The missing school children in Abia

LAST week, the Abia State Police Command declared four schoolchildren of the same parents missing. According to the Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Maureen Chinaka, who announced this in a statement  in Umuahia, the state capital, the missing children are Chinweotiti Chimaobi (7, female), Nmesomachi Chimaobi (7, female), Testimony Chimaobi (4, male) and Godswill Chimaobi (2, male). The police spoekeswoman said that the parents, Mr Chimaobi Agha, and his wife, Oluchi, residents of Umuagu-Ibeku in Umuahia North Local Government Area of the state, reported the matter at the Ohuhu Police Divisional Headquarters on November 28. The incident, she addded, happened on November 27 when the mother put the children in a commercial tricycle operated by an unknown person, asking him to convey them to their school, Great Ambassadors College, located within the area. Said Chinaka:  “No one escorted or went with them, considering that the eldest is seven years and the tricyclist is unknown. Unfortunately, at the end of the school day, the children did not return home as anticipated.” The police have since launched an investigation into the incident.

To say the very least, this incident is distressing. Time was in this country when it was possible for school children to go to school without their parents nursing any apprehension about their safety. In those days, which we must now consider to be rather glorious, shop owners, if they had occasion to leave their shop and attend to an emergency, nursed virtually no fear of their shop being ransacked or looted. Today, things have changed dramatically and trust and fidelity, key ingredients that held the Nigerian society together, are virtually non-existent. That would explain the sad case of a tricyclistt disappearing with the  children he was mandated and paid to take to a nearby school. All the same, and especially given the pervasive insecurity in the state and the country as a whole, it is confounding that a mother chose to entrust the safety of her children to a total stranger. Why would a parent entrust her children to unknown tricycle rider in these perilous times? Was that the first time she had subjected her children to such risks? Why couldn’t Mrs Chimaobi accompany her children to school, especially given their ages?

It is disturbing that the innocent four children put  in a commercial tricycle for their trip to school ended up not getting to school while the whereabouts of the tricycle rider and the tricycle itself remains unknown and therefore almost untraceable. Schoolchildren should not be subjected to such horror under any guise. This is, at the risk of sounding repetitive, a regrettable incident arising from an egregious mistake on the part of the children’s mother, as it should ordinarily not be said that a mother left her children unsupervised on their way to school, putting them at the mercy of an unknown tricycle operator. Yet, the tricycle operator turning an otherwise simple task of driving passengers entrusted to him to their destination into a case of missing and unreachable children since last seen in the tricycle is reflective of the general insecurity and unfaithfulness pervading the Nigerian environment today.

We hope that the security agencies can be relied upon to unravel the mystery of the current situation and help to locate the children in order to return them to their family.  We also urge parents to be much more careful and attentive to the security and safety of their children and not leave them unsupervised and unaccounted for at any time. The country is becoming so unsafe that it would be reckless to leave children unsupervised nowadays. We only hope that the government and the concerned authorities will work to change the temperature and logic of social existence in the country in such positive way, in order to bring about a return to comprehensive security and safety. The security agencies should do everything they can to ensure that the children are found. Insecurity has become a thorn in the flesh of Nigerians and the government owes a bounden duty to Nigerians to treat kidnappers like the criminals they are and ensure that they get their just deserts as a way of deterring would-be criminals.

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