“When you grow up a fatherless son, in many ways, you have to raise yourself. No one tells you what looks good on you, how to carry yourself, or provides the approval. Without a father, you grow up never knowing what you didn’t have. There’s no intimate model of who you want to become, it’s as if you are always guessing.” – John Heckenlooper.
The unfortunate tale of a 10-year old boy from Kano state which was shared by the editor in chief at Daily Nigerian, Jafar Jafar, and whom calamitous situation, divorce or separation, turned him to fatherless, motherless and homeless, really made me felt the waves of despair and overwhelming anguish radiated until my fury drowned in the sea of shock and sadness.
After Sayyid parents parted ways and his mother launched a new life with another man, then her newly launched spouse feit morally and legally not obliged to keep Sayyid under his own roof. He turned to his biological father who equally unveiled a new mate. His father’s new bride also saw no reason to house a new partner together with a stepson.
Thus, his father rejected him in compliance with his bride’s condition so as to peacefully enjoy her wealth as well as her body. Has our society become a miserable hub of the world where every wretchedness is being displayed, advertised and spread to the world?
Life goes on, with nothing coming to Sayyid’s aid to save him from living a life of great suffering and tribulations or take him off the streets of Kano, as he has been roaming the streets from sunrise to sunset begging for food. Abandoned by his parents though, but Sayyid shouldn’t have been living that miserable life should he live in a society where compassion is fully alive. Regrettably, he finds himself in a nation where social assistance is not guaranteed even for those in a coma.
True sense of duty is professed to be the life of every decent father; responsibility is claimed to be the commitment of every responsible mother; a teacher will tell you that life is education, while moral leaders normally say life is devotion. But if you ask me what life is, my answer is, life is an embodiment of honour and dignity. I strongly agree with those who have argued that death is far better than life without dignity; an undignified life is lifeless.
If the measure of a progressive society is the presence of moral laws, strict adherence, and value for human life and human dignity is anything to go by, one will unequivocally say Nigeria is at the bottom of of this social status, and as such can be classified as a social jungle.
Progressive societies have many moral laws that people are obliged to conform to. One of those laws is that parents are obliged to register their new born babies within 60 days of their birth. For instance, British law obliges a parent, once his child is registered at a school, to ensure that he attends regularly; any parent who kept his child for so long would undoubtedly be prosecuted and punished.
In this insane jungle which houses over 200 million people everyone has the liberty particularly in the core North to breed, breed and breed more terrorism accessories to add to the ones that have been terrorising the nation. The government has no informed knowledge of the number of babies the nation produces in a month or annually much less have a definitive idea of the number of schools, hospitals, police stations, security personnel and so on needed across the country.
A country with an outbreak of pandemic homelessness which was projected to housed 25 percent of the world’s destitute in no distant time, preferably, there should have been a severe penalty for any infidel who ceased to perform his duty as a father, who bears children that he can’t cater for, and those who have turned marriage into a stuff of Shakespearean drama, with intrigues and infidelities; also those who have turned women into a shirt which I can wear at my discretion and pull off at my pleasure, a sexual object of lust and desire, a breeding machine. But a government that failed to set up normative standard of living can’t enforce normative values of behaviour.
Sadly, in an era of moving on, unethicalness and immorality appear as the norm in our society. While true sense of duty, responsibility and commitment are now the outliers. As long as people would be allowed to continue giving birth to children they cannot protect from harm, provide food, clothes, place to live and education, then terrorists would welcome them and use them to keep on terrorising the nation.
Amiru Halilu,
Kaduna
[email protected],
@AmiruHalilu
