A CHILD IS A PERSON

My heart goes out to the precious children and parents involved in the Abule Ado Explosion. Our organisation Securing A FRIENDLY and PROTECTIVE Environment™ for Children Society is following the situation closely and will issue an official statement on same as soon as possible.

By way of conscious and unconscious observation, having spent a very large chunk of my almost 5 decades on earth in the heart of Africa and by deliberate study in the last 23 years, it is my audacious conclusion that the African culture is not necessarily anti-children but it is just that it is not deliberately pro children.

I have also found that we treat children the way we see them and we see them the way we were seeing growing up.

One of the major challenges with the way we see children is our failure to see the child as a person.

I will not dwell much on the entire subject matter of the personhood of the child.

I will focus two major skills that the person of the child must be exposed to from cradle. They are known as soft skills and hard skills.

We are today in a world, where soft skill is far rated above hard skills in terms of life and professional success and greatness.

Yet we live in a country where the investment of primary and secondary parents are dominantly focused on inculcating hard skills in their precious children.

Here is an admonition of Seth Godin,
‘coming home with straight A’s is fine, I’Il accept that, but what I’d rather have you do is come home and tell me something amazing that you learned in the spirit of doing something good for someone else, come home and tell me some really dramatic failure that occurred as you were trying to solve an interesting problem…’

On Saturday, April 4, 2020, we shall be working with our precious youngsters to consider their Soft Skills Scorecard and help them to take full charge of the development, management and advancement of their Soft Skills.

Do have an INSPIRED day as you join us to continue to affirm the personhood of the precious African child.

Do have an INSPIRED week.

I am Taiwo AKINLAMI and I remain Sober on My Knees this LORD’s day as I do SOCIAL PROTECTION ADVOCACY now and forevermore.