NIGERIA-CHILDREN: Abandoned Children a Growing Problem

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Sep 22 1996 (IPS) - She doesn’t know it, but nine-months-old Oluseyi is one of the newest recruits to the ranks of orphans in Nigeria.

Six hours after she was was born, her mother abandoned the baby at a private hospital and disappeatred. Authorities were unable to trace the mother who had given a false address.

“The woman was admitted on a humanitarian basis as she went into labour right outside the hospital. She had no money and life comes first; but later we discovered it was a plot by her to dump her baby here,” a nurse at the private hospital told IPS.

Oluseyi, Yorubu for ‘God made this’, was named by the nurses and is being cared for by the hospital. Officials, however, say they cannot continue to carry the cost and will have to send her to an orphanage.

Oluseyi is only one of the many Nigerian children being abandoned daily in hospitals or on the streets, mainly by teenage or adult mothers who cannot afford to take care of their babies.

Health officials here report that not less than six children are abandoned in Lagos alone every week. The population of Lagos state is about six million.

But the phenonmenon is nationwide.

In Bosso village near Minna in the Northern state of Niger, a young boy found a two-day old baby girl in a bush, the third baby to be abandoned in the area during the last three months, according to news reports.

The boy stumbled on the crying baby on a hilltop in the village, her umbilical cord still uncut and infected, the reports said.

The abandoned baby was taken for treatment at a general hospital in the state capital of Minna and later taken to an orphanage where she is now.

The two other babies found in the area were also girls. One of them was found in July in a sugarcane plantation near Chanchanga. Police are still investigating the cases.

According to police reports, infanticide is also on the rise. In April, a 22-year old woman in the Umudioka area of Akwa, in the Eastern State of Anambra, reportedly strangled to death her new- born baby girl in a maternity home.

Police alleged the single woman had attempted to abort the pregnancy earlier, but was kept under surveillance by her relatives.

The woman went into labour at seven months and was rushed to the maternity home where she safely delivered a baby girl, which she allegedly later murdered.

Babies have also been found in public toilets, and wrapped in cellophane bags and tossed in the refuse heaps.

Social health workers here blame the abandonment of babies and infanticide on the economic situation, and on the absence of adequate sex education for the country’s youth.

“Under the prevalent economic situation in the country, many parents are earning salaries that are not enough to take care of the number of children they already have, so they can resort to abandoning their babies in hospitals where they believe the babies will be taken care of,” said social psychologist, Ayo Davies.

Davies added that babies also are abandoned when some parents try to have a male or a female child when they have too many children of one sex.

Most Nigerians still believe that girls grow up, marry and take on the family name of their husbands. It is also believed that when a girl is educated, she takes this education into her husband’s home. For these reasons, girls are often neglected in the home when there are male children.

“If a female child is born after the family would have had many females and they wanted a male, the female child is abandoned in the hospital,” Davies said.

Also, “if a lady is not married and she is pregnant, the man responsible for the pregnancy may decide he does not want a child; in that case, the lady may be forced to abandon the child,” he said. “This is not the proper solution. We have to advise women that whatever comes their way, they should not abandon their children.”

Regina Anozie, a mother, agreed. She added however that parents must reclaim their parenting role in a society where people are too concern with material wealth.

“The problem we have in Nigeria today is that parents are not close to their daughters at all. Some parents do not even know who their daughters are going out with. The parents go out early and come back home very late. How can they monitor their children?”

Anozie said that young teens often do not receive sex education from their parents and seek out information from their friends.

“When a girl is pregnant, she seeks advice from friends outside and even when the parents discover their children are pregnant, they send them out of the house, instead of caring for them,” she said.

Sex education in schools has not taken off in the country’s schools, although it has been on the government’s drawing board for a long time. And parents find it difficult to talk to their children about sex, because of local traditions which discourage parents from discussing sex in the presence of their children.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria (PPFN) campaigns for sex education to be provided for teenagers and young unemployed school leavers.

It has initiated the “West African Youth Initiative Project”, which aims to reduce unwanted pregnancies, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases and the spread of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

The three year project (March 1994 – February 1997) is targeted at sexually active “out of school youths”, between the ages of 14 and 20. The programme is designed by PPFN in collaboration with the National Youth Council of Nigeria and also works with the local governments in areas where the project exists.

“The youth are recruited, trained and utilised as peer counsellors and are expected to take counselling services to their fellow youth and to distribute non-prescriptive contraceptives and provide referrals,” said Wole Daramola, the project’s coordinator.

“Certain socio-economic reasons have heightened the sexual interest of the youth in recent times and the only way out is by educating them on the need to embrace a sense of sexual responsibility in order to reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted dieseases and unwanted pregnancies,” Daramola added.

The project has so far been introduced in eight local governments and has reached more than 8,000 youths.

A PPFN survey shows that 83.3 percent of the males and 72.1 percent of the female youth are sexually active and yet many of them are ignorant of basic reproductive health and contraceptive information. The abortion rate among the youth is about 68 percent, the survey adds.