Eniola sells food at one of the intersections of Lekki-Epe Expressway. Her food, mostly rice and stew, is displayed on a wooden table in the open space. That is also where she lives. She wakes up at three or four in the morning to start cooking. She is just 15. Her mother used to be the food seller until she was involved in an accident and unable to continue. She’s now with the poor husband at Ijebu Ode. So, Eniola had to drop out of school to become the bread winner of the family.
Three Saturdays ago, I got to meet Eniola and she told me this short story. I asked her where she lives, and she pointed me to the same place where her wares were displayed. I asked where she sleeps and she said on the wooden bench where customers sit to eat their food. I then asked what happens when it rains; and she says she sleeps under the table. I didn’t have the guts to ask where she has her bath and answers to the call of nature. I had to leave certain questions on my mind to imagination.
On Admiralty Way, Lekki Phase1, Lagos, a tiny looking boy works with the father as an apprentice vulcanizer. Well beyond his strength, the fragile and evidently malnourished boy, is made to carry heavy objects to and from the roadside ‘workshop’. He is 14 years old, but looks much younger; and dropped out of secondary school to pursue a career in vulcanizing.
These two children are both in a very difficult situation of life, made to be adults earlier than they should and with a bleak future ahead of them. A closer examination shows that they are slightly better off than many other children of their generation.
In Lekki Phase1, the so-called affluent part of Lagos, virtually all streets are residential areas for homeless children. Thousands (sounds like an exaggeration but it is not) of homeless children live on the streets there. On both sides of the multi billion dollar Lagos – Calabar Coastal Road (phase one of which was commissioned by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu literally on Children’s Day), hundreds of children live in the open. Admiralty Way and Freedom Way, the two major arteries in Lekki Phase1, are homes to hundreds of disheveled and hungry looking children. Some of these children have lost touch with their families.
This is a nationwide phenomenon. From Borno State to Lagos, from Sokoto State to Akwa Ibom, millions of our children are lost, lost to poverty, starvation, hunger, homelessness, neglect and attendant negative influences that street life breeds.
Confirmed: The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that 18.3 million children in Nigeria are out of school. Let us try to put this in perspective: Google it and you will realize that less than 70 countries of the world have population sizes more than 18 million people. The population of about 120 countries on earth is less than the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria alone. Big names such as Senegal, Netherlands, Ecuador, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Tunisia, Sweden, Belgium, Libya, United Arab Emirates, Greece, Hungary, Switzerland, etc. have populations less than the number of children in Nigeria who are out of school.
This is a major disaster and a ticking time bomb. Compared to their counterparts who are educated, these ones, empirically and sociologically will produce more children, most of whom will not be educated. And the cycle will continue.
Some of these children are involved in all sorts of despicable activities: drug abuse, prostitution, robbery, child labour, forced and child marriages, street violence, begging and such like. We hear of stories of some of them being recruited by Boko Haram and other insurgents with as little as N10,000.
The future is bleak for many of these children. And the governments continue to pay lip service to their plight. It is so unconscionable that the future of the children, and by extension the country, is uncared for. Every 27th May, governments wake up with platitudes and rituals of celebrating children’s day. The following day, the usual neglect of the same children continues.
These problems are not insurmountable. First is to make education up to senior secondary level qualitatively free and compulsory. Investment in the education of our children is perhaps the surest way of securing the future of the nation. So, no stone should be left unturned in getting them to have secondary school education. If corruption is reduced by 10 per cent at the federal, state and local levels, enough money will be available to educate these 18.3 million children.
There is an easy bait to get children who do not want to go to school to actually look forward to it: give them lunch every school day. Food, especially free food, is a universal language. It’s just very magical.
The child rights act passed into law some twenty two years ago by the National government, must not only be domesticated by all state governments, but also enforced. It is the surest way of ensuring that these children are properly catered for and brought up to be great citizens of our nation.
By not doing what they are suppose to do to protect these children, our governments are not only failing in their duties, but are also criminally abusing these children.
I am not in any way recommending that parents should abdicate their responsibilities to their children. But given that the policies of governments and corruptions in governments have pushed nearly 150 million Nigerians into multidimensional poverty, there is not much some parents can do. Add to that is the level of illiteracy in the country, where many parents do not know enough to know how to have children they can afford to take care of.
As the Executive Director of the Hope For Second Chance Foundation, Ibukunoluwa Otesile told The Punch newspaper on this year’s Children’s Day, the out of school children’s “gifts are silenced, their dreams delayed—not for lack of ability, but because of barriers they did not create. Education transforms lives. Every child we reach is a future we rescue.”
DARKNESS IN MOKWA AND KANO
My heart goes to the people of Mokwa in Niger State and the people of Kano.
In the late hours of Wednesday, 28 May 2025, a heavy downpour swept over a hundred and fifty people in Mokwa. Another hundred people have been declared missing. This is saddening, and a reminder of the level of our underdevelopment. In advanced economies, disasters of such magnitude would claim the lives of two or three people; but here, it has to be in hundreds.
It is not enough to inform Nigerians that there would be heavy rains and flooding; and so people need to evacuate. Evacuate to where? One, the signals we receive from federal agencies about these disasters are generic. Science has gotten to a level precision these predictions need to be specific such as the location, the magnitude and the timing. If the people of Mokwa knew two days to the heavy rains, fewer lives would have been lost.
Secondly, governments at all levels need to ensure that drain ways are properly maintained and cleared for free flow of rainwater. We have gone through this several times and need to be better at saving lives.
The second disaster was the road accident that claimed 20 athletes from the Kano State contingent who were returning from the just concluded National Sports Festivals held in Abeokuta, Ogun State. The athletes were just 18 kilometres away from Kano when the disaster struck. Very unfortunate.
None of these two disasters reached the magnitude to attract our President to visit the communities of the victims for succour. This is the real tragedy.
Esiere is a former journalist!
