By Godfrey AKON
Since Nigeria domesticated the Convention on the Rights of a Child in 2003 and enacted the Child Rights Act, only 28 states and the FCT have adopted the law. While 8 states, the likes of Adamawa, Borno, Bauchi, Gombe, Jigawa, Kebbi, Yobe, Kano and Zamfara, are still indifferent, implementation of the law has not enjoyed robust support, as child abuse and other forms of violations to children’s rights remain entrenched.
Despite efforts by public-spirited individuals as well as domestic and foreign agencies to curtail the level of abuse and court relevant bodies to enforce children’s rights, violations recorded daily across the country remain very high.
Not only are the rights violations perpetrated in homes, but in institutions of primary and higher learning, children also come under severe rights violations. Incidents of child abuse, gender-based violence, street hawking, child marriage, street begging, among others, have been reported even in urban areas.
Optimistic that, in addition to the multiprong approaches being adopted to curb such violations, the over two-decade-old law can still create impact in an academic environment, Nigerian tertiary institutions, in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, are working together to mainstream Child Rights Reporting as a course under the Mass Communication Programme.
Speaking on the importance of unbundling the course in the curricula of tertiary institutions, a Professor of Mass Communication at Ebonyi State University, Abakiliki, Ifeyinwa Nsude, said child rights abuse in the university system can only be stopped if the system and students are aware of child rights and report them.
Nsude, who defined a child as anyone below the age of 18, decried the rate of child abuse in Nigerianuniversity system and stressed that protection must be given to children within the system, and thatthe right to child survival must first be addressed, before the issue of child development and others.
“In the university for instance, you see that most of these lecturers abuse child rights and what baffles me is that the students don’t even talk. They are intimidated. So, if we start child rights reporting and do it very well, it would achieve creating awareness and helping the children to know that they have rights and lecturers cannot intimidate them.
“It is not just concentrating on the university environment, that was why I made a trip to the Ministry of women affairs because the trend is just skyrocketing. So, I want to incorporate both things happening in the in society and what is happening in the universities,” she said.
Nsude spoke in Lagos at a two-day training of trainers’ workshop on the reviewed curriculum on child rights reporting, organised by UNICEF in collaboration with the Child Rights Information Bureau, CRIB, a department in the Ministry of Information and Culture.
The lecturer who has developed concept notes for the unbundling of the course in her university, lamented that the problem with universities, polytechnics and colleges of education is that mainstreaming child rights reporting into their curriculum is difficult because of the bottlenecks in various institutions of higher learning in Nigeria.
“Fortunately, during the period of unbundling, I had the opportunity to be part of the whole programme; so, when we got there, we branched off to our areas of specialization. And in journalism and media studies, when we started discussion, we removed some things from the old curriculum, and added new things.
“So, it was then that I told them that we are missing a very important course that might affect our future if we don’t take time. They now said what is that? I mentioned Child rights reporting and as God would have it, they all supported it.
“They now asked me to give them the course tittle, which I gave them. So, the title you see in that unbundled programme was what I gave them and they now gave the code of that course. Now the implication is that we don’t have to struggle so much again to put this child rights reporting into the curriculum.
“It is already in the curriculum of the unbundled programme. So, in many institutions, they have started planning on how to start this unbundling programme. In my school for instance, I went to our Vice Chancellor and gave him a report about the unbundling and about how child rights have been incorporated into the unbundling.
“Before now, I was meeting him to know if child rights reporting could be included in the curriculum. After my discussions with him, he accepted. But now that this unbundling is automatically in the curriculum, we don’t have problem again,” she said.
Earlier, a lecturer with the Mass Communication Department of the University of Jos, Mr Luka Toholde, told our correspondent that currently, child rights reporting is not taken as a core course in his university.
Toholde said “what I do is in the course outline, I try to bring in child’s rights so that the students understand that once they get knowledge of children’s rights then they would be able to report the rights. Basically, that is what UNICEF is teaching us to do in our various schools, to inculcate in the students the ability to right on the children’s rights.
“Except they get the knowledge of these rights, they can’t articulate that very well. So, what we do, because the child’s rights are not embedded in most of our courses for now, what the lecturers do is to include child rights act as part of the course content of some courses, especially reporting courses.
“But with the unbundling now, they have advanced our discussions on having child rights as a course on its own but because the unbundling is still in the process, that has not been taken care of. For production courses like television production, radio production, students are taught about the rights of the children, then they now go out and gather materials to produce programmes about child rights.
While delivering a presentation at the workshop, a Lecturer at Enugu State University of Science and Technology, ESUT, Dr Ezinwa Anthony, said at ESUT, child rights reporting is a 300-level course taught in the first and second semester, adding that the university senate approved it shortly after its introduction by UNICEF.
“Conservatively, we have trained more than 3000 students over the years. Some eventually chose child rights-related topics in their undergraduate projects, Masters dissertation and PhD thesis,” Anthony said.
He lamented that ignorance on issues about implementation of child rights was deep rooted among some students and that accounts for the reason they are still pessimistic about child rights in Nigeria.
