2017 was a horrible year for children, says the United Nations. “They have been killed, recruited to fight, used as human shields, forced into marriage and enslaved. 2017 has been a “nightmare year” for children caught in the crosshairs of conflict…
In a sobering list of this year’s unrest, the UNICEF highlights the “shocking scale” of harm to children and how the world has failed them.” CNN reported.
I don’t need the statistics to know this. In January last year I helped 9-year old Favor get a false eye courtesy of Oklahoma-based charity Voice of the Martyrs. Her face was slashed with a machete and she lost her left eye the night Muslim herdsmen raided her village and killed her father. Favor’s brother and sister survived with bullet and machete wounds too and are now in an orphanage in north central Nigeria.
2018 as short as it’s been is already on track to be a nightmare year – unless we do more to better the lot of the world’s children. On January 1, 2018 a horrific New Year’s Day massacre by Fulani Herdsmen in Benue State in north central Nigeria claimed 73 lives some mere children. Images of the rows of coffins trucked in on flatbed trailers for a mass state burial touched the world and the New Year’s Day massacre has engendered a movement to end what is termed the herdsmen/farmer conflict in Nigeria.
Upon returning to the safety of the US after a fact-finding mission to Nigeria, I was not prepared for the Valentines’ Day Massacre in Parkland, Florida. 17 lives brutally cut down while doing the most low-risk activity of all time – attending school – shocked me into a greater consciousness. Boko Haram the world’s leading terror group for several years which views education as evil has had fewer attacks on schools in 2018 compared to 18 gun incidents in US schools already. A sobering realization hit me that if all US mass shootings were classified as terrorism, the US would rank amongst the top 5 most terrorized countries in the world alongside Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria.
Perhaps inspired by Parkland’s Valentine’s Day Massacre, media savvy Boko Haram barely a week later, undertook a high profile attack on a girls school in north east Nigeria quite reminiscent to its notorious attack on a school in Chibok. Then it abducted 276 girls that sparked the #bringbackourgirls movement. Over 100 girls are now missing from this week’s attack in addition to the 112 Chibok girls still in captivity now for almost 4 years.
I texted the news of the latest attack to one of the escaped Chibok girls I relocated to school in safety in the US. Her one word response encapsulated it all – “Again?” then moments later “Wow! This is serious.”
This is serious indeed. In America as in Nigeria, the safety of school kids is now in sharp focus. The threat to school kids is not just a distant occurrence and it certainly isn’t limited to so-called “conflict zones.” It’s now a concern in comfort zones and we now have to orient international students and asylees or refugees to the US on risks here too. The abnormality though is that their survival skills and situational awareness is toned down with the veneer of Peace and security all around and they are quite unprepared for violence in America.
It is time for us to act to secure the future of our kids in Africa or America. School shootings must never be normalized. In this I see another anomaly. In Nigeria there is no other side to the argument for school safety. There’s no powerful lobby or school of thought that says it shouldn’t be done but in America for once I see a ray of hope that the tide is turning.
Times were when after a mass shooting, there would be a run on gun stores as people stockpiled weapons for fear of a government ban. For the first time I see gun owners surrendering their guns or destroying them as a #onelessgun movement takes off.
However the greater hope in my view is the movement of school kids rising against school shootings and literally fighting for their lives. When the kid in the crowd calls out the emperor’s invisible robe as nudity, that’s the time to get real.
My 13 year old returned from school today and told me they had a 17 minute walk out in honor of the Parkland 17. I told her I was proud to have another human rights activist in the family.
I remember that it was the thought of her almost a decade ago that took me back to the trenches of human rights advocacy in Africa. Seeing the charred remains of a little girl killed by herdsmen, I’d said “if I lived in Africa it could have been my daughter.” I live in America and now it could still be my daughter.
We really can and must do better for our children. American civilization cannot peak and decline on a gun debate. America is the world’s leader but it must lead first by Americans not killing Americans. A civilization that allows its unborn children to die, its living children to be killed and disallows immigrants is a civilization seeking extinction. I never thought it would come to this but I will stand with America’s school children as I have stood with Nigeria’s school children because right now we are all in the same leaky boat.
The Florida community stood with the Chibok girls as did many around the world. We should stand with Florida too.
Justice for Jos 