The short answer to that is that the child belongs to the village. If its parents are citizens of that village, their offspring becomes the responsibility of the village. And where the village willfully fails to do its duty, leaving the job to the immediate biological parents only, the whole village suffers from this dereliction when the child wanders away and stays astray.
It was to avoid the possibility of collective shame that in the old days children were considered a collective responsibility. While the parents were the child’s immediate contact to the ways of its people, everyone chipped in, giving what we will today describe as sound bites of wisdom and direction, morsels the child internalised and grew up practicing. This because the child had to be different from children from other villages. Anyone meeting the child needed be told where the child was from. He/she just evinced all the virtues associated with the tribe.
Villages took pride in their ways and their products. Just in the same way that today’s atomized parents think only of their own kids. It’s time we looked beyond the four walls of our own homes and extended the wisdom we’ve been privileged to garner over the years. Children coming in contact with us as adults should feel safe, no matter where they meet us: in buses, in the office, in places of worship, at school, wherever; they should be able to ask us for direction, and protection and even provision, confident in the knowledge that we are parent figures who will not disappoint them.
This is especially so where the child comes from a dysfunctional home and is looking to find his/ her way in the world. Life becomes an eternal dark alley for such a child when all they see is no one getting involved in helping give direction to their lives or when the people who seem to do so are only looking to take advantage of the child’s unfortunate circumstances.
Today’s children need the Nigerian village to foster them. They need schools, they need their health, they need to play, they need to show their skills, their inborn talent that they are dying to showcase if only they’ll get the stage. They want to belong; to be Nigerians – not South West and South East and North West or South South or whatever. They just want to know that this country will live up to the promise it so casually mouths of them being the leaders of tomorrow.
We can’t afford for Nigerian children to be defined by deprivation. This country has too much. Individual parents may not, but overall Nigeria is brimming with wealth. Why should our kids see wealth only abroad? It’s not enough to say they should look inwards. They need guidance; they need direction by those whose palm kernels have already been cracked for them by the gods.
A big component of this foster arrangement would be our corporates with their interventionist weight judiciously thrown in to ensure fair access to quality schools, health, recreation, special needs, etc. Our governments, by and large have not been the most responsible parents for the Nigerian child. Our corporates should not, by omission, leave the kids fully orphaned.
