The Mandate Secretary of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Women Affairs Secretariat, Mrs Adedayo Benjamins-Laniyi, disclosed recently, that the FCT Administration had sealed off an orphanage in Karonmajigi, the Priesthood Orphanage, after 23 children, aged 1 – 14 years, allegedly trafficked from Plateau state were supposedly rescued from the orphanage.
She also added that the FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, had authorised the Secretariat to profile and recertify orphanages operating within the nation’s capital.
But, this case is not an isolated one as issues of orphan abuses in orphanage homes have become a recurring decimal in the nation’s polity.
Before this development, we recall that in 2017, the FCTA had also clamped down on illegal orphanages operating in the city over alleged negligence and other nefarious acts.
Repeatedly, operators of orphanage homes in Nigeria have been accused of inappropriate behaviour that often run contrary to laid down rules on how such charity homes ought to operate.
While some of these homes are said to be involved in selling (not given out on adoption) the children under their care, others are accused of subjecting the children to diverse abuse, hard labour and trafficking.
It has also been discovered that most of the homes are operating under conditions that are injurious to the health of the children. It is sad to note that some of these homes lack of toilet facilities, potable water and healthy food. In most cases, the rooms are not only crowded but are not properly ventilated.
These children, raised under such conditions, face enormous challenges to their health and development. A National Population Commission, Federal Republic of Nigeria, and ICF International 2013 report claim that an estimated 95 percent of these children do not receive any type of medical, emotional, social, material, or school-related assistance.
In fairness to some operators of these orphanages, they provide these services under the harsh economic situation the nation has been exposed to. Without government assistance and insufficient public awareness, they complain about poor funding and other materials to properly take care of the children.
This newspaper is aware that, over the years, not much attention has been paid to orphanages in Nigeria, leaving their operators to struggle on their own and most times go cap in hand to beg for funds to pay salaries, provide health care, pay school fees and maintain their facilities.
The state of insecurity in the country has also engulfed these orphanage homes as kidnappers have now included them in their checklist for terror-related activities.
They now raid orphanages to abduct children for ransom.
For instance, two babies were stolen from the Jehovah Jireh Orphanage, Orlu, Imo State, in 2019 and in 2020, another orphanage was robbed in Ibadan, Oyo State and when the robbers couldn’t get the age grade of the children they wanted, they went on rampage, destroying things, attacking staff members.
This year 2024, another orphanage, Rachael Home and Orphanage, in Abuja, was raided at gunpoint at midnight, and seven children were kidnapped.
In some of these cases, it was so easy for the robbers and kidnappers to raid the referenced facilities because most orphanages lack the adequate funding to provide well-fortified structures for the safety of the children and prevent crime.
In 2015, the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development estimated that there were about 17.5million orphans and vulnerable children in a nation of about approximately 200 million people.
Sadly, in our opinion, that is close to nine percent of the population and this number has increased over the years due to violence, conflicts and communal clashes in different parts of the country.
India, China and Nigeria rank at the top of countries with highest number of orphans, primarily due to their large population and challenges like poverty, disease, and conflicts.
However, the number of these orphans in orphanages are not well-documented as there are no current statistics to that effect but government-operated homes are less than five per cent while 95 per cent of this figure are in private homes.
The thinking in government circles seem to be that the operators of these orphanages are philanthropists with the spirit to help such handicapped children as a way of helping the society. Even at that, those publicly- funded homes are not fairing any better.
Unfortunately people have turned it into business and the children as articles of trade.
Last year, the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) revealed how some orphanage homes in the country engage in child trafficking, claiming to have recovered 75 children trafficked by an Abuja orphanage home.
But this newspaper is aware that determining accurate statistics is difficult because so many occurrences of human trafficking go undiscovered and undocumented.
NAPTIP statistics from 2019 to 2022 indicate that 61 per cent of human trafficking in Nigeria happens internally, while 39 per cent is cross-border.
Child labour is another form of modern slavery which occurs when a child is exploited for someone else’s gain. Internal trafficking often takes the form of recruitment and transportation of children from rural areas to urban and city centres for different forms of labour under exploitative conditions.
Unfortunately, there is no post-institutional monitoring of what happens to children when they leave home for adoption and fostering.
There is no monitoring in place to also check abuses, growing rates of illegal orphanages, trafficking and child merchandising, baby farming among others.
In our opinion, a lot more needs to be done by government at all levels in order to stop the establishment of illegal orphanages especially as it is fast becoming big business of some sort.
We urge the regulatory agencies and inspectorate departments that authorise these orphanages to monitor them effectively so as to eliminate the abuses.
It is our considered opinion that they should be structured and mechanisms to check what they are doing put in place and enforced.
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