NIGERIA-POPULATION: Cut Adrift in a Sea of Neglect

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Aug 29 1996 (IPS) - For many of Nigeria’s senior citizens, the International Day of the Elderly, Sep. 1, is just another day in lives soured by neglect.

Battered by falling standards of living due to an ailing economy, shunned by poverty-stricken relatives and given scant attention by the government, a growing number of the elderly feel life has not been fair to them.

While some are lucky to have caring children, many survive by begging alms. Others, mostly women, eke out a living as porters in markets, while a few are inmates of old folk’s homes run by the government and voluntary organisations.

Emmanuel Kantu, aged 69, became an inmate of the Yaba Old Peoples Home, the only one in Lagos, in 1987, the year when a twin tragedy hit him: his house was demolished by the Lagos state government and his wife died.

Kantu, who used to be a boxer and a swimmer in the 1950s, worked as a junior public servant in the state-owned National Electric Power Authority. Like all retired state employees, he receives a monthly pension equivalent to 60 percent of the salary he used to earn. Even in the beginning it did not amount to much. Since then, currency devaluations and inflation have made its real value even less. Now, it’s not even enough to buy two day’s worth of food, he says.

“I heeded advice to go to the home since i could not beg,” he said. “I regret that I was not able to give my children proper education. I missed the opportunity of going to school myself when my father got married to another woman.”

Kantu blames his country’s government for the plight of the elderly. “We don’t have good leaders otherwise there should be a welfare policy for the aged,” he argues.

David Obasanjo, another resident of the home, built by the British while they ruled Nigeria, is also an ex-civil servant. His wife left him in 1989 when he became blind. Only one of their four children is alive. the other three were all killed during the Nigerian civil war (1966-1970).

The home has been his salvation, he says. “If not for the old people’s home, i hate to think of what would happen to me,” 78- year-old Obasanjo told IPS.

“Most of the inmates are brought by their “ever busy” children, some of who never visit them again,” an official of the home, who declined to give her name, told IPS. Not all, though. When, about 10 years ago, Mama Ondo was left in her house with no one to take care of her, it was concerned neighbours who took her to the Yaba Home.

Generally, Nigerians believe in the extended family system under which three, and in some cases four, generations live together. This is still the norm in the countryside. but, in large towns, the influence of Western culture and increasing economic difficulties since 1986, when a structural adjustment programme was introduced, have led many people to cut their aged parents adrift.

“It is done by those who have imbibed foreign cultures,” charges social scientist Ola Aderibigbe. “It is very unafrican. whatever happens, children should take care of their aged parents instead of dumping them in homes.”

“Children should remember that their parents took care of them from birth to the time they became what they are today,” he adds. “It is ungodly to forget the care they received from their parents.”

But many urban Nigerians are hardly able to provide for their nuclear families and find it difficult to look after their elderly relatives too. Some say they would rather have them in homes than begging on the streets, a common feature of most nigerian cities in the past decade.

“The African culture is such that we believe seriously in the extended family system to the extent that even if a person is childless, relations still have to take care of him or her at an old age, but the economic situation of this country has made that impossible,” says Shina Ogundipe, a civil servant here.

“I can send my aged mother to such a home if she behaves abnormally,” he says, explaining that “some children have the means but their parents prefer begging thereby causing them embarassment. At the homes they will not have the chance to move about the streets begging.”

Taxi driver Sunday Akande told IPS his mother still lived in his house and that she was going to remain there. “Though I cannot dump my mother in a home,” he said, “some children do it because they are very poor. They don’t have anything, so the best thing is for them to take their parents to old people’s homes, where government can take good care of them.

“Some neighbours have even taken such suffering aged people to the (Yaba) Home where they have visiting doctors and receive donations of cash, clothes and food items from individuals and voluntary organisations.”

The Yaba Old People’s Home is funded by the Lagos state government and voluntary organisations, including Rotary International, which recently renovated one of its blocks. Its some 50 inmates “are fed three times a day,” one official said. “Their clothes are washed by the staff of the home while some Filipino and other Asian volunteer doctors come in once a month to examine and treat them.”

But many more live outside of the institution. The most destitute beg alms during the day and sleep on pavements at night. Others work as porters, nannies or vendors of vegetables and cooked food.

“My child gives me a daily allowance of 50 naira (about 63 cents). This is not enough in the present day high cost of food, so I use my grinder to grind pepper for people and also help my landlady to sell borehole water,” Morufa Iyaagba told IPS. “From that I take care of myself and my grandson’s two little children living with me.”

Iyaagba, aged about 80, makes the equivalent of about 1.25 U.S. dollars daily. The one-roomed appartment she rents costs 300 naira (3.75 dollars) a month.

Even in the villages, where traditional values are still being upheld, things are changing. Elderly people who used to sit back at home and tell their grandchildren stories while their parents were at the farms, are now working in the fields themselves as most able bodied men and women migrate to the cities in search of jobs.