Today is Children’s Day and I am out of town to attend to critically pressing family matters…

As I am here, my heart is with the precious children of Nigeria, who I am not too sure it will be appropriate to wish Happy Children’s Day.

How do I wish our precious children happy Children’s Day when a nation lags behind ‘fantastically’ in education, holding the world record as the country with the highest number of children out of school, 10.2 million, beating war-torn Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, just to mention a few?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when over 1 million children are out of the school and 1.4 million children are displaced in the north as a result of Boko Haram attacks?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when our precious children are used as suicide bombers, noting that 1 in every 5 Boko Haram Suicide Bomber is a child, between 2014 and 2016 there were 40 suicide attacks involving children in the north-east and in 2015 alone 44 children were used as suicide bombers?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when as a nation we shed the blood of our future, our precious children, when they are murdered in their thousands, many hurried alive and orphaned by Boko Haram as over 20,000 people have been killed since the beginning of the insurgence?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when they are kidnapped in their hundreds without concrete efforts to rescue but only sensationalized noise both from the government and its agencies to score cheap political points and so-called activists to boost their dwindling image and social relevance fortune?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when Nigeria’s newborn death rate(neonatal mortality) is 523 per day, one of the highest in the world?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when more than a quarter of the estimated 1 million children who die under the age of 5 years annually in Nigeria die during the first 28 days of life?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when about 9 out of 10 newborn deaths are preventable?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when about 5.3 million children are born yearly in Nigeria, about 11,000 everyday, 1 million of these children die before age 5?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when every 10 minutes one woman die on account of pregnancy or childbirth in Nigeria, a total 53,000 per year, meaning about 800 women die in every 100,000 live births, making the precious children without mother’s care?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when most of us in the abundance of our ignorance call our precious children, who are denied of their basic rights like rights to life, education, health, shelter and all underprivileged or less privileged, when what they are denied of are their fundamental and birth rights and privileges?

How do I wish our precious Children’s Day when I know that no child lives in proxy for the other for the other, knowing that our commitment should be leaving no child out behind and leaving no one out?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when the handful who have what can be described as a good life have the neglected as a formidable threat to their existence?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when we are oblivious of the trite truth that there is no better way to measure the humanity of a people than how they treat their children?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when most of us, particularly the informed are not aware that in the words of Martin Luther King Jnr. that ‘injustice any where is a threat to justice everywhere’ and we jealously plot a great future for our own precious children and we look another way concerning the unbearable sufferings but avoidable of many other precious children?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when even today that is set aside for them focus more on pomp and pageantry and every other interest, including huge commercialization but the real issues affecting their precious lives hardly find their ways to the deserved front burner of discussions and actions?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when many of us, primary and secondary caregivers are not aware that in matters of Child Rights, Child Protection and Childhood Preservation, prevention is better than cure, therefore Enlightenment is Superior to Enforcement?

How do I wish our precious children Happy Children’s Day when as it is today the families, community and state are yet to accept that abject poverty is the greatest threat to the protection of our precious children and have no concrete plan for SOCIAL PROTECTION, which ILO began to propounded since 2014 as the number solution to seemingly insurmountable inequality in our world today, particularly as it affects our precious children?

Hmmm, how…how…how? I don’t seem to wrap my mind round rolling out the drums but to call for deliberate actions aimed at ending the sufferings of our precious Nigerian children and END VIOLENCE AGAINST THEM in THEIR BEST INTEREST and the PRESERVATION of our PRESENT and FUTURE of our great nation. Do have an INSPIRED day.

I am Taiwo ‘ODINAKACHUWU’ AKINLAMI, I am The Preacher of the Gospel According to Child Protection and CHILDHOOD PRESERVATION CULTURE in the defense of the precious African child.
C) 2016 by Taiwo AKINLAMI..All Rights Reserved
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