- Its administrators should be prosecuted to send the appropriate message
Reactions of the parents of some of the 300 persons freed by the police last week from what was supposed to be a correctional Islamic centre at Rigasa in Kaduna State exemplified the notion that ignorance is indeed a disease. It is the story of a rehabilitation centre in need of rehabilitation.
What gladdens the heart is that some Muslim authorities have dismissed the notion that the school is an epitome of an Islamic school. According to President Muhammadu Buhari, “We are glad that Muslim authorities have dismissed the notion of the embarrassing and horrifying spectacle as Islamic school. The place has indeed been described as a house of torture and a place of human slavery.” Such a place where some inmates were chained to prevent their escape from the centre cannot be allowed in any country in the 21st century.
Ignorance may be a disease; but it is not incurable. The cure in this case lies in massive enlightenment on the need for parents to give birth to the number of children they can cater for. One of the women whose children were freed from the rehabilitation centre said she had two children there while another said she had four. Maryam Fatika, who had four children at the school said she saw nothing wrong with the way the school was being operated: “there was nothing going wrong in the school because we took our children there willingly. We don’t know why the police raided the place,” she said, adding: “My children have never complained to me about abuse or anything. But we are aware that they were punished if they did something wrong because they are very dangerous and stubborn children.” Another parent with six children there, Hajiya Shafa’atu Zakari, said she took her children to the place because they were drug addicts that they could no longer tame at home.
Obviously both the parents and their children need to be educated to see what is wrong with the way the centre was being run. We therefore agree with President Buhari that education is the panacea to child abuse and that children “will be safeguarded from roaming the streets and protected from all evil influences that assail idle hands and idle minds, when they are sent to school.” This is the essence of making the first nine years of education free and compulsory nationwide. It is a constitutional matter; what is left is for state governments and the Federal Government to activate the processes for enforcing this policy.
We emphatise with the parents over the fate of their children. But that is one of the problems people run into when they have more children than they can take care of. Be that as it may, there is the need by government at all levels to do something about the country’s economic situation. More economic opportunities would take some of these children off the streets.
Governments nationwide must be alert and alive to their responsibilities. The mushrooming of illegal baby centres is also an indication of lax monitoring and enforcement of laws guiding the operations of homes like the one in Kaduna and others that have been uncovered, either in recent times or in the past.
We cannot close our eyes to the operations of such places. Government’s licence is required to operate such centres. Moreover, separate licences ought to be obtained for schools and rehabilitation centres. It is not a question of whether the parents willingly sent their children to the centre for rehabilitation; it is a question of whether laws have been breached. In this case, the answer is in the affirmative.
So, we cannot pretend not to see the abuses that children in the home were subjected to in the name of discipline. A rational human being must know where discipline stops and torture takes over. The approach of the Kaduna centre can only promote fanaticism and fundamentalism, two scourges Nigeria cannot afford to nurture, especially given our experiences in recent years and the experiences of other countries under the spell of religious bigots. The school’s administrators should be prosecuted to serve as a deterrent.
