To heal the world, fix the child, by ABDULYASSAR ABDULHAMID

Our greatest enemies today are not the heartless, corrupt government officials whose undying ambition is to fleece our country of its resources; neighbours or the abject poverty that results from acute mismanagement of the country’s human and material resources; rather our greatest enemies are the monsters we make out of our children.
These monsters, as they come of age and are ready to strike, strangle not only the homes from where they emanate but the society as a whole.
Many commentators and public affairs analysts have been calling, day in, day out, for good governance and healthy democracy; but what they miss is that even the good governance, ideal society or healthy democracy we crave can only arrive and establish itself when we, collectively, decide to rehabilitate or reform those monsters of our own making.
Unless we take up responsibilities and sanitize our homes, our societies will never be free from the numerous socio-economic and political problems confronting us.
‘We can only create change in the world if we start with our individual healing’, argued Vienda Maria.
For example, despite the danger of reconciling fiction with reality, such moral policing has been practiced in Black Panther (a movie that tries painstakingly, although in vein, to trace African culture from its roots).
Seemingly in defiance of its technological advancement and responsible leadership, Wakanda cannot bounce back to utopian-like state without being disposed of killmonger, an enemy from within, who is the monster and Wakanda’s number one enemy of its own making.
This is a fiction perhaps, but still it is a realists’ making and realists draw their analogies from real life, perhaps our societies.
I suspect that we are suffering beyond measures and our societies are disintegrating partly because we refuse to take up responsibilities.
We lack good sense of judgment.
We so much believe in the legality of bringing children into this world, but we lack the sense of responsibility that welcomes their arrival.
Two factors responsible for the creation of these avoidable, hideous monsters are (i) the regular bases at which husbands run away from their wives under the pretext of searching for greener posture.
Now mothers have to bear the brunt of doing their traditional role of running their homes, being good housewives and even giving some support to extended family members; and at the same time contribute, if not taking up the whole responsibility, to the family income (ii) the high rate of divorce and the rise of the culture of single parenthood which this abomination brings about.
This is because, perhaps, our African traditional societies characterized by familiarity and cohesion have been replaced with individualism supposedly brought about by modernization which is best characterized by stark societal fragmentation; you here; I there.
‘It is not enough to sow the seed of human life in quick, repeated sessions of reckless ecstasy’, wrote Kofi Anyidoho in his introduction to Amma Darko’s ‘Faceless’.
Beyond the desires and love for children, the future of our children lies in our readiness to take up the responsibility of adequately feeding, sheltering, educating them and our willingness to monitor them; and give them a proper upbringing by inculcating moral values in them so as to become an asset rather than liability to themselves, their families or society.
Recently a friend and classroom teacher related to me a story of one of his neighbours who has three wives and twenty-plus children.
He is of a low social standing, does not have a reliable source of income and he still brags about the number of his wives and children.
There are thousands of his like outside there, who do not know what parenting means in the real sense of the word.
A child in such a households is both a child and an adult; he/ she acts in both ways and he/ she cuts his, mostly, first teeth on the street and starts to cater for himself or herself at a very tender age.
There is no doubt that gangsters; pick-pockpockets, armed robbers, thugs and cultists easily recruit them.
And at last they turn against the society that has contributed to their making.
However, a section of the society which is either well off or has no direct connection with adverse effects of this ‘irresponsibility’ think, mistakenly, that they are totally safe.
But the truth is that the consequences of allowing the street to swallow those children affect the entire society.
You or I cannot escape the attendant negative consequences; and in the final analysis we have to share the same environment with them.
A man asked Dr.
Menninger, wrote John Mason on his Why Ask Why, what should be his advice to a person suffering from ‘nervous breakdown’.
Many expected him to refer the person to a psychiatrist; to their sheer bewilderment he said, ‘Lock up your house, go across railroad tracks, find someone in need and do something to help that person’.
How many of us bother to offer community service to our societies despite the huge fortune we have made in the same societies The other day I heard politicians, who are also looking for the slightest chance to enrich themselves and some youth who are not even actively contributing to our political decision at all celebrating the ‘Not Too Young to Run Bill’.
I mourned the president’s decision to sign it not because the youth deserve less, but for our nation’s youth psyche is nothing to write home about.
Some might have done it in good faith; but the majority has but wishful thinking of being rich overnight.
They are obsessed with trivial rather than serious issues.
Ultimately, all hands must be on deck to address this social menace that threatens our existence as a people.
Parents, religious leaders, community, NGOs and the appropriate authority should do their parts to educate parents and rehabilitate the afflicted, so as to bring back the society on the right course.
AbdulHamid writes from Kano