The People We Neglect Today

No living human being will claim not be faced with one challenge or the other. Life itself throws numerous issues on us in such ways that everyday living is filled with several issues and problems ranging from the frivolous to the devastating. But no matter how big the challenges are, life goes on!

The fact that everyday life itself is challenging in itself, makes it impossible for me to rationalise suicide in any way! But there are a categories of people in Nigeria that their mode of living astonishes and oftentimes arouse a sense of repulsion in me.

First group is made up of mad people. For a society that has chronically become allergic to planning except when it involves negative deeds, mad people are one of the most abandoned set of people one will meet on a daily basis on our streets. They throng the streets in various degenerate human forms ranging for being barely clad in tattered clothes to being stark naked. Seeing them on the streets, makes me want to puke, not because of them but because of theway society abandons them as if they simply chose to be mad. I believe that if present-day mad folks are given any choice, they will rationally choose to stay sane like everyone else. The truth is that those who do nothing about the mentally-challenged today, when he or she is in a position to do something tangible, he or she should know that anybody can become mad at any time.

The next group is made up of stret urchins. This group is fully sane but due to certain socio-economic or cultural conditions, they are left on the streets to fend for themselves. There are many kinds within this group but two of them are fundamental—those who walk the streets begging for alms because they ostensibly have no means of sustaining a better livelihood and the other are children (mostly in northern Nigeria) who are sent out of their parents’ homes for cultural cum religious purposes. As an outsider, the utilitarian status of such practices might elude me. But in the light of contemporary realities, is there any rational argument to sustain such a practice? In a world where every child who is not being educated now stands the risk of being inferior to his or her mates in future, is it still justifiable that a parent could take his or her ward and throw the innocent child out in the streets with just a plastic bowl as companion?

Like I always say, the problem with my country is not lack of ideas, but the fact that the people who suffer the most are yet to understand that the rich/privileged people have only one engagement: devising ways to keep the poor perpetually impoverished. In more specific terms, in a society where more privileged folks are sending their wards to the best schools in Europe and the Americas, what is the rationale for a parent to settle his or her own child with a plastic bowl for life? The implication is that the parent has blown away his or her retirement plan because the lucky kids who eventually become rich may not have any motivation to seek out their parents who must have resigned into a life of impoverishment. And the child himself, will grow up being angry with the society for not caring for him. A lot of them grow up to become misfits and societal nobodies, ready-made touts for mischievous politicians!

What am I then saying? Nothing more than to say that at 6.30 am when this picture was taken, these boys should have been getting ready for school after eating wholesome meals in their parents’ home instead of queuing up in a garage behind another out-of-school girl who is hawking “masa”! A practice that sends some children to regular schools and others to walk around the streets begging for food, is flawed. Something needs to change. The bad news for everyone is that those children we fail to take care of today, will be our problems tomorrow!