Nigeria’s Forgotten Children

On a working visit to a rural hospital in the North East, I met a mother who had brought in her teenage boy to the clinic. He was running a temperature and had abdominal cramps, his mother reported. The young man glared at me intermittently and I noticed he had a paper and pen in his hand. Whenever I asked him a question, his mother would collect the paper and write it out for him to read. He would then write out a reply which she would read aloud to me. Recognising his hearing impairment, I asked the mother if he was born deaf. This is her story.

Seven years ago, Bitrus* was a cheerful, healthy, eleven-year-old boy in JSS1 in a science secondary school in Potiskum. On a day like several others, he had breakfast with his siblings and rushed to school on his new bicycle. He chatted happily with his older brothers on the way, trading banters while avoiding the heavy morning traffic. They arrived at the school gates and parked their bicycles hurriedly as the assembly had already started. Bitrus located his class row and immediately queued up behind the last pupil, panting heavily. He recalls hearing the principal talking about the need to respect the school prefects when suddenly a loud noise, louder than anything he had ever heard before, erupted and thereafter was a deafening silence.

His mother related to me how the sound was due to a bomb blast which she heard herself, as they lived close to the school. People ran out of their homes to witness an explosion in the school that left many teachers and children lifeless on the assembly ground. Some corpses had limbs missing, while some were not recognizable. Initially, Bitrus, who had lost consciousness following the blast, was assumed to be dead but when the medical team arrived, he was found to be unconscious and bleeding from the ears.  One of his brothers had fractured his left arm, while the eldest was missing, never to be found.

Days later, Bitrus regained consciousness, but lost his hearing. Both his tympanic membranes had ruptured traumatically and the hospistal could only manage him conservatively. As months went by, they were referred from one teaching hospital to the next, until the little money they had was depleted. Bitrus’s father was a primary school teacher employed by the government while his mother was a tailor. They were told that they needed a type of surgery for which they had no funds. And just like that, his life changed. He went from a child optimistic about life, a child who could hear, to a sullen adult who relied on his ability to read and write to communicate. I suppose we should be happy that he is literate enough to express himself.

Nowadays, the most lucrative industry in Nigeria is banditry and kidnapping. It is an open secret really; If you want to be rich, just arrange to kidnap school children, preferably those in boarding schools. This business entails that one does his research well and targets the most dilapidated, wretched looking building, in the poorest of rural areas in northern Nigeria, where the citizens are already educationally and economically challenged. A school where security is obviously lacking and, in a village, where many Nigerians would have a hard time locating on the map. I remember people asking “What is Chibok? Is it a tribe or a place?” and recently, “Where is Kankara? Is that not ‘ice’ in Hausa?”

These ‘would-be terrorists’ (His words, not mine) kidnap the children and thereafter release them immediately after being paid millions in ransom. The children are then paraded in front of the cameras to show that they have been rescued by the government. Hurray for the government! Thereafter, the kids are returned to their parents, never to be heard of again. Do they return to school? The government does not care. Is there a way to support them financially through school? The government does not care. What about those injured like Bitrus? Again, the government does not care. As far as I am concerned, the only person who even remotely benefits from this well-designed orchestra, apart from the kidnappers, is the tailor who is given the contract to sew matching outfits for the students who were rescued. Omo! That man don hammer! Imagine the constant flow of work he has been receiving since this kidnapping rampage started two years ago: Dapchi, Kankara, Kagara etc. I am sure he has now completed building his house. No more rent- Thank God!

Seriously though, does no one remember these children? Do they not realise the keg of kerosine we are practically living under? Whenever, I am opportune to meet with any of these victims, either that of kidnapping or bomb blast, my first question to them is: how do you feel about your country?

In Washington, some years back, I met one of the Chibok girls who was rescued and sponsored by government to study abroad. Our discussion centred around her experience and how she was coping. From her manner and speech, I gathered that this one was not coming back. Her sentiments were shared with her friends and other victims of the kidnapping. They were scared of coming back to Nigeria. They felt it was a place of torture and bad memories. I could feel the same emotion from Bitrus as he wrote down, on a piece of paper, how much he hated this country. The last sentence he wrote was ‘I wished I had died, like my brother’.

Therefore, apart of the damning image this kidnapping menace is giving our country, is the reality that we are breeding a whole lot of unpatriotic Nigerians. Patriotism in Nigeria, is at best, limited to begin with, but by the time these young men and women grow up and realise the way their country ridiculed them, parading them across international television and abandoning them to their fate afterwards, then we are doomed. Imagine these young people who have been hurt, mentally and physically, occupying seats of government; do you think they will spare any sympathy for Nigeria?

The stench of this terrorism business in Nigeria will last long after this is over. Those who are in government and who have taken an oath of responsibility of their citizens must ask themselves: Are we doing right for these children? How do we better their lives after this episode? How do we help them to recover, physically and psychologically?

Or else, these forgotten children and their ghosts will never let us sleep.