*Photo: Solanke *
Each day as I returned from work while still in Lagos and engage in casual survey of faces on the road, women in the markets, ladies in their prime or able-bodied and barrel-chested men soaked in the drudgery of daily work, I see frustration and desperation But I also see deficit or dearth of parenting from them as I imagine the lot of tender children this club of agony abandoned carelessly in the hands of total strangers. Today, the home has lost its essence and practically is on the wheel.
Family contacts and intimacy are no longer real in life but thrive superficially In the virtual world. Father-son or mother-daughter friendship is in the email box. Instructions on food preferences are under the doormat. In the extreme, copulation could even be away from the matrimonial bed because there is no home again. Now, what we have are just concrete slabs t for mere residential identification as the comfort of the home is in some club houses; relaxation at some beer parlors and neighborhood joints. The Paradise Spots, Abe Igi, Home Baze and Aso Rocks at the road sides are crashing and crushing homes. The semblance of real family life and communication are reserved only for Sunday when Christians go to church or Muslims troop out to Asalaatu, making a stopover at the Mr. Biggs and the Tetrazzinis while returning from the weekend communion with God.
Lamentably too now, frustrated and jobless neighbours with questionable qualifications are mostly our children’s part-time teachers as children now chill out at the gaming centres, casinos, cybercafés and clubs. If we are not careful, they may also be doing drugs or yahoo-yahoo in our absence or with some hideous excuses. It is so sad that sorrowful surrogates are the nannies tending new born and toddlers in many homes; lying and thieving housemaids are waiters at the dining tables of well-to-do couple, just as women ill-prepared for real family life and illiterate grand mums are at the sick bedside of ailing children because the parents are too engaged to give mother care and fatherly attention.
It is also a tragedy that toddlers, barely out of the diapers, are now forcefully consigned to the boarding house in a neighborhood school as. Kindergarten kids who should return home to the hands of their loving mums are also conscripted into needless extension classes and after-school care regime, learning rote lessons. I see wet mothers who should be tendering to the milking needs of their new borns in the cold nights at Iyana-Ipaja, Oshodi, Ikotun and Obalende displaying worthless wares as if it is just daybreak. I see men drowsily returning from office, hooked on drugs not to oversleep because of the next working day. Many only catch quality sleep in their cars or inside BRT. For many, breakfast is on the wheel.
Of course it is normal that lunch is either on the work desk in the office or from some takeaway specialists. But it is unfortunate that for many, ‘dinner is in some pre-packed combos picked from the On-the-Runs or the Mama puts. Happily for some homes, the refrigerators and the deep-freezers have proved a saving grace for couples rich enough to store three months food items purchase at a time. But if the freezer suddenly packs up or there is no back-up generator to power the savior-refrigerators, it becomes stupid and wasteful to buy in bulk.
What we are now witnessing is an era of absent fathers, frustrated by this lifestyle, shifting all the blames of family breakdown on their marital mates for being incompetent mothers and irresponsible wives. This is an era where most wives readily, easily and justifiably haul allegations of infidelity at their night crawling husbands. It is no longer strange that many babies in their cribs cringe and cry at the sight of many itinerant fathers who they cannot recognize. In this tragedy of the dearth or death of true parenting, many young girls have suddenly become wayward and objects of enjoyment and amusement on the laps of some paedophiles.
Many young boys become errand boys for the criminally minded area fathers who initiate them into petty crimes, dangerous drugs and some other dirty acts. In this tragedy too, many parents lose their children in practical terms or metaphorically, as they become deviants, delinquents, wayward or maladjusted in one form or other. And we say our children are doing very poorly in WAEC, JAMB, NECO and other public examinations when parents do not have or give quality time for the upbringing and moral and ethical orientation of their wards. Rather unfortunately, many fathers and mothers are fraudulently minding this gap of deficit in parenting by indulging them in wasteful spending and conspicuous consumption, registering their children at special centres, greasing the palms of invigilators to look the other way to allow expo, odu, jazz and microchips. I pray no one becomes a victim of this tragedy of civilization, as any child could be lost like the ravishing beauty murdered by her ‘Facebook lovers’ some years ago.
But it is not prayers or wishful thinking that can end this misfortune of parenting. It is by collective action of cultural reinvention, moral rearmament and public enlightenment on the dangers inherent in mortgaging our future by abandoning the children to eroding forces in the society while hassling for daily bread. The public media are no doubt doing some bit to awaken our consciousness. But there must be some deliberate social policies that will criminalize child abandonment on the pretext of pre-age schooling or early childhood education. Night markets must also be discouraged, indeed banned to stop the license of odd hours sales and shopping. Mo wi temi na.
Abdulwarees, a 2007/2008 Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Scholar in Public Policy at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam is Deputy Director/Head, Strategic Planning & Corporate Development, Voice of Nigeria, Abuja.
