As 10-year-old Miriam Chuwkwu and her parents would dress today in radiant attires specially made for the celebration of the yuletide and make merry, Miracle Nana, a nine-year-old kid and his three siblings who reside in Boola, a slum in the Ikosi Isheri Local Council Development Area of Lagos State, would be confined to their parents’ shanty hoping that a good Samaritan would visit their home with food items.
“I don’t know what it means to have a Christmas dress. My daddy has never bought one for me since I was born,” Miracle told our correspondent plainly.
Their mum, Faith Nana, was visibly pregnant. Her pupils looked grey; her skin, pale. She sat on a bucket outside with a loosely-fitted blouse and a worn-out wrapper.
The hairdresser is married to a Ghanaian who is a painter and they have five kids together. “The one wey dey for belle go make am six,” she said.
“Where can I get money to buy clothes for them? I don’t want to say anything negative. We have been surviving on our little income and the benevolence of others,” she said, forcing a smile.
On how she ended up living in the slum with her children, she said, “I was born in Lagos; I schooled here and met my husband here. We moved to the slum in 2011 when things became difficult and we could not afford the rent where we were staying. Since then, we have been living here. I gave birth to four children here.”
“I feel sad not able to afford for my children what other parents out there give their own children at ease, especially during this period,” she added, sobbing softly.
Like Miracle, his playmate, Emmanuel Ojo, a primary three pupil, had no idea what it meant to celebrate Christmas. He said whenever he went to town, he would see parents holding their children’s hands and buying them things, but he knew his own parents could not afford such items.
“It makes me sad whenever I see these children. I will just look at them having fun. When I come back home, I would cry,” he said. “My father is not around. It is only my mother and that is at home she did not buy anything for me and my siblings. I did not even ask her for anything because I know she does not have money.”
An awkward welcome
A strange stench is what welcomes you at Boola. With no tarred road and electricity, it was a semblance of a dump site with endless trails of rubbish.
Fenced off northwards from the highbrow Magodo Phase 1, Boola does not seem to have any government presence. Further down and very close to the Magodo Phase 1 fence is a canal with smelly water filled with all manner of debris.
One of the kids playing by the canal, Mohammed Hamzat, a 12-year-old Primary Four pupil, told our correspondent that although his mother is a Christian, he had never enjoyed any Christmas celebration.
“My mummy doesn’t buy me new clothes or shoes. It is even food that is my own problem. I have not eaten since morning. Some church people came to share rice for us yesterday. That day (today) would be like any other day,” he noted.
Mohammed’s mother, Fatima, a widow, held her two-year-old son, Lekan, as she spoke to our correspondent about why she could not afford what she called ‘big men things’ for her children.
“I have four children. I am almost 40 and I am still suffering. All those things you people are talking are ‘big men things’. What I want is food to feed my children with,” she added.
She took our correspondent on a tour in her shark. What looks like a curtain was torn and dirty with bloodstains which she said was from bed bugs and mosquitoes. Her kitchen is made of triangle-shaped stones and some firewood.
“This is how we manage. As long as there is life, there is hope,” she stated.
A 63-year-old community leader who had lived in the community since 1985 and gave his name only as John said even though he would celebrate yuletide like every other day as he was broke, he was thankful for sound health.
He said, “I will eat whatever I have. I have four children. Three are still with me. The last one is almost 18. The first one who is 33 has left home in search of greener pastures.
“Though it saddens me sometimes that I cannot do as other men out there will do for their children on Christmas day (today), I am happy that I am still alive.”
He added, “The government needs to help us to do the road and sink a borehole. To get clean water, we have to trek long distances.”
Christmas: What about the poor?
World-renowned motivational speaker and leading FX trader, Charning Peters, had in 2017 taken a trip to Nigeria to celebrate Christmas with some indigent kids in Surulere, Lagos.
The award-winning author flew to Nigeria that year disguised as Santa Claus to share the joy of Christmas with the underprivileged, orphaned kids as well as the physically challenged children, giving them gift packs.
In his remark that year, he told Deaf and Wealth TV News, “It is always a different kind of pleasure to make kids happy and to see their faces lighting up in joy is an experience of a lifetime. I feel myself fortunate to be able to share the mirth and merriment of Christmas with these little children. And honestly, it felt like being on seventh heaven when those tiny tots rushed to hug me with stretched arms and bright smiles.
“With the holiday season around the corner, we are all busy packing Christmas gifts for the little ones in our family. But what about the poor kids in the orphanages and the special kids who hardly have anybody to send them holiday gifts?”
In November 2020, a report by the World Poverty Clock rated Nigeria as the poverty capital of the world. According to that report, Nigeria had overtaken India, which according to United Nations data, had a population of 1.3 billion people – more than six times the population of Nigeria.
According to Endpoverty.org, nearly 90 million out of about 200 million people in Nigeria are living in extreme poverty. Worldpoverty.org puts the figure at over 86 million people, which is approximately 41 per cent of Nigeria’s population.
The World Bank defines “the extremely poor” as those living on less than $1.90 a day (N782.50).
The family of 12-year-old Emmanuel Sunday, a dropout, is one of the many slum dwellers that fit into the World Bank’s description.
“Even though I am a Christian, Christmas means nothing to me,” he remarked grimly. “People come and share food for us, but everything remains the same. I don’t like this place. I want to leave here and be like other kids.”
Ogun-born 25-year-old Gbemisola Soyemi brought her three kids to speak to Saturday PUNCH. They unanimously told our correspondent that they had no idea what it was like to celebrate yuletide.
One of them said, “My mummy said clothes are costly now but promised to buy new clothes for us next year.”
Child rights activist, others seek help for kids
A senior lecturer at the Department of Psychology, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Dr Johnbosco Chuwkuorji, noted that children who could not celebrate the yuletide because of their economic status might begin to make some unhealthy in-group comparisons with themselves.
He said, “This is one of such instances where one can look at it from the angle of relative deprivation. It is relative in the sense that it is a reality that these children are growing up in want. On the other hand, one predominant quality people in such areas have is resilience. They may also tend to make comparisons with the in-group rather than the out-group.
“They know that they cannot afford the luxury of the rich so they now look inward around their own environment and compare themselves with other children in that environment. That is why it is not surprising that they are not thinking of Christmas clothes. At that level where they are, what is important to them is the food, and once they have the food, they are okay.”
He also highlighted that the effects of this on the children’s mental health could be indirect, as they could grow up to be resilient children or moral misfits.
Chuwkuorji stated, “The cascade effect in terms of the mental wellbeing of these children is something that one cannot say it is straightforward. Some other factors are going to come in between moderate and in some ways try to modify the long-term effects. In that slum environment, you would see people who would rise from there to become captains of industries and professionals in society. These are people who are able to overcome the limitations of that environment. Resilient children grow into resilient youths who grow into adults that achieve great things in society.
“We as psychologists make efforts to try to work on those children to ensure that they become empowered, instead of looking at their environment as a limitation to becoming what they want to be but as a motivating factor that helped them to survive. Those who are not resilient would be the ones who may not perform well in school or even drop out of school. They may find it difficult to engage productively in learning a trade or the likes. For them not to see clothes and a good environment as essential needs, a lot of work needs to be done.”
Chuwkuorji also urged society to create time to show care to these underprivileged children so as to make them have a sense of belonging, warning that they might come down with depression, anxiety, among other stress-related psychological problems if neglected.
He said, “It is also understandable that due to the economic and social stress that these people go through, they may not have the time to meet the psychological needs of their children. For us, that is what society should work on, even when we realise that their parents cannot do these things, we must try to show love and care to these children to close some gaps.
“This is like sitting on a time bomb for some people. Some of these children may be engaging in child labour. It becomes more worrisome if the child is a girl. Such a girl may be exposed to early sexual practices and may have some pervasive sexual behaviour.”
In her view, a Rivers-based child rights expert and educationist, Ms Mercy Chepaka, said it might take some time to rehabilitate slum kids into mainstream life.
She noted, “Our environment has a way of affecting us and our perception of things and how we see, analyse and interpret any concept. What you know is what you live. It is just like about Christmas dresses that they couldn’t quite get. It would take a very long time of therapy and counseling to be able to integrate them into mainstream life. It is the same way the rich may not really understand what it means to be poor. They, too, would not understand it.
“Depending on the time they were introduced to slum life, it would affect them as they grow older. For children who were born there, it is going to be more difficult to integrate them into urban life. The way they develop and understand life will not be the same as the ones born into rich families.”
She, however, urged the government and civil society organisations to intensify effort in making sure the children are rehabilitated and empowered to be more effective in society.
“Some of the NGOs would come to solicit funds from the masses to help indigent children, but in the end, most of these monies go to private accounts. That needs to stop. It is so disheartening that as the world celebrates Christmas (today), these children are so deprived and don’t even know what the season entails.
“We need to show them love because if we don’t do that, some of these people will end up being the problem of society. When things become so difficult, you would see them carrying guns, because they have to survive. If we say we want to minimise crimes, we must start with these children coming up. Should we wait till they become militants so we can give them amnesty?” she asked.
A professor of sociology at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Iheriohanma Ekeoma, also warned that if nothing was done, the children might become a societal burden.
He said, “In the first instance, these children are deprived, marginalised and don’t feel like part of society. They are seen as the dregs of society. When you see someone as the dreg of society, it means they are not in any way accepted by the members of society. This would have a serious effect. All these Boko Haram insurgents and others we are seeing, how did they come about? Did they just start in a twinkle of an eye? These are as a result of these failures on the part of society.”
Copyright PUNCH.
