By Emedolibe Ngozi Emeka
It is unfortunate that we don’t see the likes of Frank Olize, dominating the mass media space like it was when I was young. As the anchor of Newsline, arguably Nigeria’s most-watched TV magazine show in the late 80s and 90s, Olize, full of humour and charm, would open his show with that basic question: ‘It’s 9pm, do you know where your children are?”
It was a question directed at parents of that era. Of course, homes with great family-life would always offer an answer to this rhetorical question. If you cannot, as a family, do so with great certainty, then there is an issue. With today’s unfolding scenarios about cultism, yahoo business, rituals, drug addiction and prostitution, every family on this boat, needs to pay greater attention on how their teenagers are faring.
The reason is simple. Handling teenagers is a tough job, perhaps the toughest portion of the child-raising curve. It sure requires a lot of grace. But as parents, you must play your role, while talking to God to grant you His grace to decorate your efforts, beyond paying huge tuitions and bankrolling pricey vacations. Your regular interactions, assurances, encouragements and advice matter a lot at this stage.
Biologically and psychologically, this stage is crucial and sets the stage to what the child will become. During this stage, the hormones will be running riot, preparing them for puberty, while offering them that sense and quest for self-expression.
They also become very conscious of their looks, and begin to have sexual fantasies. The fact that they are overtly naïve makes them vulnerable to easy manipulation.
With each ugly story of youngsters indulging in vices such as cultism, yahoo-plus, drug addiction and ‘money rituals’ comes an underlining incident of a parent, who did not try and pray enough. In the past three weeks or so, the stories have been most brazen in Nigeria: In Jos, Moses Okoh had checked into a hotel with a third year student of UNIJOS, named Jennifer. At the end of their tryst, she had been killed with her vital organs harvested. At Egor, near Benin, Osas, had returned from Ghana to perpetrate this same evil on his girlfriend, Elohor Oniorosa. In Sagamu, a viral video showed a dismembered body of a female, purportedly killed by some friends tossed by the wayside at Sabo area of the town. In Kano, we are still grieving over the death of 5-year old Hanifa Abubakar, murdered by kidnappers after collecting a tranche of the ransom. At Onitsha, one young man was caught in an attempt to bury a neighbour’s son inside his room so his ‘Yahoo business will mature’. In Lagos, Afeez Olalere, confessed to killing his younger brother. He said: ‘My mother took me to an herbalist who told me if I want to be successful in the yahoo business, I will have to sacrifice one life and that person must be a sibling to me.’
With the under-policed nature of the Nigerian society, numerous other cases may have happened without trace. Where are the CCTV cameras to capture footages of what may have happened in the dead of the night on Third Mainland Bridge, and other such locations in the country? But we cannot continue to wait for the government to do everything. While the digital age, may pre-suppose that solutions to life’s challenges should come with the swiftness of computing algorithms, parents need to talk to their wards, especially the teenagers that life is graded and that patience is a virtue. If Afeez Olalere had not been under undue pressure to make money, he would not have seen the ‘desperate need’ to kill his brother, with the encouragement of his mother as a viable option. Much as these youths think that ‘school is scam’, because of lack of jobs and that ‘patience is old-fashioned’, parents should not stop drawing their attention to the benefits of hard work. It pays and avails the wealth one would enjoy at old age. Robert Schuller, American tele-evangelist who hosted, ‘Hour of Power’ for five decades said: “Tough times never last, but tough people do. This has proven to be a timeless fact.
While encouraging our teenagers to compete, we should not push them into the wrong contests of owning fat bank accounts and driving big cars. That it worked for Emma does not mean it would work for Alex. I heard some teenagers, who are not up to 16, have bank balances in excess of N30million realized from Internet scams and the likes. This should not be the reference point to gauge the success or otherwise of our teenagers. Once, someone was describing how successful a friend of his had become in ‘Yahoo business’, and I ‘suggested’ he should send his only son, who is 10 for apprenticeship in the ‘business’, but he flatly turned it down. He wanted his son to be a lawyer.
It is pathetic that the female child is at the receiving end of these crimes. They form bulk of the people being targeted for ritual-killings and the Internet further exacerbates the situation as these evil ‘predators’ lure them with romantic advances only to murder them at the end. For this reason, parents must stop pushing their daughters to that state of helplessness, where they seek freedom in the wrong places. God help us!
• Emedolibe, a former editor of Hints, wrote from Lagos.