“Keep quiet” - the parents of the early forties would tell the young child, and he would keep quiet even if he needed to communicate an idea to his parents. “Turn off the lights and go to sleep” the African parent of the early fifties would tell his children, and they would obediently go to sleep even when they were enjoying the reading of a good story. Most of the parents of those yesteryears couldn’t be bothered about children because they didn’t know better, and their fervent belief was that the children needed to be seen and not heard.
And so they kept the children quiet, to speak only when they were required. The children themselves had a lot of ideas and questions buried in their heads because they didn’t know about early childhood; adolescence and adulthood. As the children themselves continued to ride the carousel of life, everything seem foggy and unclear. In the late sixties, Julie Andres and Christopher Plumner acted in the movie called THE SOUND OF MUSIC, and one of the background music on the tracts of that movie said, and I quote : “Climb every mountain, Walk every street swim every river, till you find your dream” .
Some twenty years after, His Excellency, Mr. James Grant (then of UNICEF) and now (of blessed memory), alerted the United Nations about the need to reposition the status of children so that they automatically become the center of the family. There was an urgent need to assemble Hon. Ministers of Education from around the world; Professors of Behavioural Psychology, and Representatives of Government in the area of National Planning to attend a GLOBAL CONFERENCE ON CHILDREN in New York, - USA. The year was 1989; His Excellency, Ambassador Joseph Garba was the Permanent Representative of Nigeria to the United Nations, and also was President of the General Assembly of the United Nations.
The Conference convened and the Convention on the Rights of The Child was drafted and eventually ratified by all member-states of the United Nations. As a sequel to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, children were to be exempted from war fronts; The Rights of the Child in that 1989 Document was that children should also be excluded from Child Labour; They had the Right to Education; and so on and so forth.
When the Country Delegates returned to their various countries, they tried to use the State of Political Affairs and National Security to design a local Convention on the Rights of The Child, similar to the Clauses and recommendations of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. When everything started to move on smoothly, the International Labour Organization of the United Nations, organized Regional and Global Conferences on CHILD LABOUR, and finally was able to evolve a comprehensive International Mechanism on the prevention of CHILD LABOUR in every country on the face of this Earth.
But Girls unfortunately were kept out of school with the fervent belief that the education of boys should be prioritized. A world of female illiterates was building up and the United Nations became concerned that, if care was not taken, the future of girls in the education sector would be nil.
Professor Adebayo ADEDEJI then Executive Secretary of the UN-Economic Commission for Africa came to Abuja (1989) to preach PARITY IN EDUCATION FOR BOYS AND GIRLS. Some five years after, over 5,000 women assembled in Dakar Senegal to produce a comprehensive document on the position of Africa at the (then) forthcoming, UN GLOBAL CONFERENCE ON WOMEN and recommended that the education of girls should be prioritized at all levels. It was as a result of these recommendations that PLATFORM FOR ACTION; and BEIJING DECLARATION - the report issued by that UN GLOBAL CONFERENCE ON WOMEN devoted several pages of its report to comprehensive recommendations on the EDUCATION OF GIRLS and as a sequel, the United Nations Fund for Children UNICEF, has now established the UNGEI - UN Girl’s Education Initiative. Today, the world is not only focusing on girls but comprehensively on THE YOUTH.
For instance, Lagos State has its own YOUTH COUNCIL which facilitates, YOUTH EMPOWERMENT; SKILLS ACQUISITION; CAPACITY BUILDING and son on and so forth. At the community level, Somolu has its own SOMOLU LOCAL YOUTH FORUM, and in order to contribute our own quota, SOMOLU GLOBAL NEWS delivered a MOTIVATIONAL SPEECH on “Taking The Bull of Your Life by Its Horns : A Sine-Qua-Non To Succeeding in Life”; just to encourage our youth.
Why don’t you then get yourself ready, for this edition is packed like an ‘Action Movie’; enjoy it.
Ciao.
Prince Foster Akinpelu,
Publisher,
SOMOLU GLOBAL NEWS.
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