I don’t want to de-market Nigeria by saying that it is a country where anything goes. But it will take some deep thinking to come up with something that can actually be described as unattainable, impracticable or unimaginable here. We inhabit a land of paradoxes where poverty and humongous wealth maintain a grudging cohabitation. In our own “Animal Farm”, it is the children of the poor that are encouraged to seek God while those of the rich hold court with Mammon.
Just when you thought that life couldn’t be more oppressive on the poor, you are confronted with situations that jolt you back to the realisation that the more things change, the more they remain the same. The more you advocate for a better deal for the poor, the more they seek out their salvation from the same manacles tying them down. Perhaps the situation would have been different if they didn’t have the same rapacious elite as their pathfinders.
Human Cargo
Bang came the news: A cargo van with 59 minors had been intercepted by the police on its way from Kano to Nasarawa State. If you thought that the incidence of child trafficking under various guises or the negative interpretation of religious injunctions to keep the children of the poor perpetually down had gone with 2024, the fresh interception reminded you that you must not remove your hands from the plough of advocacy because the new year 2025 was barely six days old when it happened.
As the police commenced their investigations, a senator, Sumaila Kawu, representing Kano South in the Nigerian Senate intervened. He offered to take custody of the human cargo. He argued that the children’s movement was part of the almajiri system, a traditional practice where children migrate for Islamic education. Kawu assured the police that he would return the children to their families in Kano and criticised the police for wrongly labelling the practice as child trafficking.
According to the lawmaker, “The almajiri system is a legitimate educational tradition in Islam. While it needs regulation, it should not be misconstrued as trafficking,” Kawu stated. But why are the children of the political elite not among the almajiris?
With that turn of events, you really can’t weep more than the bereaved. We have advocated for donkey years that state and local governments in the northern part of the country where the almajiri system is in vogue, in concert with Islamic teachers and clerics, should help integrate the system with Western education and skill acquisition to give their children a chance of being economic players rather than beggars in future.
Mass Wedding
Senator Kawu obviously meant well for the children but his solution of returning them to their parents who had released them for the journey in the first place, will only lead to a repeat of the “cargorisation” of the children
Remember the case of a controversial mass wedding in Niger State in 2024?
The Speaker of the Niger State House of Assembly, Hon. Abdulamlik Sarkindaji, had announced his plans to sponsor the wedding of 100 orphaned girls to men approved by their families. That announcement drew the ire of the then Minister of Women Affairs, Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye, who made her opposition known in her inimitably feisty style and dragged the speaker to court.
The issue was quite divisive in the sense that those who were used to seeing mass weddings sponsored by the rich didn’t see anything wrong in the speaker’s offer. Indeed, they saw him as a man to be emulated. On the other hand, “outsiders” like Mrs Kennedy-Ohaneye pointed out that many of the girls were minors without any kind of skill. They would be completely dependent on their indigent husbands thereby ensuring the perpetuation of poverty and an increase in the number of women suffering from vesico-vaginal fistula (VVF) which is rife among underage mothers.
While the speaker was convinced that the minister had overstepped her bounds, the ensuing national debate coalesced around the point that no one should continue using religion to keep the people down or engage in harmful traditional practices. Granted that there is a real problem of poverty in the country, it is also true that there are many opportunities at the lower rungs of the ladder waiting to be tapped. The mentality of railroading female children into marriage under the umbrella of moral rectitude belongs in ancient history.
During the COVID lockdown when there was supposed to be zero movement all over the country, cattle-laden trucks smuggled almajiris to southern states under the cover of darkness. Many states protested. At the time, one Joel Nwokeoma reported thus:
“Nigerians have in recent days been inundated with heartrending spectacles of human cargoes of mainly dishevelled lads surreptitiously packed like sardines in articulated vehicles and lorries from the North headed for the southern parts of Nigeria. The unsightly spectacles are splashed all over the pages of newspapers, online news portals and TV, with identical banner headlines like, ‘Ogun Intercepts Truck Carrying 30 Almajiris (Ripples Nigeria)’; ‘Two Truckloads of 120 Almajiris Intercepted At Gakem Border In Cross River, Sent Back To North, (Daily Post, May 11)’; ‘Another 189 Night Travellers From Katsina Arrested In Abuja (thewhistler.ng)’; ‘COVID-19: Residents Panic As Truck Dumps Almajiris From Sokoto In Ondo (May 5, Daily Post)’; ‘Enugu Govt Intercepts 9 Buses Relocating Almajiris From North (May 8)’; ‘Police Intercept 200 Lagos-Bound Almajiris From Katsina (SaharaReporters, May 10, 2020)’; ‘Security Operatives Intercept Truckload Of Almajiris Going To Abia’, (BusinessDay, May 5, 2020) and, ‘15 Men Hidden In Trailer Loaded With Cattle Intercepted In Enugu’, (The Guardian, May 13.)”
Baby For Sale
While the almajiri system has turned out to be a northern “disease”, if you look down south, you’ll also see that a different kind of demon is militating against children in that geographical space. One highlife song that reigned in our younger days went like this:
You can steal my money
You can steal my wife
But you cannot steal my child…
Not anymore! Now, they will steal your child and sell him/her to buy a bag of rice. There is a well-established cultic sorority that deals in selling kids. Some of the slave dealers acquire their children legitimately under the cover of running orphanages. There was a famous case several years ago where an orphanage was found to have sold virtually all the babies it acquired “legitimately”. Who is to tell what human beings will NOT do for money?
From Rivers State came the news that the Police Command had arrested a woman, Akudo Azoroh, for allegedly operating a baby factory. She kept a retinue of pregnant girls who came with their pregnancy with the hope of selling the babies when born. Depending on the baby’s gender, she revealed, a child could go for N1.4 to N1.5 million.
Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, we have allowed the economic downturn to desensitise us to the bestial proclivities to which many of our struggling people have succumbed. The thought that some people are having children they have no intention of rearing is frightening. The earlier we have that discussion on a national scale, the better. Perhaps through this, we may reclaim a tiny bit of our collective humanity which in recent years has been gifted to the god of Mammon.
