THE UNENDING CYCLE OF CHILD LABOUR IN NIGERIA

THE UNENDING CYCLE OF CHILD LABOUR IN NIGERIA

By Jessica Luke

In Nigeria, especially in urban centers, it is very common to see children working as carpenters, motor mechanics, vulcanisers, welders, bus conductors, shop attendants, street hawkers, and domestic servants. Most of these children work as wage earners outside the homes to survive and supplement their family incomes. This may solve some family economic problems but also create new ones both for children and the society, at large.

Although, there are some economic benefits derived by these children when they engage in rigorous work and labour for survival and assist their families. However, the negative effects of child labour are enormous. Besides stunting the children’s personality development and hardening their aptitude prematurely, it could also lead to compromising sustainable development. Other effects include occupational hazards, cognitive problem, and denial of right to qualitative education

Child labour covers all economic activities carried out by children regardless of their occupational status. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), child labour refers to the engagement of children below 18 years in work or employment on a regular basis with the aim of earning a livelihood for themselves or their families which deprives them of their childhood, potential, and dignity and which is harmful to their physical and/or mental development.

When children, especially young ones are exposed to long hours of work in harsh and dangerous environments, which threaten their lives and limbs as well as jeopardize their normal physical, mental, emotional and moral development. it is termed child labour. Thus any type of work, which among other things interferes with schooling by:

• depriving children of the opportunity to attend school, especially when schooling is available;
• obliging them to leave school permanently; or
• requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work, is exploitative.

The Child Rights Act was passed into law in 2003 by the Federal Government of Nigeria in view of preserving the rights of children and protecting them from exploitation and forced labour. It is 20 years now, yet millions of Nigerian children still engaged in one form of physical labour or the other in order to either earn money to survive or support their family.

According to the Federal Government, not less than 43% of Nigerian children between 5 to 11 years of age are actively involved in some form of economic activities, including the worst forms of Child Labour.

During a road walk in commemoration of the 2023 World Day Against Child Labour, the Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment, Kachollom Daju, described Child Labour as a grave concern that affects millions of children across the world and denies them their fundamental rights to education, health, mental and moral development and a childhood free from all forms of exploitation. She also said 39% of children involved in child labour are working under hazardous conditions including quarrying granite, artisanal mining, commercial sexual exploitation, armed conflict, and sometimes are victims of human trafficking.

In an auto-mechanic workshop located along the airport road in the heart of the FCT, the reporter met 8 children below 18 years working full time as apprentice mechanics. 16-year-old Abdulazeez Aliyu and his colleagues were trying to drop the engine of an accidented Mercedes Benz C240. At the other end of the workshop was 9-year-old Felix, nicknamed Fela by his ‘Oga’, fighting had to remove the tire of a 2006 Toyota Corolla.

Abdulazeez has been undergoing apprenticeship in the workshop for the past four years under his elder brother who is a Mercedes Benz mechanic. When asked why he wasn’t in school, he said, “I am in school but I did not go today because our oga said we have to finish this work today. So I did not go to school today, till tomorrow”

Abdulazeez is in SSS 2 and he resumes at work immediately after returning from school and works from Monday to Saturday every week. When asked why he is engaged in this kind of work at his age, he said his parent wants him to learn ‘hand work’ (a trade skill) so that he can eventually become specialized in the mechanic trade.

Felix on the other hand, does not go to school at all. He resumes at the workshop in the morning and closes in the evening. At his age, Felix is supposed to be in primary school but he is completely out of school and undergoing child labour in the name of apprenticeship. When asked why he is not in school, he said he is ‘learning work’ and that is why he is not going to school.

Felix says he is less than a year in the apprenticeship and so he has not learnt much yet but has gained basic understanding of his work tools and their application, and he knows how to jack up cars and some other basic things. He adds that many times, he gets very exhausted by the work and hungry, coupled with the heat from the sun.

Felix’s parents don’t earn enough to put him and his siblings in school and provide for them. So, apart from going to the farm with his parents during the farming season, he has to work full-time from Monday to Saturday to learn technical skills and also earn some money.

For 10-year old Aisha Isah school is a foregone alternative for her has she had to drop out of school since her parents could no longer afford the cost of her education and she now hawks sachet water, popularly called ‘pure water’, on the street to support the family’s income.

Aisha narrated her story in pigeon English, “I no dey go school again now. My father say him no get money to pay for my school again, say make I go learn work. So I go start to learn baking and catering but the wahala of the work too much and my father no pay all the money to my oga so I come stop, now I dey sell pure water for my mother.”

Aisha said she will love to go to school but does not know if her parents will still put her in school. For now she sells sachet water from morning till evening and some other times she sells boiled groundnuts (during the groundnut season).

Many children like Aisha and Felix are engaged in full-time child labour working for as long as 12-15 hours a day at the expense of their health and education, while others like Abdulazeez combine formal education with part-time child labour. No matter the reason why children work, child labour is an evil that should be eliminated if children will live healthy lives and develop socially, physically, morally and intellectually.

It has become worrisome that out of Nigeria’s 216 million population, 20 million children are disadvantaged due to a lack of access to education or poor commitment to formal education. Recently, UNESCO confirmed that there now 20 million out-of-school children in Nigeria.

Nigerians, like other African people, love children profoundly, with almost a maniacal zeal. Hence having many children is very popular. The love for children has both sociocultural and economic dimension.

While children are socioculturally seen as gifts from God and the product of matrimonial consummation, they are also seen as economic assets as they provide additional labour power for increased productivity.

Children are seen as social insurance against future uncertainty, especially in the context of subsistence food production under a feudalist mode of social organization. Also, work occupies a central position in most Nigerian culture. So occupational training for skill acquisition, socialization of children into the culture of responsible citizenry, and sense of community, apart from poverty and economic hardship, have always been culturally at the core of children’s involvement in work in Nigerian societies. Therefore, advocacy against child labour is considered immoral by many culturally enlightened Nigerians. This also is one of the reasons child labour is still wide spread in the country.

Agricultural Child Labour

The Nigerian society, especially in rural communities, is agrarian. With the household being the primary economic unit, family labour, including children, is primarily the labour force for agriculture in rural Nigerian communities. This is partly responsible for the high procreation rate and large family sizes in these communities, as more children within a household means more hands available for farm work. Children seven years and above are involved in long hours of farm work daily, working under harsh conditions and completely out of school.

Another variant to agricultural child labour is with the Fulanis who intiate their children into the pastoralist agrarian culture from a very young age despite the attendant risks, dangers and health and development implications for the growth and well-being of the children. As a result of perpetual trekking of several kilometers in search of green vegetation and fodder, and exposure to nature, most Fulani children are highly disadvantaged in terms or life chances and opportunities for social and educational development.

Street Trading or Hawking

Trading is one of the predominant occupation of low income earners in Nigeria both in rural and urban communities. Children are seen on the street everyday hawking one item or the other either for their person survival or for contribution to their family’s income.

Speaking with our reporter, Isah, a child selling ‘awara’ on the street, said it was his mother that gave him the ‘awara’ to sell and the proceeds from his sale will be part of what his mother will use to prepare the meal for the next day. When asked why he was not in school, his said he is wasn’t in school because his parents did not enroll him in school.  Ude, who was seen hawking vegetables (ugu and water leaf), said he helps his mother to sell vegetables in the morning and in the evening, but in th afternoon he stays in the shop with his mother. He too is not in school because he needs to contribute to the family’s income.

Particularly in the northern part of Nigeria were the culture of wife seclusion is still in practice, women kept in harems or in seclusion depend on their children for marketing their products. The money earned by these children supports the economy of the family especially that of the woman and her children.

Domestic Servitude

Child exploitation within the household is a common practice across Nigeria. Married women bring their unmarried sisters or nieces to assist them in carrying out domestic chores, while in some cases children live with relatives who are more economically stable and handle domestic chores in exchange for education and care, or children are sent to live with master craftsmen in exchange of learning the craft or trade.

Urbanization and increasing employment opportunity for women in both public and private sectors has heightened the demand for domestic help. Children are taken from low income families or from rural communities to serve as domestic servants in middle income and high income families in urban centers. These children are often subjected to very hard, long and gruesome labour. Many are often poorly fed, mistreated and even sexually violated. This in itself is a form of child trafficking.

During this investigation the reporter discovered that some children between 14 and 18 years are engage in routine and/or contract domestic service whereby the are sent by their parent to handle domestic chores for other families on weekly bases or on specific days in a week. Some do daily service, some every two days, and some do weekends and they are paid an agreed price for the work done.

Speaking with a woman in Gbessa, AMAC area council of the FCT who gave her name as “Mummy Samson” and who usually handles domestic chores for, particularly laundry, for other women and families in her neighbourhood, she told the reporter that she and her children, particularly the girls, handle laundry for people in their neighnourhood. She said they go to their customer’s houses but during week days and weekends to wash clothes for in order to raise additional income for the family.

When asked why her children were not in school, she said her eldest child recently completed secondary school but she has been unable to put the younger ones in school because the money she makes from frying ‘masa’ was barely enough for the family’s up keep and that is why they also work as domestic help to raise some extra money.

Child Begging

Predominantly in semi-urban and urban centers, children are often sent out to beg for alms by their parents, guardians or caregivers. Some adult beggars use children as aids to beg on the street, and in some cases these beggars pretend to be disabled in one way or the other while using children as begging baits from unsuspecting members of the public.

There have been several reports of arrest of fake beggars with children assistants or employees in different parts of the country. These, amongst other, includes arrest of a fake blind woman who used a 10-year old girl to beg alms in Ado-Ekiti of Ekiti State, arrest of fake blind woman who used children to beg at Oyi LGA of Anambra State, arrest of a fake blind woman in Akure, Ondo state with a 4-year old boy, five able-bodied beggars who engaged their children in begging alms were arrested at Ejigbo in Lagos state.

The most common form of child beggar in the north is the Almajiri street beggars. This has become a subject of many conversations and interventions by individuals, groups and government.

Poverty And Child Labour

The findings of this investigation revealed that poverty is a major reason why children do works that are inappropriate for their ages outside their homes. According to Uche Ekwe, Head of NLC’s International Relations, “poverty and socio-economic dispossession are at the heart of the dominant and spiking state of the incidence of child and forced labour in Nigeria. These issues exacerbate in ways that the worst forms of child labour are increasingly becoming normalized. The 2022 Multi-dimensional Poverty Index survey reveals that 133 million people live in different poverty stages, representing a staggering 63% of Nigeria’s population.”

The country’s interventions aimed at ending child labour and other forms of violation of the rights of children have failed. Despite the adoption of the Child’s Rights Act by the states in Nigeria, the number of children engaged in child labour seems to be on the increase. Poverty, and illiteracy, and cultural beliefs, religious prejudices are some of the reasons that have actually affected the efficacy of the Child Rights Act implementation in Nigeria.

Poverty is forcing many children to be absent, skip classes, and drop out after successful enrolment. The situation is worse for the girl-child, who often is recruited by the family as an additional hand in the family business rather than be sent to school. This kind of choice entrenches and sustains feminisation and generational poverty.

Ekwe further said, “In the past eight years and counting, we have continued to witness the worsening of families’ economic situation on account of successive governments’ voodoo fiscal and macroeconomic policies. Household poverty mirrors child labour in Nigeria.”

Conclusion

This investigation reveals that there is a negative relationship between household income and child labor in the country. This suggest that the poorer the households the more likely they are to engage their children in labor activities as a source of income. The investigation also revealed that the percentage of households that engaged their children in economic/ labour activities in the country is higher in rural communities than in urban communities.

Child labor also tends to be gender sensitive, as more male children participate in economic activities outside the household than female children while more female children participate in household work than males. In terms of age of the children, the study revealed that the higher the age of the child the more likely for the household to engage the children in economic activity.

It has been established that poverty is a major cause of child labour but other causes include: family expectations and traditions; institutional collapse; decay in social services, such as health care, education, and transportation; public opinion that downplays the risk of early work for children; violation of labor standards by the employers; illiteracy, and family disorganization; traditional beliefs; massive rural-urban migration; and large family size.

There is therefore more work to be done in public education, reorientation and campaign against child labour in the country. Furthermore, smaller family size, parental education and family economic enhancement would reduce the pressure on parents and guardians to engage their children in labour activities.

This investigation is for the GENDER, THE AGENDA project of Gender Strategy Advancement International (GSAI), supported by the Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ), and the MacArthur Foundation.