Beginning from this week, the Edo State Government said it would implement its long touted policy of holding parents of out-of-school children liable. Governor Godwin Obaseki said his administration would start arresting and prosecuting parents or guardians of such children from the new academic session that commenced on September 12.
According to the governor, necessary machinery had been put in place to enforce free and compulsory basic education in Edo State. He made known that his administration had, in partnership with the judiciary, set up special courts to prosecute perpetrators of sexual and physical abuses of school-age children. “If we find any child under the age of 18 years being used for manual labour, the parents will be prosecuted,” Obaseki told journalists in Benin City last week ahead of the new session. He thanked the state’s chief judge for setting up the special courts that will be used in prosecuting “any offender who perpetrates violence against any child or gets involved in sexual defilement or physical abuse in our school system,” adding: “From 12th September when school resumes, any child found loitering or hawking during school hours will be arrested and the parent or guardian will be prosecuted… We have specially trained people to observe and watch over our children to ensure no child is abused in Edo State. School resumes on Monday, 12th September, and teaching must commence same day. I will send out a special squad to monitor schools across the state, I will also monitor the schools myself alongside the commissioner for education.”
The Edo State government had long announced plans to crack down on parents or guardians of out-of-school children. Early in May, the governor said: “We believe that basic education is the right of every child in Edo State; it’s their right and it’s free and compulsory. We will link education with street begging and street children. In the next few weeks or months, we will not allow street begging in the state anymore. We have farm settlements and we need hands and labour to cultivate food. People arrested from where they are begging will be taken to the farm settlements to work, and if they don’t want to work, they will be sent back to where they came from.” He spoke against the backdrop of government notice dating back to 2018 that it would arrest and prosecute parents/guardians who violate the child rights law, especially those who deny their children or wards access to education.
Edo State had since 2007 domesticated the Child Rights Act and the Obaseki administration, in 2017, inaugurated the Family Court to try cases pertaining to violation of the law. How effective it has been in doing that is debatable, but the latest push is fresh boost for that objective.
The state has an estimated population of 80,000 out-of-school children, which is among the lowest per-state out of a national population of some 20million out-of-school children according to recent data by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). It is laudable that the government is strongly committed to further roll back the figure, to the point of holding parents/guardians of affected children liable. It isn’t beyond contemplation that the Edo State government learnt bitter lessons from the state’s notoriety for adolescent trans-border trafficking for sex, and is hence determined to prevent school abandonment by the underaged from festering. Whatever may be its motivation, the initiative is noble and worthy of emulation by other states, especially those with much higher populations of out-of-school children.
The selling point in Edo’s approach is that parents historically and typically see their children as personal assets to be deployed as they deemed fit, including to chores that hinder the children from going to school. But state governments must devise means of coercing these children back to school. If parental liability would help to achieve that end, so be it.