Country Director, GOALPrime Organisation Nigeria, Professor Christopher Chinedumuije, has urged President Bola Tinubu and the governors of the 36 States of the Federation to help end deplorable condition of malnourished children and out-of-school syndrome.
In a Children’s Day open letter to Nigerian leaders, Chinedumuije, a professor of Disaster Management and Humanitarian Studies, called for an urgent end to out-of-school menace affecting over 10.5 million children and over two million malnourished children, especially in the North-East and North-West Nigeria – a fact supported by United Nations Children and Education Fund (UNICEF).
In a statement issued on Wednesday as part of the activities marking the 2025 Children’s Day annual celebration, Chinedumuije stated that “Today, 27th May, as Nigeria marks National Children’s Day, I write this letter not with a heart full of celebration, but with grief, urgency, and a plea that history must record.
“How do we clap for our children, when their backs are burdened with hunger, neglect, and abandonment?
“How do we raise flags and deliver poetic speeches, when across this nation, millions of children are being erased from the promise of tomorrow?”
He added that the children were not in schools either, “They are not in schools—they are in the streets, markets, and slums. They are not playing—they are fighting to survive.
“They are not dreaming—they are shrinking under the weight of broken systems and betrayed futures.”
He noted that over 10.5 million children in the country were out of school, citing UNESCO 2024 release.
He added that over two million children were also severely malnourished, mostly in the North-East and North-West, referencing UNICEF 2024 statement.
Prof Chinedumuije said that the Nigerian children’s situation was more pathetic as “Thousands of preventable child deaths annually due to poor healthcare access. Millions of children unregistered at birth, legally invisible and excluded from state support, and a Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs that has been marred by scandals, with billions of naira meant for the poor lost to greed and incompetence.”
He lamented that, “This is not just a failure of governance.,It is a betrayal of our children.
It is a betrayal of our nation.”
“A child neglected today is a soldier of chaos tomorrow.”
He opined that, “The abandoned boy will not remain a boy. He may grow into the bandit we can no longer control, the insurgent we cannot defeat, or the angry youth who sees this country not as his home, but as his enemy.
“The girl we deny education today may become the mother of another generation of brokenness. The child who drinks from a gutter today will grow up remembering a country that offered him nothing—and such a child, with nothing to lose, becomes the greatest threat to everything we want to protect. If we do not act urgently from today.”
According to him, the ranks of the dreaded insurgents would be automatically swollen by the populations of neglected children.
“The recruitment pipelines of armed groups will flourish. Radical ideologies will find fertile ground in hearts that were first emptied by hunger and despair. And Nigeria’s national security crisis will deepen—not from external threats, but from the children we refused to empower.”
He, therefore, saw it expedient to highlight at this moment what must be done to the precarious situation.
He urged the Federal Government to “Declare a National Emergency on Child Protection, with cross-ministerial coordination and Presidential oversight. Establish a National Child Development and Protection Agency (NCDPA)—a fully empowered institution for the coordination of all child-focused investments, policies, and interventions. Legislate and enforce the allocation of at least 15% of the national budget to child development sectors—education, nutrition, health, identity, and social protection, and Investigate, prosecute, and recover all stolen funds meant for poverty reduction and child protection—not as politics, but as justice for children.”
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