As Nigerians love to say, a gust of wind has exposed the chicken’s rump. It is a rather unrefined proverb but one that seems crudely fitting for what we have witnessed this week, for the wound we have inflicted on our children.
President Bola Tinubu on Monday ordered the release of over 70 Nigerians, including 30 children, facing the death sentence for allegedly protesting against bad governance and waving Russian flags. The treason charges against them were also dropped, the Minister of Information, Mohammed Idris, announced. The problem is that the fact that the president had to do this at all was damaging enough.
Many Nigerians were shocked to learn that there were people still in detention from those protests three months ago, and a good number of these were children. Some of them were as young as 10.
How a sane police officer would even arrest a child for protesting, even if they waved a Russian flag, is beyond me. How a senior police officer would approve the unlawful detention of these children and other protesters for three whole months, starving them, and then shamelessly presenting them in court, charged with treason, is beyond comprehension. For the record, treason is punishable by death. I wonder if these children, if they, in fact, waved those flags, knew what the flag represented.
So imagine the shock and outrage of Nigerians when they saw these children, starved and dishevelled, collapsing in the court. The outcry of Nigerians and the negative international publicity they drew forced the president into damage control mode.
The pre- or post- presidential order on Monday is not a good look for the president who had himself led protests against the state of affairs in the country in 2014 when his party was in the opposition. It was not a good look for Nigeria.
Whoever was behind this ill-fated operation, for whatever reason it was done, the blowback on the president and Nigeria as a whole is stupendous. It is going to take a lot for Nigeria and the presidency to recover from this.
At this point, the priority should be the children. The damage this has done to them, physically and psychologically, cannot be quantified. We may not be able to measure this damage now because we do not know how much it will manifest in their lives and what forms this manifestation will take. Imagine being 14 and hungry; imagine believing in your country and hoping that your voice, expressed through constitutionally guaranteed means like a protest, can make an impact. And then imagine being arrested, thrown into jail for three months, starved, shipped to a city far removed from your parents, and presented before a judge who is expected to condemn you to death.
Whatever torment they endured in detention, apart from the hunger that was evident in their emaciated bodies, whatever damaging experiences they were exposed to might have uprooted their hope and belief in this country. A hope and belief that can only be restored through sincere effort and perhaps some counselling. But most importantly, the good governance their protests demanded. It is frightening to think that some of these children have been emotionally damaged for life. The optics of putting them on a plane to fly them back to their parents will not cut it. There is a need for compensation, something I am sure a court of law will happily grant them should they sue.
Having said that, we must interrogate how this scandal of unimaginable proportions happened. Already, the president had ordered an investigation into the circumstances of their arrests, detention, and arraignment.
The police must be made to answer for this blatant violation of the children’s rights. Beyond the failings of the police, the judiciary somehow managed to cover itself in the excreta the police handed them.
Imagine a judge looked at these children and decided to set their bail at N10 million each. If the law is an ass, as lawyers are fond of saying, it shouldn’t mean that the men who serve the law are as well.
But still, the government lawyer, Rimazonte Ezekiel, had the temerity to look Nigerians in the eye and tell them that all the children presented to the court were adults. The reality of what Nigerians saw seemed to go over his head. He did himself no favours with the prosecution of these children and that interview that he granted. He did not represent himself or the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) well.
A lot of officials and a lot of things must have failed to allow any of these things to happen. This is why the investigation Tinubu ordered must transcend lip service or a mere exercise in damage control to actually investigate the wrongdoings that have shamed the country in this manner and scarred the next generation of Nigerians.
Children, as we have been told since we were children ourselves, are the future of our country. What we have done with this scandal is consciously unbuilding whatever future we should be building for our country. Whoever caused this damage should be made to account for it.
The eponymous question in this column remains: what do we do with our scarred children? How do we salvage them? How do we ensure that they are positioned to take advantage of the future and contribute their quota to the country?
If the systems meant to set the children on track are failing them, what do we do? Aside from the failings of the justice system, the education system has thrown up worrisome scenarios as well.
While efforts by some states to sponsor their students to foreign institutions to access better education have their merits, as well as some arguments against it, recent reports about the state of these students have raised some concerns.
A recent report by the Guardian inferred that these states have spent about N53 billion to sponsor students abroad. However, in the last month alone, reports have emerged about scholarship students from Kano and Zamfara suffering in foreign lands. Claims of abandonment have been thrown around.
The Kano students, who were promised a $150 monthly stipend, the reports claim, are now receiving some of the naira equivalent of $62 monthly. How they are expected to survive on this, especially as some of them use part of these stipends to cater to their families in Nigeria, is hard to comprehend. The non-payment of tuition and other fees for Zamfara students has reportedly left the students stranded in Cyprus and scrounging for a living.
At least the Zamfara State government, through its Commissioner of Education and the Executive Secretary of its scholarship board, held a press briefing in Abuja this week to clear the air.
In both Kano and Zamfara, the transition from one administration to another has impacted the payments and left the students in limbo. Especially in the Zamfara case, where the previous government had reportedly gone into disadvantageous arrangements with several universities in multiple countries, which have led to the accumulation of debts. Debts that the new administration is expected to pay, or else their students will continue to suffer. It all looks like a hostage situation.
While the state had, before these latest reports, settled the situation of its students in India and Egypt and sent a delegation to address the situation in Cyprus, as well as some private universities in Nigeria, this situation in Cyprus, especially, has become a niggling thorn in its side, one that it must address expediently.
In both the arraignment of the children and the situation of the scholarship students, it is evident that these are predicated on some people’s attempts to score political points.
The reality, however, is that these games are being played at the expense of our future, which some people won’t hesitate to unbuild even before we have had the chance to build it. On one part, we inflict wounds on our future and play tinko-tinko with others.
We have not gotten this generation right. We should not fail the next one. We will be waiting on the report of that investigation Mr President ordered.
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