By Israel Adebiyi

Once upon a time in many Nigerian homes, there was a rhythm to childhood. It echoed in the laughter of children gathered under the moonlight, listening to folktales from wise grandmothers—stories of Tortoise and the hare, morality and mischief, hard work and honesty. It echoed in warm evenings of family dinners, morning treks to school in uniforms neatly ironed, and the comfort of knowing that adults were in charge—parents, teachers, and a government that at least pretended to care. That rhythm has long faded.

Today, the Nigerian child is born into chaos, grows up amid contradictions, and learns too early that promises mean nothing. Each May 27, we gather to recite that children are “the leaders of tomorrow,” but what we fail to admit is that this tomorrow is deliberately being sabotaged. It is not just lost; it is being stolen in broad daylight.

Let’s Begin with Education. Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world—an estimated 18.5 million. That number alone should spark a national emergency, yet it is spoken of with such casualness you’d think it were a weather forecast. Millions of children roam the streets hawking sachet water, fruits, or plastic wares when they should be in classrooms. In the North, Almajiri children continue to be abandoned in large numbers under a system that provides neither education nor security. In many Southern states, children are seen as economic props, pushed into trade or house help servitude.

Those who make it to school are not necessarily lucky. Public schools across the country are crumbling. From leaking roofs and broken chairs to the absence of toilets, blackboards, and learning aids, many Nigerian classrooms are not places of learning but sites of struggle. The curriculum remains outdated, irrelevant to modern realities, and poorly delivered. While the world is building coding academies for toddlers, we are still teaching children to cram colonial poetry and 1980s textbook diagrams.

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Teachers, the supposed nation-builders, are grossly underpaid and in many cases, underqualified. In some schools, a single teacher manages four to six classes. Training and capacity development are either nonexistent or political rituals. How does a child receive quality education when their teacher is themselves a victim of a broken system?

Worse still, our schools are no longer safe. With rising cases of abductions—from Chibok to Kagara to Dapchi—parents are forced to weigh the risk of education against the price of safety. This is a dilemma that should never exist in a sane society. A government that cannot secure its schools has no business sermonizing about the importance of education.

In the health sector, Nigeria’s infant and child mortality rates remain among the highest globally. According to UNICEF, one in ten Nigerian children dies before their fifth birthday, mostly from preventable causes. Many Nigerian children still die from diarrhoea, malaria, pneumonia, and malnutrition—ailments the world conquered decades ago. Our immunization coverage is poor, especially in rural areas where vaccine hesitancy and infrastructural gaps persist.

Traditional birth attendants continue to thrive in areas where government clinics are either too far, too expensive, or simply unavailable. Expectant mothers still deliver on floors or with torchlight. Where children are born into such conditions, the cycle of vulnerability begins at birth.

Here are the unspoken scars of the Nigerian Child – Abuse and Rights Violations. The Nigerian Child Rights Act (2003) is a comprehensive legal document that affirms the rights of every Nigerian child to survival, development, protection, and participation. Yet, over 20 years later, some states have still not domesticated this law. And in states where it exists, enforcement is patchy at best.

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Children suffer physical abuse, sexual exploitation, forced labour, trafficking, and emotional neglect daily. From baby factories to underage marriages to child soldiers in conflict zones, Nigeria has become a theatre of child rights violations. It is one thing to be poor. It is another to be unprotected.

When we say children are “the leaders of tomorrow,” what exactly do we mean? A child growing up amid poverty, violence, abuse, and hunger will not suddenly blossom into a competent leader because we proclaimed it. Leadership is cultivated. And cultivation requires care, systems, and consistent investment. We are not preparing children for tomorrow; we are abandoning them to survive today.

In many homes, the idea of parenting has become largely transactional. Economic hardship has eroded family bonding. Tales by moonlight have been replaced by cartoons on phones. Parents, stressed and underpaid, often have nothing left to give emotionally. We are raising children in isolation—physically present but emotionally disconnected. The result is a generation growing up without empathy, values, or vision.

Parents and communities must take back the moral responsibility of shaping children. Government cannot parent our children for us. But government must provide the basic scaffolding—schools, clinics, protection, and justice.

In the final analysis, May 27 must stop being a day of sugar-coated statements. It must become a mirror—a day of national reflection, policy accountability, and renewed investment in our children’s future.

The Nigerian child is not asking for luxuries. They are asking for classrooms with roofs, teachers who show up, clinics that work, and laws that protect. They are asking for the basic dignity of being raised in a country that sees them not as statistics, but as citizens. Until then, the phrase “leaders of tomorrow” remains a grand deception—a scam coated in celebration.

It is time to give children more than cake and fanfare. It is time to give them a future.