With These Kids, We Play Too Much



Visit the average Nigerian crèche or day-care centre and you cannot tell it apart from a poultry farm. And in like spirit of profit-driven farmers whose priorities are in the number of eggs their chickens lay, most proprietors get into childcare business to tilt the balance sheet in their favour.

One can imagine how these crèches spring out of nowhere: a fellow finds himself stricken by unemployment; he scratches his underarm for ideas to put body and soul together. Next he tinkers zinc sheets and plywood behind his house, plants a signpost on it: ABC International Crèche. Neighbours spread the word and in no time, they drop or dump their kids in this new shack on their way to work and pick them up by dusk.

Or do I speak of those primary schools, where one child contracts cough and in a matter of minutes the entire class is whooping because the room is so airtight you can bake cake in it?

Time will fail me to speak of boarding schools, some owned by religious bodies that ought to be epitomes of propriety, yet they fall for the drive for cheap lucre, piling students on bunks like sardines. It was some months ago that news filtered the net about a kitchen man in a Unity school, who impregnated a student. Rather than bundle the pervert out of the midst of sensible society, he got a slap on the wrist and was demoted to the gatepost.  Sure enough his perversity reared its head again. By night, he pimped away the school girls to city men for a paltry sum till the world got wind of his deeds. I am not sure if he has been sacked.

In all these sob and sordid tales, it is easy to point fingers and blame the government for not regularizing the education system and blame the economy for its poor state and blame the greed of the founders of these good for nothing schools and blame the Ministry of Education and blame everything else till we lose breath, but no amount of blame can revive a child’s lost innocence, no lawsuit can resurrect a child’s decaying corpse.

Perhaps we can start with things we can control by not having children until we can provide the best of care for them. We can cushion ourselves from the effect of these ills by having only the number of children we can truly carter for. It is sad that many homes are still on a birthing spree in search of the golden Y chromosome while their six little girls still have last night’s mucus caking on their nostrils, wearing frayed and tattered undergarments to school. If your income is slim, why calve out a herd of offsprings that would have you go a borrowing? The normal parlance on the lips of those bringing forth more than they can bear is, “The Lord who gives children shall provide”. Even the Lord has tired of our carelessness with our children.

Every day we hear of another molester gaining access into another home, into another school and as much as we hate to admit it, most cases stem from institutional and parental neglect.

The hour has come and is now when we have to stop treating kids as legal tenders we pay for acceptance in society, or trophies to shame intruding in-laws when they come knocking on our doors like impatient debtors, demanding proof of our virility.

I know it is impossible to still our lives in the name of shepherding our children out of harm’s way, neither do I support the notion that mothers should shun the workfront and stay at home for the children’s sake. Childbirth should not impede anyone’s goals and growth, especially mothers. But there are schools that offer higher degrees of security and care than those batchers down the streets and those rickety boarding school owed by greedy bodies.

To school proprietors who would rather not pay their workers or improve on basic amenities but rather amass wealth: do better. Pay teachers well. Screen out the ones ill-fitting to tutor: teachers with terrible diction, venomous individuals who leave welts on children’s bodies in the name of discipline. Calling on government to do something is so cliché I’d just end it here. You already know what their response would be.

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