Mr. Achibong Anderson is the Head of Operation, Child Guide Brigade International and the Coordinator of the National Council for Child Rights Advocate. He is also the Coordinator of the Child Protection Network of the FCT.
Anderson who spoke to ENE OSANG said that for the problem of child abuse to be reduced to the barest minimum, NGOs must be empowered to work because they can respond to emergencies immediately they are called upon.
What is your organisation doing to curb child abuse?
First of all we train child protection officers just like you see them match today, they are to work from their environment, they will be the eye in their environment so that whenever there is an instance of child abuse all they have to do is to give us a call and then we intervene but where we cannot handle the case we make referral to the police.
The major challenge children face today is that they do not have a friend to run to whenever they are abused that is why we are training these officials to be friends of children they go to their schools so children now know who to report such cases to we drop our phone numbers, direct those we have trained to educate others go from house to house to educate them on child abuse and all of that.
Are children also part of this brigade?
Yes they are we get them involved while the adults and youths do the foot work the children benefit from it so they ought to know the kind of rights enshrined in the child rights act, they ought to know their responsibility. Through the brigade in schools we teach them their rights, where it stops and how they can even get their rights.
Can you say children are well involved in the polity?
That is what we want government to do, to have an inclusive government with the children. Include children in the polity because every day we say children are the future of tomorrow but is there really any future for them? They don’t have a future, yes the privileged ones are there but they are also been neglected because parents are busy. There is neglect of children at the higher level and abuse on the lower level so everything must be put in place.
What is the spread of the brigade?
For now we have it only in about six states and we are still in the spreading process. Children look up to adults yet they do not have these adults as friend who they can complain to whenever they are abused, that is why the brigade is training these adults to be friends of children so that whenever a child see them they can run to them without fear of being abused.
We know what the minister of labour and productivity said about youth employment so by the time we are training these ones and they are engage indirectly from the government we will reduce the rate of abuse in the country and give the country a better image before the United Nations so we believe that since we have started a test run in the FCT we will continue to spread across the country.
Children have demanded for security at schools, is this achievable?
Yes this is very achievable if one member of the house can have two or three policemen guiding them let them reduce this and give one policeman to each school. They can also train these officers to be child protection agents. It is about all eyes being on them, engage them and in fact let the public/private partnership government talk about be practical especially when children is involved.
For instance nobody talks about the motherless homes where we have vulnerable children and terrorist can also attack them since all they want is to hold government ransom to see if they will react to holding orphans captive, so what am saying is that security is supposed to be put in place because they are the ones wearing the shoes and they know where it pinches.
As someone who works with children how would you describe how children feel about the security situation in Nigeria?
Security of children can be divided into two, children from the south feels they are safe while those from the northern parts feel they are not safe. One instance given by the North Eastern representative of the children parliament was that children no longer go to school because of bomb explosion and that might be why most of them fail their exams.
Security situation has made children not to feel secured if you look at the children’s day celebration of the past three or four years back, children were more in attendance than of this year because some schools practically refused to allow children come for the match past because they do not know how safe the place may be. But anything that has a beginning must have an end and I know that one day the insecurity situation will be a thing of the past. I also want to commend the efforts of the federal government to restore peace back to the people.
What will you say about the abuse of children in recent times?
The child protection network is a platform that gives us the opportunity to intervene in cases within our territory. We have child protection network in about 26 states of the federation and anything that happens to children within these states, the organisation will handle the case.
As we are here now there is information from Lagos about child abuse and we are doing our own part to address the situation here and God is exposing these persons to us because before we would not have known. A situation where somebody will just keep girls to be making babies for her is unheard of. Before it was to steal babies and use for rituals but now babies are sold so I think it is high time we intensify our efforts in curbing this while also relying on God for mercies.
How do you think government can solve this problem?
This all depends on investigations, number of people government put on ground to work and so on. If child rights brigade have trained a hundred officers and they are all placed at homes, definitely in those hundred homes there won’t be child abuse because the people will know that they will be arrested by the officers around so also if the child protection officers are spread in all organisations and parastatals for example have a child protection desk at these offices it will go a long way just like NAPTIP which is fighting the trafficking in persons a lot of people knew about it so likewise our organisation, if I get any such case the first thing I do is to call the attention of NAPTIP.
What the government can do is to empower NGO’s that are working, make them partners and there will be changes. The problem with government is that there is a lot of bottlenecks for instance if a child is to be rescued now and you have to go to the social development secretariat by 3:30 pm on Friday, the staff will tell you that work is over come back on Monday but if you go to an NGO, it wakes up immediately to follow up the case.
Three weeks ago a girl was about to kill her 7 months baby by watching her die in an uncompleted building but immediately we got the information we rushed there to rescue both child and mother not minding it was 10.pm. As I speak with you, they are at the Asokoro general hospital receiving treatment if it was government it has to pass through protocols which will delay the immediate responses to such situations so it is organisations like this that can swing into action that will do the work then report to the government.
