Of my childhood I was robbed…

Of my teenagehood I was denied

Of my young adulthood I robbed myself…

Of my older adulthood I am a restorer…

Restorer of the robbed childhood…

Restorer of denied teenagehood…

Restorer of self-robbed adulthood…

Though, a restorer I set out to be,
But at my best, I have been a repairer…

Is restoration now a lost battle?

That answer I leave to God in whose hands I seek refuge…

Today, I stand up to the culprits of a stolen life…

Alas, I am too weak to stand to myself and for myself…

My fate seems to have been sealed…

To normalcy, I may never return, except that His strength is made perfect in my multitude of weaknesses…

I stand for others, whose destinies are exposed to the operations of the same bandits…

Bandits?
Yes, these ones are masters,
Masters at aborting childhood,
Truncating teenagehood,
annexing young adulthood
And rendering human lives wasted adventures…

The bandits were not my parents, as I once believed…

The members of the bandits are prominent in the places of social and political powers…

They distract my parents, from their primary responsibilities as divinely ordained custodians of vision, value, virtue and inspiration…

By the deliberate denial of Social Protection, poverty is activated to go after my parents, leaving them in the throes of daily survival…

It is a worse case for today’s African parents…

Today, we heap on the African parents loads of responsibilities and blames too…

We teach them to take full responsibilities for raising their precious children…

We talk to parents as if there is one family in this world, endowed enough to bring out fully, the deposits of potentials in the precious children under their care…

How unfair have we all being? How so unfair?

Yet, great children are raised by great nations, who deliberately empower and support their families fully in all things and at all times…

Does it not really take a village of parents, community, state and International community to raise a balanced child?

To tell parents to raise their precious children alone is to accept that the nation is unnecessary to the family life

Or are the precious children citizens of their parents or citizens of the nations in which they are born?

To my advocacy for the rights of the precious African Child, I shall deliberately and actively add the rights of the distinguished African Parents to Social Protection…

I will speak more importantly for those parents who are, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the hoi polloi, those confined as the ‘wretched of the earth,’ in the sobering words of Franz Fanon.

TAKE NOTICE: PARENT’S RIGHTS ARE CHILDREN’S RIGHTS…

Yours IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE PRECIOUS AFRICAN CHILD,
Taiwo AKINLAMI
The Preacher