Massive Mass Child Abuse At Two Extremes -By ‘Tope Fasua

What has the world turned into? That is a very popular refrain when we contemplate how yesterday is better than today. The thought that yesterday is always better than today is documented in psychology as a cognitive bias. In truth though, yesterday is not necessarily better than today. The ‘good old days’ weren’t really as good in many ways compared to today. Imagine a time when there was little in terms of human rights, when people were summarily slaughtered at the behest of some monarch, when all land belonged to some feudal lord, when little villages engaged in endless and meaningless wars, when superstition ruled the world, when there was no antibiotics or advances in medicines and people died of the simplest of infections, when millions were shackled as slaves and traded like cattle, when there was zero freedom of expression, and technology wasn’t available to help human beings. In those days, whenever you traveled, you were gone. No communication, until you showed up again. People got lost forever, many were consumed by the elements, or by wild animals. Imagine a time when you had to trek over hundreds of kilometres to trade, and tens of kilometres to get to the farm or market, your back bent with loads and stuff. No; those weren’t particularly days of joy and prosperity for those who suffered and survived through them.

But so also is today not perfect. And certainly, if human beings do not destroy the earth entirely – even though we are trying hard to do so and to end the times – there will come a day in the future when the inhabitants of this earth will wonder how we pulled through without the innovations of their times.

I am however concerned with two sinister phenomena going on in our world today. In the ‘developed’ world of the U.K., U.S., Canada and other ‘enlightened’ countries, their fixation right now is how to get the teaching of ‘sexual diversity’ into the school curriculum of fouryear old children. The justifiers of this position talk about how the world has changed and that children need to be taught that parents could either be two men or two women, and that people can switch sexes at will. They say it is important to start them young, so that children do not grow up into ignorant adults and misfits in their modern world. I had cause to take on one popular former CNN, now ITV UK presenter on twitter some week ago. That was Pierce Morgan. For some reason, the unquestioned acceptance of such positions is now being equated with modernity, liberation, enlightenment, and anyone who says ‘slow down, are we on the right track?’ is labeled all sorts. Pierce had taken umbrage at the subtle rejection of the idea that children should be taught these sexual preference subjects at a young age, by a young Muslim Briton on his show, by stating condescendingly that ‘this is not Islamabad!’ I was shocked. Anyhow, my comments on Twitter were also greeted with a lot of misplaced aggression, including one which advised I should go and take care of female genital mutilation in my country. It is obvious that those who are pushing this preposterous positions are not stable human beings.

My position remains that four year old children should be allowed to play and evolve without being prodded in some certain sexual direction or the other. A four years old child just wants some normal toys, enough space to play, a certain amount of freedom for his/her brain to grow. There is so much information for such a child to explore, especially in today’s information age. Sex is certainly not on the mind of a four or five year old child. Well, let me speak for myself. I would cringe if you told me about sex, and two daddies or two mummies when I was five, or eight, or even 10. Heck, at 18 or 20, one still had one’s heart in one’s mouth just to talk to a girl. And I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with that – a mild fear and lots of respect for the opposite sex until you come to your own! But sex and sexuality at four? It could only be the prelude to an agenda to destroy the world. As usual, the next agenda is to come to Africa and shove it down our throats.

There is no way to describe and understand this impending mass hijack of the minds of little children in school, than to see it as mass child abuse on an industrial scale. I see it as a victory for the practitioners of ‘alternative sexuality’ who are all out to recruit as many as possible into their camp, and what is better than to catch them young? They will soon be here, threatening the cancelation of aids and grants and what-not if we do not accede to their requests. Luckily our culture is a bit strong but how long can the culture hold up? One of the first questions they ask new politicians is their take on same sex marriage. While I was contesting, I was never invited to the ‘hip’ programmes (like Falz’s “The Couch”) where these questions were asked though – perhaps because my opinions are already known. My simple answer is to tell them we have so many serious, existential issues here than to be bothered with who is sleeping with who, and how, so long as they are consenting adults. And that if we threw the question to a referendum here, it will be roundly defeated by our people. Also our society does not, as yet, support all that open kissing and necking they do inside trains and everywhere in the Western world. We have serious catching up in hard developmental stuff to do here.

As a corollary to this new rhetoric of a modern world, in the same U.K. the public space is full of rhetoric that paint men as weak, confused, predatory, useless, out-of-control, while women are in-charge, focused, liberated, firm and so on. A few movies that have come out lately are subtly projecting this new modernity, including one titled The Favorite which paints Queen Anne, who ruled England in the late 17th Century, as a serial lesbian. Another is Enigma, which reveals Alan Turing, a computer genius during the Second World War, as gay. Yet another great recent British movie is Bohemian Rhapsody, which chronicles the life of Freddie Mercury, an openly gay superstar who eventually died of HIV/Aids. Two weeks ago however, the Independent newspaper in the U.K. carried a news item that hundreds of child sex dolls were seized at their border. It is only natural that with this ‘experimental path’ for want of a better phrase, they will see stuff like men seeking little children to sleep with. What is more? Last year, a German medical student (perhaps a medical doctor now) – Mirjam Heine – gave a TEDX talk claiming that truly, just like homosexuality, pedophilia is innate and not a choice that people make. She demands understanding for pedophiles because ‘they were born that way’. Perhaps the world is truly coming to an end.

The other extremity in mass child abuse, is the mass manufacture of ignorance, especially in parts of Nigeria, with the exclusion of millions of children from any meaningful functional education that makes people productive in the 21st Century. In these parts, people are encouraged to have many children, but children of the hoi polloi are allowed to roam the streets. This is in total and direct contrast to the other approach (gayism, trans-sexualism etc) which seeks to reduce global population. How will we be saved from these extremes?

It is a fact that at some point we brainwash our children with tribal and religious prejudices. Children who have always had open minds about the world begin to see those from different parentage and tribes and religions as those they were born into, as ‘different’. They often stop playing or talking to those ‘other’ children, and start suspecting them once we convince them to. Some grow into teenagers and become aggressive about it. Radicals. Fanatics. Some are even ready to kill and maim in the name of their tribes, creed, and religions. We all seem to forget that these things are accidents of birth. No one chose to be born into Nigeria, or their particular families – Christian, Muslim, idol worshipper, North, South, East or West. We just found ourselves here. I personally do not believe that God, in His infinite mercies, will punish us for what we are unable to change. So I urge that we be careful – especially the Christians and Muslims – with this usual mutual recriminations about who is worshipping God and who isn’t, or who is heading to Hell and who is Heaven-bound.

But the real mass child abuse that compares with the force-feeding of four year olds with sexuality, is what I see as an elite conspiracy around the mass illiteracy in some parts of Nigeria. It is now clear that we have a class system in Nigeria which we all need to begin to scale down. Nigeria, in particular, needs all the intelligent human capital that it can find. But nowhere else in the world are they manufacturing ignorance on industrial scale as we seem to be doing in Nigeria. While I was campaigning, I made a point to walk into public schools randomly in the North, West, East and South of Nigeria. And this shaped my opinion to a great extent. In States like Kebbi, Katsina, Zamfara, I saw that most of the public schools had no teachers. The largest number of personnel I saw in any of the random primary schools I visited was three. Mr. Segun Adeniyi of ThisDay wrote about this last week and corroborates my position. In one large school in Katsina, I was glad to find a teacher in a creche kind of class, and she taught the children rhymes, in English. This is a good innovation from the Ministry of Education but I never saw another creche in any other public school I visited.

With one, two or three teachers in a whole school, nothing actually gets taught all day in many public schools in Northern Nigeria, which leaves one with the impression that we are deliberately keeping the children of the poor in continuous ignorance. The governors and even the president don’t believe this is a major crisis. When asked about this at Kadaria’s presidential town hall meeting, President Buhari said it was a problem for the local government to solve. Such a massive problem that is globally embarrassing? Part of the rationale from believers of this class system is that mass education will tip the social balance, by depriving landowners of people that can till the land, odd-jobsmen, peasants, petty traders and so on. But we must be careful not to choose a forgotten, regressive reality. This is the 21st century, and whereas we are not willing to join those who equate sexual overdrive and perversion with modernity, we must strike a balance to ensure we do not remain somewhere in the 16th Century. I need to report that the South is also slipping in terms of teacher population, quality of teaching and so on, as a result of massive corruption over the years.

The neglect of the minds of our children across the country is a great cause for concern and is gross child abuse for one reason; these children did not ask to be born. No parent has the right to keep their children ignorant of basic essentials of today’s world. No parent has a right to show unconcern and lack of care for their children. No government has the right to manufacture ignorance by embezzling funds for education. The moment a child is born in a progressive, normal society, that child becomes the property of the state. A mother cannot kill a child and say ‘shebi it is my child’. A father cannot starve a child, beat a child to stupor, or lock a child up for long as punishment and claim the government has no opinion in the matter. In such countries that are progressive, everyone is accounted for. Population size is not by conjecture or something to play politics with, like we do here. One single child can change the fate and trajectory of a nation and the world. In fact, singular people, whether born into money or out of it, into royalty or servitude, have changed the world positively – and indeed negatively – up to date.

We must push back against these two forms of mass child abuse. We must protect our children and make them strong for the challenges of the future. Our children are not mere playthings in our hands.

‘Tope Fasua, an economist, author, blogger, entrepreneur, and recent presidential candidate of the Abundant Nigeria Renewal Party (ANRP), can be reached through topsyfash@yahoo.com.