RE: SAVE OUR CHILDREN!

Let’s Save OUR CHILDREN

I see our children on the streets of Lagos on their own, hawking, walking, and suffering.
Little children, tiny tots, wondering, helpless destinies!
Why are our children hawking?
Why are our children suffering?
Why are our children grumbling, struggling and dying?
I see their future bastardised because of such harsh exposures at such a tender age by their parents and their wards.
Why are our children molested, deflated and helpless?
Can we get them off the streets?
Can we create jobs for their parents?
Can we give hope to these helpless children?
Can we give life to these lifeless ones with sunken eyes and bleeding hearts?
Our children are wondering why their lot is so difficult and ugly.
Who will stand for their destinies?
Who will take their case and matter to the National Assembly?
Why should a 10years old be hawking water bagged in cellophane bags for 10k a piece at 10pm?
What does the poor man do in such a difficult and dangerous terrain?
Why do Nigerians steal from the public coffers and steal with such panache, stealing huge sums that cannot be explained simply to his needs?
Why is corruption so high and so endemic in our polity? Why is there youth restiveness within our National state? The simple truth is that our past governments have failed us! They have created a lopsided economic and social state that celebrates the rich and weakens the poor even in his poverty.
Have we noticed the recent increase in criminality including wide scale fraud and high profile kidnaps?
It is simply because the governments of the past have not lived up to their billings, they have refused to be responsible, accountable and reliable. Time and time again they have pillaged our economies and have plundered our resources.
People have become their own governments, business have become their own governments, because the government have refused to make available roads that work, hospitals that functions and infrastructures that can meet the great demand of the ever increasing populations of our nations.
People have had to sink their own boreholes, maintain their own strip of the road, and ensure that they generate their own power by spending humongous amounts in purchasing diesel to power their office equipment.
People have been left to pay for their extremely expensive hospital bills and even look after their aged parents while ensuring that everyone in their extended family is looked after. Some everything that the government it supposed to be doing for its citizenry has been left undone and Nigerians are saddled with responsibilities that has no bearing with their existence, of course in the business world it is the same situation, so the added costs of all of these amenities are passed unto the consumer.
So we have very difficult challenges and terrain to work through as a people. This scenario explains why Nigerians who into government steal. They want to be secure. They want to be shielded from the difficulties that the ordinary common man faces on a day to day basis. They want to give their children the best life can offer, they want to be secure and be able to jet out and enjoy the good life when ever and however they want! The fear of poverty is the beginning of corruption.
I am not making a case for the corrupt and the people who steal and impoverish the rest of us but I perfectly understand their psyche. Nigerians are a product of their environment, so people begin to cheat, steal and pillage early in life.
Parents pay examiners for their wards to cheat because they have realized that even if the wards pass examinations, at the end of the day the slots will go to the minister’s daughters and the governor’s cousins, so parents are forced to pay their way to the top for their ward and these kids grow up to understand the game of cheating, stealing and dinning at an early age. So the entire society is agog with cheats, thieves and corrupt and die hard 419ers. If only we had a caring government from the beginning?

If only the government officials realized that as human beings we are all one family of God? If only the 200million ear marked for that road construction if properly utilized for the good of all will one day save the life of one of their own relatives? If only we did not hate one another so, and distrust so and divide so?

If only we could understand the pain of a mother who did not have any food to give to her four starving children? If only we could understand the gravity of losing a whole family to the tragic death of death on our high ways. Where roads are merely death traps?

If only we could see and feel the plight of the men and women of over 60 who have to beg to eat because their pensions have been swallowed up by the system?

If only we cared for our fallen heroes? Men and women who fight with their lives for our fatherland and at the end of the day their widows are left to beg the streets for daily bread?

If only we cared? If only we loved each other as a nation genuinely and faithfully? Why should a government official have 10 cars? 20 houses and and unlimited wealth when our children are dying?

Yes they are daily dying, because all we care about is our little world of me and my wife and children alone! Yes all we understand is our fancy trips to RIO?

It is a collective problem and it requires a collective solution. We must come to the aid of the poor as a government and as a people. We must do what must BE DONE AND DO IT NOW!
Let’s save the children by saving the POOR amongst us. The only reason why a mother will send a 10year old with a tray of oranges that does not cost more than 300naira from 4pm till 10pm on the streets of Lagos to hawk is because of poverty! They are poor, lacking and dying, and it is our collective responsibility to change the situation.

We must as a people help the helpless!

We must give hope to the hopeless!

Let’s save the children! Let’s show them our love for their destinies by taking them off the streets!

Let’s not mortgage their future today because of a few kobos!

Let’s bring back happy faces, smiling faces and happy lives.

Who will save our children? Our government must take off the blinds off of their faces, and see and feel the suffering of the masses, the teeming masses!

My heart bleeds as I daily watch the charade, and see the suffering of the poor.

Only yesterday the 12th day of November as I returned from a lecture that I went to give at the School of Communications of the Pan African University, I passed a young boy not more than 11years old from his tiny and frail frame. He leaned over the side of the road, obviously tired and completed fagged out. Pitiful and crying out for help and deliverance!

It was 7.30pm Nigerian time and as I watched him I wondered what kind of a mother would send this young lad out in the night to sell a tray of oranges not worth more than 300naira?
What kind of a mother would do this? A poor mother, a tired mother, a helpless mother, an illiterate mother, who did not care of the hazards she was putting her son into, a mother who just wanted her 300 naira regardless, damning all the consequences, what if the child gets knocked down by a car? What if ritual killers lure the child to his grave? The questions are endless, but to the poor hungry, deflated and helpless mother these thoughts do not even cross her mind. Her singular thought is “SURVIVAL NOW”!

We have created a monster within our system that allows the rich to become richer and the poor to become poorer. Let us work at redressing the system.

We have allowed child abuse to thrive. We are killing innocent souls, by hardening their hearts at a tender age because of the hardships they face too early in life.
We are aborting destinies.

Let’s arise as a people and as a nation to stem this tide called “CHILD ABUSE”!

Let’s arise as a people and build a “NEW NIGERIA”

Let’s enable and empower lives by creating jobs and lets provide basic amenities like power, roads, hospitals, and good schools for the children of the common man.
Let the government wear a human face.

Let the rich who are legitimately so help the poor.

Let our religious havens deliver souls and provide SUCCOR!

If God has blessed you to help the children then support the various homeless homes within Nigeria!

Whatever you can do to make life better for the ordinary man slaving and suffering, let’s come together to make Nigeria better!

The government has a part to play! So also the people too must play their own part!
President Yar ‘Adua , Senator David Mark and Honourable Dimeji Bankole, we call on you to SAVE OUR CHILDREN!

This is a plea to all the law makers and men and women in government to help save our children by helping our mothers and our fathers. Some of them are pensioners with nothing to show for their labour and their love for their fatherland. Some are teachers, traders, artisans, farmers, men and women from all works of life, whose only predicament is their poverty. They are hardworking, humble and happy Nigerians who deserve a better deal in life.

We all CAN! We all MUST!
God bless our Children!
God bless our Governor!
God bless our President!
God bless Nigeria!
Copyright @ VICTORIA FADEYI NOVEMBER 12, 2009!