Blurb: If Nigerian children continue growing up in fear, neglect, collapsing institutions, and normalised insecurity, then Children’s Day becomes something more tragic than celebratory. It becomes an annual reminder of promises repeatedly made to children and repeatedly broken before their eyes.
Every year on May 27, Nigeria celebrates Children’s Day with colourful parades, speeches, banners, television programmes, and official promises about the future. Politicians smile beside children dressed in school uniforms. Public officials speak about hope, leadership, and national destiny. We are reminded, for the umpteenth time, that children are the “leaders of tomorrow.” But each year, I find myself asking a painful question: What exactly are we celebrating?
Promises kept, or promises never kept, because a society cannot claim to love its children while continuously failing to protect them.
A nation cannot speak passionately about the future while neglecting the very people expected to inherit it. And no ceremonies or rhetoric can hide the growing reality that millions of Nigerian children are being raised in fear, insecurity, poverty, institutional failure, and emotional exhaustion.
For too many children in Nigeria today, childhood itself is becoming fragile. Some children fear going to school. Some fear travelling on highways. Some students study in classrooms with leaking roofs, broken chairs, and no learning materials. Meanwhile, children from wealthier backgrounds increasingly retreat into private systems of education, healthcare, and security, creating two very different childhoods within the same polity.
Some go to bed hungry. Others watch their parents struggle daily against economic hardship. Others have already encountered violence before they fully understand the meaning of safety.
That should disturb every national conscience, because childhood is supposed to represent innocence, possibility, imagination, and protection. A healthy society creates conditions where children can dream safely, where curiosity is encouraged rather than stifled by fear, and where education opens doors rather than exposing children to danger.
Yet across Nigeria, many children are growing up learning survival before stability. That is a national tragedy!
The repeated abductions of schoolchildren over the years should have permanently shaken the conscience of the country. From the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping to countless other attacks on schools and students across different regions, insecurity has slowly transformed education itself into a source of anxiety for many families.
A parent should never have to fear whether a child will return safely from school. We remember Abdul Samad Toyib, four years old. Christiana Akanbi, two years old. Idowu Taiwo, four years old. These are not mere statistics buried beneath security headlines. These are children who left home expecting to learn, play, and return safely to their families. Days later, their absence still haunts the nation.
And yet, for many Nigerians, that fear has become disturbingly ordinary. That normalisation is dangerous, because societies do not collapse only when institutions fail structurally. They also collapse when citizens become emotionally accustomed to children’s suffering.
Perhaps one of the most frightening things happening in Nigeria is the gradual normalisation of childhood trauma.
A child raised in persistent fear eventually begins to see fear as normal life.
A child repeatedly exposed to violence, instability, institutional neglect, or public humiliation internalises those experiences in ways society may not fully understand for years. Children quietly inherit the nation’s emotional state.
When adults normalise dysfunction, children inherit it psychologically. That is why Children’s Day should not merely be celebratory. It should be reflective. It should force difficult national questions.
Why are schools still unsafe in many parts of Nigeria? Why do millions of children remain out of school? According to UNICEF, Nigeria has one of the world’s highest out-of-school children populations, with estimates exceeding 18 million. That figure alone should force a national emergency conversation, because governments reveal their true priorities not only through speeches, but through what they consistently fund, protect, and treat as urgent.
Why are public educational institutions deteriorating while families bear increasing financial pressure? Even more troubling is how institutions sometimes respond when these failures are exposed publicly.
In Ebonyi State, two headteachers from a community primary school in Ezza North were reportedly suspended after a viral video revealed pupils learning inside severely dilapidated classrooms with unfinished block walls. Rather than the exposure immediately triggering national outrage over the school’s condition, the educators faced allegations of misconduct and sabotage.
That response sends a dangerous message. Exposing institutional failure may prompt punishment more quickly than the failure itself prompts urgent remedial action. The world is watching, and so are Nigerian children.
Why do children in some communities still lack access to basic healthcare, nutrition, electricity, clean water, and safe learning environments? Why are so many young Nigerians growing up with deep distrust in public institutions before they even become adults?
Under Section 17(3)(f) of the Constitution, the Nigerian state is directed to protect against exploitation and moral and material neglect. Section 18 further recognises education as a state responsibility and commits the government to equal and adequate educational opportunities.
These principles matter because children do not merely belong to individual families. They belong to the moral future of the nation itself. And this is where Children’s Day becomes uncomfortable, because once a society repeatedly fails its children, it eventually begins to fail its future.
The consequences may not appear immediately, but they emerge over time. Children denied a stable education today become adults struggling against unequal opportunities. Children who fear tomorrow grow into citizens shaped by fear and distrust. Children forced to normalise suffering eventually inherit diminished expectations of governance, dignity, and public life.
That damage extends beyond individuals. Despite all this, Nigerian children continue to display extraordinary resilience. Across cities, villages, and communities, millions continue studying under difficult conditions, helping struggling families, pursuing dreams, creating art, excelling academically, innovating technologically, and carrying hopes larger than the systems surrounding them.
That resilience deserves admiration, but resilience should never become an excuse for institutional failure. Children should not have to be extraordinarily strong just to survive conditions that adults have normalised. That is not a strength. That is abandonment disguised as endurance.
Perhaps this Children’s Day, Nigeria should move beyond mere celebration. Perhaps the country should honestly mourn certain failures.
Reflect seriously. And ask whether national priorities truly reflect the value we claim children possess, because the true measure of any society is not how loudly it celebrates children one day, every year. It is whether children feel protected, educated, nourished, heard, and safe during the other 364 days.
If Nigerian children are growing up in fear, neglect, collapsing institutions, and normalised insecurity, then children are becoming something deeply painful.
A yearly celebration of promises the nation has still not kept, because the true measure of any society is not how beautifully it celebrates children for one day. It is whether children feel safe, valued, educated, nourished, and protected during the other 364 days of the year. If Nigerian children continue growing up in fear, neglect, collapsing institutions, and normalised insecurity, then Children’s Day becomes something more tragic than celebratory. It becomes an annual reminder of promises repeatedly made to children and repeatedly broken before their eyes.
. Ukoh, a PhD student and coauthor of: “Built By The Ancestors,” writes from his base in New York, United States of America.
