The illiterate parents entrust their children to these people, who do not have the interests of the young child-servants at heart. However, are in the trade to make money. Often times the middlemen/women never contract their natural children to any household. Rather, they ensure their children have treasured childhood.
The ones that come back to the hamlets may in some instances have started lives in Lagos as child-servants: "boy-boy or house girl" depending on their gender. These are among the few that survive. Whereas, there are many that are returned to their hamlets more damaged than when they were contracted to abusing and unloving homes. These child-servants, when dispensed are left on their own to deal with the consequences, for which no one takes responsibilities and no one tenders an apology. The child-servants live with guilt for failing their families and yet quietly wonder the type of love that necessitates a parent to farm out their children like tools. The pains and scars carried by the child-servants for the rest of their lives are not factored into the immediate solution of economic relief brought about by hiring them out as factotums, where they develop adult skills early in life.
As for the skills developed by these child-servants while in service, it is unwise to marshal any argument based on such gains. The talents and hopes of these children are rarely developed or fostered so that they can contribute meaningfully to the financial freedom of the parents who love them so much, to give them up for a better life in our commercial centers. The pittance that these child-servants earn is inadequate to justify the cruelty meted to them. These children are not covered by the minimum wage legislation. Their Masters/Madams vociferously campaign and encourage national strikes. Yet, they conveniently forget their own personal responsibilities to pay a minimum wage to some child-servants who they engage at their homes to serve them and their children. The precepts of the Masters/Madams include: what is good for the goose is not good for the gander. Hypocrites!
As a matter of stating the obvious to Nigerians and a broach of national opprobrium to outsiders, it is worth explaining the helplessness of these child-servants and the type of people who foster the shameful trade to blight the chances of brighter futures. It is arguable that without the life in a commercial centre, these children would have been wasted anyway. I reject that type of argument. In a nation as richly endowed as ours, there ought to be no place for child-slavery. If these children are to leave their homes and loved ones, it must not be for the reason of toiling on behalf of another family.
The arrival of these child-servants at our commercial centers, where their Masters/Madams reside is distressful. The child-servants are far away from their own homes and there is little lifeline to keep them abreast of the childhood they left behind, families and friends in the hinterlands. For them their childhood is immaterial to their new environment and particularly the people they have come to serve. We participate in destroying the memories that comfort and assure children the memories upon which children build their lives, to become rounded adults. Yet, we wonder about the degeneration of our society, when we are faced with dysfunctional ties
In some cases they serve in homes at which they are coeval with the children of their employers. This is where the shame lies. The Masters/Madams send their own children to the best schools and embrace their childhoods, so that their children develop into well-rounded adults. The children of the Masters/Madams grow up in surroundings that are not alien and they never leave their childhoods behind for any other locations. If they move away, it is to boarding schools or foreign countries amongst rich playmates. The children of the Masters/Madam grow up to identify with their ilk. These rich children have long and sweet memories of childhood.
For the child-servants, life is not as kind. If at all, he has anyone with whom to compare notes; it is likely to be with another child-servant in the neighborhood. Their notes of comparison is about the distance they have to walk to the market to purchase food and household materials, the harassments and abuse they confront and the amount of money they are able to steal to survive. This is not to allude that all child-servants are thieves or dishonest. These abuses of childhood are unfortunate and we are all culpable as a society for the attending guilt.
Compare the childhoods of these child-servants whose parents are not rich to influence their lives in order to bring about a memory full of sweetness and a past surrounded by people who love and care for them. Their memory is most likely full of physical and sexual assaults and abuse, affray and indignations.
In many unreported cases, the Masters/Madams have used these children not only to serve their domestic needs but their sexual pleasures as well. The child-servants have no voices, no one to come to their defense to prosecute their Masters/Madams and they are easily dispensed without the abusers facing any form of justice.
In some cases, the Masters/Madams are not the only abusers; their older children have a sitting target to unload their libidinous and febrile antics of youth. It does not matter to the children of the families that their forced tango with the "house-girl" is unlawful and morally bankrupt. For them they have a weakling at hand, whom they are accustomed to treating shabbily. The sexual engagements with the "house-girl" for whom, there is no respect or affection is like rubbing salt into an injury.
Our national culpability stems from the ingrained flaw in the psyche of what it means to be deemed a success in our nation and the error that are bequeathed to the following generations of well to do Nigerians. For success to the children of the Masters/Madams is measured in repeating the opprobrium of which their parents were able to destroy the future of another Nigerian child by abject and purposeless neglect.
Therefore, who apart from the middlemen/women foster this unspoken and unpunished crime? It is important to sketch the caricature of the types of Nigerians that are likely to employ child-servants. They are highly educated and intelligent to decipher the wrongfulness of employing a child and they have lived or traveled in developed and civilized nations of the world. They are a young family with their natural children who are of the same age as the child-servants. They are Nigerians that are informed and knowledgeable in simple socio-economic effects of the waste attached to the destruction they perpetrate
If we deny the existence of this servility, we damage ourselves amongst civilized nations. It is time for our Lawmakers and Executives at the State levels to extirpate the consignment and destruction of Childhood for exchange of money. It will be wrong for any laws to punish the parents of the child-servants. After all, the society has failed in instructing effective Family planning and the state our economy makes it difficult to resist the abhorrence of child-slavery.
