This year’s Children’s Day, while nations across the globe lift their young in celebration, Nigeria drowns her children in a sea of neglect, betrayal, and unpardonable cruelty. Under the mocking banner of “Enhancing the Total Wellbeing of Children Through Quality Education and Skill Development,” our leaders dare to posture while millions of Nigerian children lie starving, unschooled, abused, and forgotten in the shadows of the nation’s rotting conscience. Nigeria is not a poor country. Nigeria is a poorly governed country.
Let us strip away the hypocrisy: More than 20 million Nigerian children are out of school. Over 11 million suffer from food poverty. Thousands are stunted—too weak to learn, too hungry to hope. The streets of Lagos, Abuja, Kano, and Port Harcourt are infested with the lost innocence of children turned beggars, hawkers, domestic slaves, or worse—child soldiers in a war they did not start. The statistics are not just grim; they are apocalyptic. Six out of ten children are victims of violence—physical, emotional, or sexual—before they even turn 18. We live in a nation where the womb births a child into war, and the classroom has been replaced with trauma.
What has the Nigerian state done in response? Empty slogans. Teary-eyed speeches. Budgetary betrayal. In the latest budget, less than 5% was allocated to healthcare, a sliver of which reaches nutrition. And yet, the same government seeks billions in loans for roads and power, while children rot in malnutrition clinics, their ribs spelling out the indictment of a nation.
And what of our lawmakers? Those peacocks in agbadas, parading in the National Assembly while child marriage, rape, trafficking, and child labor spike across the country? They legislate everything but love for children. They pontificate, but they do not protect. The Child Rights Act, domesticated in nearly every state, is now nothing but ink on forgotten paper.
Nigeria is at war with its children. In the northeast, armed gangs abduct children from their classrooms. In the northwest, they conscript them into militias. In the southeast, they are trafficked. In the southwest, they hawk pure water in traffic at the age of six. The state looks away. The elite drive by in bulletproof SUVs. And the children die—slowly, silently, without justice, without hope.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is clear: when you deny a child education, you don’t just destroy a life—you steal a nation’s future. What we face now is not just a crisis of governance. It is a moral catastrophe. It is the unforgivable sin of a generation of rulers who have turned Nigeria into a cemetery of potential. How can a country with so much land, oil, talent, and history become the world’s capital of child abandonment? How long shall we lie to ourselves that the “future belongs to the children” when we dismember that very future with policy neglect, budgetary malice, and executive wickedness? Children do not vote, and so they do not matter. Their screams are unheard. Their pain is ignored. Their lives are discarded like political promises after elections.
But let this editorial thunder into the corridors of power: A nation that devours its children deserves no future. Nigeria’s redemption must begin with its youngest. Education must be universal and free. Nutrition must become sacred. Every street child must be rescued, every school must be safe, and every act of violence against a child must be met with swift, uncompromising justice. If the future must belong to anyone, it must first be protected for the children.
To President Tinubu and every governor, minister, senator, and policymaker: Look into the hollow eyes of our starving children. Their silence is louder than your slogans. Their pain is your legacy. Their abandonment is your shame. And to every Nigerian citizen who still has a conscience: Rise. Protest. Speak. Vote. Demand. Because if we remain silent, we too are complicit in this national crime. We do not need another Children’s Day celebration. We need a Children’s Revolution. Let it begin today.
