QC, Babcock, and the age of higher responsibility (I)
The other day we heard that 586 ex-Boko Haram members are being de-radicalised and absorbed into society in Gombe State. In our country where very little gets done properly or consistently, we have cause to worry about whether the de-radicalisation is real, effective, dangerous to society, or whether it is another scam. We have cause […]
The other day we heard that 586 ex-Boko Haram members are being de-radicalised and absorbed into society in Gombe State. In our country where very little gets done properly or consistently, we have cause to worry about whether the de-radicalisation is real, effective, dangerous to society, or whether it is another scam. We have cause to worry whether it is possible at all to rapidly ‘de-radicalise’ boys, some of whom we have seen slaughtering human beings as they would a cow or ram. Many of those boys are also minors; below 18 years old. Their involvement in Boko Haram however confers a certain informal ‘adulthood’ on them, given the ‘big’ things they have had to do to maintain their membership of that sect. Perhaps as they grew, their parents or guardians could have taken better care to correct their courses, but that did not happen. Millions more children are being so raised in Nigeria today; often sired by parents who themselves should be under care and tutelage, or being subjected to corporal punishment to force their brains into hard reset. Perhaps the threshold age for adulthood needs to come down from say 18, to say 14. What and who even determined 18 years? Is it not arbitrary? Does it consider how fast people grow and mature these days?
Many Nigerians believe that some sort of corporal punishment is what will solve our corruption problem anyway. Some even ask that we go the way of China, where capital punishment may have helped the country of 1.4billion people to reduce – not eradicate – corruption, especially in high political spaces. Given that most of Nigeria’s leaders today grew up in the age of corporal punishment in school, and some say their acts of corruption and blind stealing today may have stemmed from their traumatized past, there are also no assurances that swinging to the other extreme (a situation where we condone children that are growing in the age of higher responsibilities, side with them always, pamper them, spoil them with money and gifts, adorn them with adult things before their time, expose them to sex online and elsewhere, refuse to take interest in what they do on their phones and other gadgets, and so on) will lead to better outcomes.
What are the possibilities? As adults, these pampered children of ours may not be able to compete in anything with children of conservative, poor parents who instill discipline into theirs. They may grow up entitled having got everything they wanted from parents who were trying to play ‘wanna be’, having picked their sense of parenting from soap operas, TV dramas and so on, while trying hard to be whiter than white people. Luckily there will be exceptions; children who become well-adjusted and appreciate the fact that though they did not grow up with corporal punishment, they have to be responsible to society. It will be great if we could press those ones into service here but chances are that they soon relocate abroad and have nothing to do with Nigeria. I once commented about how children who attend expensive schools are wired by the kind of teaching they get, to look down on Nigeria. Many of them organize meetings and tours in foreign lands every holiday. The focus is usually not on how to make this country better. No. Right from kindergarten their teachers, proprietors, minders, colleagues and especially boastful parents of other children, have fed their disconnect from this nation. A Vice Principal of a private school confirmed to me recently that most of their children look down on Nigeria. All their thoughts are about emigrating to ‘systems that work’, even if they are ignorant of the issues faced by those other nations. They go on expensive holidays, often financed with corrupt money stolen by their parents from the private or public sector, and they like what they see. They hardly see the underbellies of the glistening countries they visit.
It is with this prism I will want us to look at the incidence at Queens College – a privileged pseudo-public school with special benefits and ‘aje-butter’ alumni – where an unidentified girl showed up to regular school wearing fake fluttering eyelashes and painted nails and was promptly ‘bounced’ by the guards. We saw that her mum came back with her and some scuffle ensued near the gate of the school. I noted that the mum also wore the same type of fake eyelashes. Much social media debate has gone on during the week on this matter, to the extent that Nigeria’s adept purveyors and manufacturers of fake news came up with the picture of a Queens College student accepting a cash prize of N250,000, claiming that to be the eyelashes girl. The mum of the scholar (Grace Nnachi) has since debunked the fake news and asked everyone not to drag her child or herself into what she obviously considered a despicable debacle. My position has also been that the girl or her mother cannot feign ignorance of the rules of the school and that it is right to eject the girl for flouting the rules of the school. I do not however subscribe to the use of force or violence as was allegedly used on her. However, it is obvious that the girl and her mum started the drama.
This drama throws up a number of other larger issues which prompted my writing on it. these are:
- The value of rules and discipline – many commenters believed eyelashes and painted nails were not a big deal and did not deserve the hoopla around it. Some however stuck to their guns, restating the discipline they had in their times in secondary schools. On a personal note I have never flogged any of my three blessed children who are almost now fully adults (one is). I may have smacked two of them only once in that their naughty age when they scream, try to destroy things and drive everyone up the wall. I regretted afterwards. I believe though that the occasional hard reprimand is good for our children not to totally derail. These days we see people who reward children for bad behavior, and parents who themselves need to be re-raised because they have nothing to offer their children. Some are trying to hide under modernity, behaving like white people to let their children get away with blue murder. Truth is, it is the lower class white people who are likely to leave their children to roam. Blue-blooded ones are very strict with their children. The condoners of that girl’s behavior – daring the school by flouting its rules – are also saying that school rules have no values. Some said the girl should have been called and counseled not turned away. This is a girl who knew the rules. Bending the rules is a good way of ruining institutions. Nigerians talk about strong institutions but many of us don’t know one when we see it, or how to build one if we had a chance.
Corporal punishment – so for me, corporal punishment should not be a standard or a culture, but there are children whose DNA require something more than verbal reprimand/counseling. What do we do about those ones? The western world is not the benchmark in some respects. And even if it was, we should remember that our makeup, environment, culture and the entirety of reality that we and our children are exposed to, are different and therefore require more nuanced and applied responses. To be continued