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Parents, Wake Up!

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Parents, Wake Up!

By  Grace Ego Omoni

It is a well-known axiom that “when you build the youth, you build the nation” In other words, the development of any country is dependent on the quality of her citizens, especially the youths who fall under the able-bodied work force of the nation.

However, it is so unfortunate that Nigeria, today is in a state of anarchy and moral decadence. The reasons are not far fetched. The high level of signs of indiscipline and deviant behaviour cut across ethnic groups, age-grades, socio- economic class, the elites, the poor, religious bodies, traditional rulers and even among the different political classes. The indiscipline so far exhibited by these different groups has earned Nigeria a very bad image worldwide; hence it has been rated as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. All forms of criminality have infected and affected the nation so much so that terrorism, arson, armed robbery, ritual killing, gangsterism, banditry, prostitution, outright dishonesty, ethnicity, embezzlement, fraudulent practices, lying by clergy men and politicians of the day have become common occurrences.

One would have expected that the educational sector would have done the needful to bring sanity to the system because it is supposed to be the centre for character formation! Educational institutions ought to be the foundation of wisdom, knowledge and discipline. Woefully, it has become a breeding ground for perpetrating deviant behaviours. The same goes to the churches and mosques.

The government of the day made of the three arms, the Executive, the Judiciary and the Legislature that should uphold the laws of the country are ingloriously exhibiting all manner of shameful criminal activities. Here is a system headed and governed by half-baked, mentally demented elements in human clothing; installed by debased politicians, unruly ignorant traditional rulers and hunger-stricken religious bigots and charlatans bought over with peanuts. These people go about campaigning, proclaiming and singing the praises of these social misfits. In fact, these so-called rulers are only fit for the correction centres like the Maximum prisons in Kirikiri, Lagos and Eleweran, Abeokuta.

Why is there so much evil? The first answer to come to mind is unemployment! Who are the creators? The government people would say. Partially true! This is just a one-sided assumption. One not having a job cannot be the reason for bad behaviour. Deviant behaviour or indiscipline or criminality is a foundational issue. I beg to submit that it stems from the HOME. Babs Fafunwa, a great educationist of blessed memory in his book “History of Education in Nigeria” discussed in details the role of the family in child upbringing. He referred to it as traditional education. In this book, Fafunwa gave a detailed account of the day to day training of male and female children in the home. These include household chores, etiquette and respect for individuals, dignity of labour and professional training into different occupations.

For instance, boys were trained in their father’s job like farming, fishing, blacksmith and basket weaving while the girls were taught by their mothers in trading, cloth weaving and mother craft. Again, the boys were made to sweep, clear the compound and help build or repair the huts while the girls would cook, wash plates/ clothes and help take care of the little siblings. The training of the children then was a communal responsibility and a collective job to correct deviant behaviour found in any child. Again in time past, parents especially mothers use eye contact to talk to their children who, of course understood immediately the unspoken language of correction being conveyed to them.

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Today, the contrary is the case. Parents do virtually everything for the children in the name of civilization. They cook, wash, sweep, take the children to and fro school, write assignments and pay contractors to write both internal and external examinations for them. House helps and drivers are engaged to do these house chores for the career women. Often the assertion is that their children will not undergo the suffering they the parents passed through in their own time. Again, parents are afraid to scold their children for wrongdoing and bad behaviour under the impression that psychologists condemn it. Inappropriate dressing code, use of foul language, rudeness, Yahoo syndrome, tattooing, drug addiction and alcoholism abound among the youth. You see our youth with expensive apparels. Iphones and cars. Parents cannot query their children or find out how they came about these.

In the university hostels you find inmates with plasmas, refrigerators, deep freezers, generators, air conditioners and what have you. These students are not from rich homes! Their parents are even very proud of them and talk about their children’s ill gotten affluence shamelessly. Stories have it that some mothers ignorantly buy their sons Android and Iphones for them to defraud people of their hard-earned money without knowing the dangers involved. Some parents are either unaware or pretend not to know what their children do. The girls go about half-naked in the streets; you find them in the hotels, night clubs, uncompleted buildings or lurking around male lecturers’ offices stripping and selling their bodies for money. The boys too are the most vulnerable. They sleep around with sugar mummies, engage in ritual murder, armed robbery, fraudulent activities, kidnapping, religious and political thuggery and reckless vandalization of lives and property.

The end result of these wanton behaviours include unwanted pregnancy, mental breakdown, maiming, dishonesty, alcoholism, drug trafficking, abortions, ruptured wombs, loss of virginity, carriers of sexually transmitted infections including HIV/AIDS and other killer diseases ravaging mankind. We know too that when these happen, parents are the most hit. Girls are unaware that the boys and the young men run back to the so- called uncivilized village girls to marry. They no longer see the self-acclaimed civilized girls as wife materials. For the boys, the so- called politicians and big men abandon them after they must have been used to achieve their political ambition to suffer their own loss either thrown into prisons of left half maimed. Come to think of it. Have these badly behaved youths wondered why the children of these politicians are not seen carrying guns, snatching ballot boxes or acting as their father’s bouncers!

Parents, it is time to wake up! You need a new orientation about child upbringing. Train up your child the way he should go and when he grows up, he will not depart from it, so say the scriptures( Proverbs 22:6)

Apart from peer group influence, unemployment matter, societal and school- related factors, poor parenting is the highest index in this issue of deviant behaviour. There are three main types of child rearing practices in the home. These are: autocratic, authoritative or democratic and laissez faire or permissive parenting. Autocratic parenting is not recommended because it is harsh and does not permit the child to have access to the parents love.

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Permissive parenting is also not recommended because it allows the child to do whatever he or she likes.

Authoritative or democratic parenting is highly recommended by counsellors and psychologists. Parents exhibit love, care and friendship with the children. Parents teach, provide for the needs of their children. They spend quality time with them, ask them questions and discuss issues pertaining to their welfare. In authoritative parenting, parents do not leave their children to immature house helps or devouring uncles and aunts. They share in their children’s challenges, visit their schools and interact with their teachers and friends.

Autocratic parenting on the other hand is characterised by harsh practices such as nagging and over- bearing attitude by parents. Children are abused and scolded for minor offences. The consequences are not palatable. Children from such homes most often run away and become victims of rape, alcoholism, drug addiction, immorality, armed robbery, fraudulent acts and other serious criminal acts. Some of them are even killed or kidnapped.

The last type of parenting is the laissez faire or permissive parenting. Here parents leave the children to care for themselves with little or no teaching, care or correction. They ate not provided for; they leave and come back to the house at will. You find such children among the poor, the rich, the literates, the illiterates as well as among single parents and the divorced. They are in the cities, the ghettos and in the villages. They are quarrelsome, arrogant and prone to criminal activities. They exhibit control over their parents and dictate what happens in the homes. They are social deviants.

To correct and minimize the occurrence of these deviant behaviours, there is a call for parents to Wake up to their responsibilities. In the school, children are taught so many things about family life and citizenship education. One of the topics is that of the role of parents in child upbringing. Here too children are taught their own responsibilities.

Parents are the main agents of their children moral development. Developing children to become good citizens starts from the home. Parents are to be role models. Children watch their parents and replicate what they see them do and say. Thus, parents should create an enabling environment for their children. They are to teach their children the acceptable norms and core values of the society such as dignity of labour, the joy of hard work, respect for constituted authority, contentment, honesty, sincerity, labour before pleasure, morality, family ethics, appropriate dressing, proper way of addressing people and the use of decent language. Parents should create time to interact and discuss with the children on different aspects of life. Learn to know their needs, friends, aspirations, visions and dreams. Parents should monitor their movements and the adults that are their role models. Please parents go to your children’s school and ask questions. Be loving and friendly but do not hesitate to correct and scold and give reasons for being firm.

Earlier, I mentioned the issue of being a role model. This is very important because you cannot give what you do not have. Parents should be mindful of their own behaviour. Are you a night prowler or you go about having strange relationships with the opposite sex; engage in illicit business, drink, dress inappropriately, embezzle, engage in civil disobedience, quarrel and fight before your children and support issues which are symbols of injustices? These will influence your child negatively and in no time will become perfect in such. So parents, wake up and be agents of positive characters. Train up your child, the way he should go and when he grows up, he will not depart from it.

Parents Wake up and build
A people of Power
A people of Integrity
A people of Honour
A people of Respect
A people of Dignity.

Omoni, PhD writes from Delta State

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Opinion

Kemi Badenoch’s Bad Knocks  On Nigeria 

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By  Hope O’Rukevbe Eghagha

One of the interesting proverbs I picked up in our General African Studies (GAS 201) course with the late Professor Jabez Olowo Ojoade in the University of Jos in 1979 was ‘it is a bastard child that points at his homestead with his left hand! The Akan people of Ghana put it this way: a bastard child points to his father’s house with his left hand’. The Yoruba say that ‘a person who points to their homestead with the left hand is not a good person’, while the Luhya of Kenya say that ‘when pointing to your village, use your right hand’. It is in the Swahili language that a sort of generalised use of the left hand is concretised when it says ‘the left hand is for personal hygiene, not for pointing!

Bastard child! Homestead! Pointing with the left hand! These three constituents and functional parts of the proverb tickled my teenage imagination to no end. What is it about the left had that it should not be used to refer to one’s family? Why is this metaphor common across the continent? Indeed, there must be something about the family, about the homestead, about one’s origins that deserves respect no matter the circumstances.

By the way, some Nigerians in the diaspora also point to Nigeria with their left hand. ‘That country’, is often used to describe the place where some spent eighteen or thirty of their lives as they tried to find their feet. So, in a sense, Kemi is simply doing what some full-blooded Nigerians do in reaction to the anomie which currently rules the land. Kemi stands out because of her delicate and prominent position in the world. We all took offence when Bully Donald Trump referred to ours as ‘shithole countries! At that level, who said what becomes very important, that is, the message is given prominence because of the stature and calibre of the messenger.

            The proverb, according to Wikipedia, is ‘often used to convey that someone who is not respectful or grateful to their roots or heritage will eventually be rejected or ostracised by their community! The left hand, we are told, is for personal hygiene. We don’t use it to give or receive gifts; we don’t use it to serve drinks or for traditionally important functions.

             In the African context, a bastard child is not one who was born out of wedlock or whose father is not known to the family. Bastard child represents a person who is disconnected from their family. Pointing to the family house with the left hand is indicative of disrespect.

            These thoughts flooded my mind when I read recently elected leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, Kemi Badenoch, gave some hard and bad knocks to Nigeria, the Nigeria Police, and governance in her Nigeria, her ancestral home. To be sure, nobody who has encountered some men of the Nigeria Police in action can fault Kemi. Her chemistry of being brutally frank is what has taken Kemi to the heights in Conservative Party politics. Whether she can indeed lead the Party to victory in an election is a different kettle of fish. As the potential leader of the British government, all cards will count when push gets to shove. Which is why Kemi should remember that no well-trained child points to the family house with the left hand.

            Nigeria is in process. It is a building site. And we started this project of disparate and different cultures fused together when the British pounced on our ancestors to create Nigeria. We look back to the years when a British monarch, King Henry VIII (1491 to 1547), who ate two of his six wives for breakfast and dinner. Wives Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were executed by beheading. Jane Seymour died under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps if Diana had emerged in the 15th century as wife to a British monarch, the reigning king would have sent her to the guillotine instead of the tunnel in Paris! Some British monarchs actively participated, supported, and profited from the transatlantic slave trade. British monarchs oversaw the colonisation of indigenous lands in Africa, North America, and Australia sometimes through genocide! No where in Africa, our dear left-handed and grandly insolent Kemi, would a Prime Minister allow his wife to remain in an adulterous relationship for decades as Harold Macmillan did with wife Lady Dorothy Macmillan did with the bisexual Bob Boothby in the 20th Britain!

            We may need to remind Kemi that racism still dominated policing in Britain as it does in much of the Western world. Yet, we have not painted the entire police system as being racist. Indeed, Kemi, without officialdom around her can still be profiled by a police officer if she were found driving alone in some areas of London! Her skin colour, is not typically British, I dare say. Yet, we have not said that Britain is racist. The ‘how dark’ racist discussions which precipitated Harry and Meghan fleeing the British monarchy is still very fresh and raw in our consciousness; yet, Nigeria’s Vice President has not called the British monarchy a racist institution.

            Time will fail me to discuss the Damilola Taylor case in year 2000 when the Metropolitan Police handling of Taylor’s murder was seen as slow and inadequate due to racial bias. By the way, Damilola was both British and Yoruba like our illustrious and petulant Kemi who believes in giving hard knocks! What about the Stephen Lawrence 1993 murder case which the Metropolitan Police badly handled owing to racial bias? In 1999, Roger Sylvester, a Black man, died in police custody and an inquest showed that the police used excessive force. In 2009, newspaper vendor Ian Tom died after being struck by a police officer during the G20 protests in London. The 1999 Macpherson Report, which investigated the Stephen Lawrence case, concluded that ‘the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist! As late as 2017, the Lammy Review which was led David Lammy (MP) concluded that “black and minority ethnic individuals were more likely to be stopped and searched, arrested, and imprisoned than their white counterparts! Need I say more?

So, our dear daughter and bright star Kemi in the British firmament, we shall not point to you with our left hand, because in spite of you, you are our daughter. We can only say that the Nigeria Police is in good company of the Empire of the Police system which was created in 1820 by your progenitors from the other side! Colonial vestiges are not easy to shake off!

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Afe Babalola And Dele Farotimi: On Justice, A Just Society And The Nigerian State

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Prof. Tunji Olaopa

By Tunji Olaopa

The feud between elder statesman, Chief Afe Babalola and civil rights activist, Mr. Dele Farotimi, is perhaps the most significant discourse that postcolonial Nigerian state has thrown up for the moment, one in a class of those grand defining disputations that surely will gather dust which will take some time to abate. And it is one case that is fraught with all sorts of legal, jurisprudential, moral and political traps and complexities that speak to more than the trivial interventions—leveraged around the David and Goliath motif—that are attending the matter. Those who have been able to go beyond the surface of the case will agree that it goes to the very foundation and founding of the Nigerian society, and the fundamental objective of crafting a good and just society for Nigerians. That the issue revolves around the dispensation of justice immediately alerts us to the deep insinuation about the idea of social justice itself, and how the conception of fairness could be written into the very fabric of the Nigerian society. And yet, the complexity of the case is what makes it a case that is too critical for a public servant like me to dabble in.

(Un)fortunately, my intellectual maturation, my political science education and my professional endeavor in institutional reform advocacy have prepared me to intervene in this critical matter. I have always been involved with Nigeria, and with reflective thoughts about how to reconstitute her greatness. Three learning encounters with three world-historic icons configured my passion for wanting to see that Nigeria becomes a state we all can be proud of. The first came from my reading of Plato’s Republic. There is a reason that the entire treatise commenced with the question, what is justice? Justice was a fundamental issue in the decline of the ancient Athenian democracy that allowed Socrates to be judicially murdered. The second learning derived from Wole Soyinka’s dense prison memoir, The Man Died. And like most who have read it, Soyinka was troubled by the idea of justice: “For me, justice is the first condition of humanity.” By the time I would be coming to Thomas More’s Utopia, I was already apprised of the connections between my political science education, my professional endeavor as a public servant, and the key elements of institutional reform as a cogent framework for transforming Nigeria.

From Plato to Soyinka, we have a trajectory of political reflection that takes justice seriously as the basis for organizing a just society. This is part of the intellectual frameworks for my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. In one of those explosive seminar classes that played some fundamental role in my intellectual maturation in the graduate school, I had proposed an argument through a seminar paper titled: “Is a revolution an option to fix Nigeria?” The topic was meant to titillate the collective yearning for revolution that would serve as the ultimate mechanism for social change that would flush off all traces of corruption and degeneration in postcolonial Nigeria. Revolutions seem to possess some allure for the masses because they constitute a framework of justice that the constitutional justice mechanism might not be able to handle.

However, as Wole Soyinka, Thomas More, Martin Luther and even Galileo Galilei would realize, the need for radicalism is balanced by the force of establishment orthodoxy. The Nigerian predicament has, as a fundamental foundation, a lot to do with the connection between governance failure and injustice in terms of the persistent and protracted class strife between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich and the poor, indeed, in the final analysis between the government and the governed. And in the case between Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi, the issues boil down to the administration of justice and the entire edifices and institutions of social justice and the rule of law in Nigeria. And so, in outlining the key issues involved in the matter, we must be careful enough to read between the lines and the noises of analysts who are eager to queue behind their favored protagonists.

First things first. Let us remove the surface debris. Indeed, and in this case, the debris points us in the direction to look for the rot within the matter. First, there is the matter of civil defamation and its legal ramifications. And second, there is the issue of the legal and moral protocols involved in dealing with the pursuit of redress by someone who knows and understands the law. Barrister Farotimi has a legal right to seek redress in court. Chief Babalola has a legal right to defend his reputation in court. In raising the specter of legal prosecution against defamation, I see Chief Babalola as being at the forefront of gatekeeping the legal establishment in terms of what is and is not permissible or possible under the law and its conservative tenets. If you are hurt or an injustice has been done to your person, then the best place to seek redress is not the court of public opinion but the constitutional legal establishment.

Unfortunately for him, Barrister Farotimi’s book, Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System, impugns the entire legal and judicial establishment up to its apex institution, the Nigerian Supreme Court. However, does radicalism preclude moral decency? A book could be written and allegations made without the complement of atrocious language. Or maybe the rot in the judicial system, and the need for a revolution preclude any niceties, especially with those who are allegedly at the forefront of perpetuating and protecting the rot. But then, how to prove what we all consider to be the norm in terms of legal prosecution of judicial corruption remains a hanging question.

No matter how we look at what we are calling the surface debris, we are redirected deeper and deeper into what lies beneath the surface. The ultimate question is that between Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi, what we are asked to contend with is the state of the Nigerian judiciary and the corrupt impediment of social justice, especially for an average Nigerian. What Barrister Dele Farotimi said about the Nigerian judicial system is not new. We are all familiar with the rot within the system. Indeed, this is not the first time an alarm would be raised about what we are all familiar with. Indeed, as far back as 1999, The News magazine carried a most unsalutary headline, “Crooks on the Bench: An Expose on the Rot in the Judiciary.” The magazine headlined the names of 47 judges indicted for judicial corruption. What is new is that Dele Farotimi dared to go so far as to mention specific names, and to confront the big players in the legal establishment. And he did this in a most scurrilous manner targeted at getting maximum traction and attention. It is as if Mr Farotimi, through the public sphere, is throwing the gauntlet to every Nigerian and challenging us on our collective responsibility to clean the Augean stable.

If Barrister Farotimi cannot prove his allegations in court, it would not mean that his charges are false. It might only imply that the system which is supposed to guarantee justice has become too corruptly dense to achieve its mandate. But there is also the chance that since the entire judicial system cannot be tarred so broadly with the same brush, Farotimi’s allegation might receive a dispassionate hearing that might deliver justice as we expect it. This might be a tall expectation. Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament has inevitable consequences on the capacity of the judicial system to facilitate the delivery of justice. And this failure also complicates the capacity of the Nigerian state to deliver on its social contract to Nigerians. This is what makes the Babalola-Farotimi case too complex to be decided either in the constitutional court or the court of public opinion. The burdens of postcolonial disruptions that the Nigerian judiciary system carries are enormous: judicial corruption, miscarriage of judgments, executive lawlessness, delayed trial due to insufficient infrastructure, financial dependence on the executive arm of government.

To outline the fundamental challenges of the judicial system in Nigeria this way is not to give in to cynicism and a deterministic mindset that we might be caught in a vice that is inescapable. It is simply to say that the ongoing uproar between the two dramatis personae demonstrates that the court has been given a chance to reflect on the role that (in)justice plays in the fundamental understanding of the Nigerian postcolonial predicament and the capacity of a democratic system to correct itself. When Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi are given their day in court, we will have no choice but to trust that same judicial system to deliver unbiased judgment no matter our misgivings about how objective and untainted that judgment could be. This is just a way of saying that though our judicial system is not perfect; it is still the best that we have.

The last words on this reflection on the connection between the ongoing feud between Babalola and Farotimi and Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament must be given to Haile Sellasie, former emperor of Ethiopia: “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission,Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com

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Opinion

Fear Of Witchcraft And Politics In Zambia

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Witch Burning, Impunity And Abuses Linked to Witchcraft Beliefs In Benue State
Dr Leo Igwe

By Leo Igwe

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) is concerned over the reported arrest of two men accused of being ‘witchdoctors’ in Zambia. The arrest underscores the potency of witchcraft fears and the connection between occult anxieties and the country’s politics. These individuals were accused of trying to bewitch the Zambian president, Hakainde Hichilema. The police claimed that they had charms. They planned to use the charms to harm the president. The report says the two persons have been charged under Zambia’s Witchcraft Act. The Act criminalizes “possession of charms”, “professing knowledge of witchcraft”, and “cruelty to wild animals”. The police found the two with assorted charms, including a live chameleon.

This development is utterly embarrassing and shows that the Zambian government is slowly losing its focus and bearing.The country has many socio-economic challenges. Suspicion of bewitchment or possession of charms should be the least of its worries at this time. There should be no place for witchcraft and possession of charms in modern politics because there is no evidence for these beliefs and practices. Zambian authorities should not weaponize the Witchcraft Act or use it to justify this incident. Zambian law does not recognize witchcraft. Zambia’s Witchcraft Act criminalizes naming or imputing witchcraft. It prohibits accusing or threatening to accuse any person of being a witch or a wizard. In this case, it is the police who are breaking the law.

Otherwise, how did they know the two individuals were ‘witchdoctors’? Did these persons identify as witch doctors? If not, the police are liable because they named and imputed witchcraft and have to prove that these individuals have witch-doctoring powers. The police claimed to have charged these individuals for possessing “assorted charms”, including a chameleon. Really?

The police in Zambia have questions to answer: What are charms? How did they know that what was in their possession were charms, not pets? Is a chameleon a form of charm? What makes possession of a chameleon possession of a charm? When and how does a chameleon become a charm? The police need to answer these questions and more before one takes them seriously.

Again, did the individuals describe what was in possession as ‘charms’? If they did, does confessing or designating something as a charm make it a charm? And if they did not, the police are liable because they need to prove how those possessions translated into charms.

In addition, the police claimed that the duo wanted to bewitch the president. What does that mean? How did they know? Are the police not contravening a provision under the Witchcraft Act by professing knowledge of witchcraft? Can one harm another person using a chameleon? They claimed that the two persons wanted to use the charms in their possession, including the chameleon to harm the president. How did they know that? What is the evidence for that?

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches calls for an end to this state-sponsored witch hunt. There is no evidence of harm through witchcraft or charms. The Zambian government should desist from witchcraft- related infractions and violations including arbitrary arrest, and detention of innocent citizens. These allegations are baseless and absurd. The arrest was politically motivated. This development demonstrates that Zambian authorities are out of sync with their duty and obligation to uphold the rule of law and protect accused persons.

Zambian authorities need to act in compliance with the 2021 UN resolution, which urged states to take measures to combat abuses linked to witchcraft beliefs and ritual attacks. End witchcraft allegations in Zambia. End witch hunts in Africa now!

Dr Igwe directs the Advocacy for Alleged Witches.

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