WHAT WILL IT COST TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFER FOR CHILDREN

I remembered  a particular children’s day which happened to be my first time following my school to the stadium for a marching parade. My mum had followed me to school to see how the logistics would work as the school was meant to make arrangements for that. After days of practice and being of a small stature, I was assigned to one of the front rows in the parade. However, I often lose coordination easily on the parade. In a blink of an eye, the team will be going north and I may be going north east.  You can guess, I was taken off the parade. Some schools were famous for always winning or at least being in the top three. They were Unity school,  Osogbo and I think St. Claire primary school.

It was on those days we could freely buy cone ice cream. I remember it goes for four or five naira depending on the size. The day always feels like Christmas. My major memory of those days was how safe the society was for children. I was about eight years old on this particular day that I joined my school for the parade. The logistics arrangement made doesn’t include taking us to our respective homes. We were dropped at a popular bus stop and we were all expected to find our way home.

The distance from where I was dropped to my home would be more than 3 km which also includes walking into different neighbourhoods. Anyone could have picked me without being noticed. I could have been distracted and followed perhaps a dancing masquerade etc. In essence the only guarantee that I will make it home on that day was merely hope that the society was safe. There was no mobile telecommunications to access one another. Even if I get lost, it will be long in the day before anyone notices.

Well I made it home. I don’t know if my parents were agitated all the time I was away but I made it home and it felt like the normal thing. Yes,  it’s meant to be normal for a child to walk out of the door of his home to run errands or attend events and return back safely. It shouldn’t be a special thing but what do we have now? At some point, we may begin to have a tracker on children just to be sure we know where they are and that they are safe.

Both the sane and the seemingly insane society have their fair share of the collapse in societal comfort and trust. Recently,  a teenage boy was brutally attacked with a sword on his way to school in a place not so far from me. The news of children not being totally safe and secure is everywhere you can possibly imagine. Physical, mental, and sexual abuse of children happen in places where you least expect them to happen and often time through known faces. How badly have we fallen?

What will it really cost to make the world a better place for children? Many times we know the answer but I’ve since realized that knowledge is useless if not applied and even worse if it’s applied selectively.