President Bola Tinubu and his children; our children

Now is the time for Tinubu to be a true father of the nation by releasing these minors; all of them and listen to the nation.

An Abuja high court was thrown into pandemonium recently when a minor suddenly collapsed obviously in very bad health. The presiding judge took flight from his seat. The scene sent lawyers scampering all over the court questioning why minors should be arraigned in court. The minor that dropped to the floor almost dead was one of the 32 minors who had been arrested and locked up in the cells of the Correctional Center for about three months. They were part of the 72 persons arrested during the #EndbadGovernance protest a few months back. They were from Kano where they had flown flags of Russia calling for overthrow of the Tinubu administration.

They are not children who can distinguish their left from their right hand. They are part of the hordes of the Almajiri produced by the oppressive rule of the northern oligarchy in Nigeria. They are children born by parents who obviously didn't plan for them and who had no means of taking care of them. They are street urchins who became such because they have been thrown into the care of mallams who are supposed to teach them the Qu'ran without any payment for their services. Without any form of remuneration, the mallams device ways of earning their pay; the children are sent on the streets to beg alms or collect food wherever they can get it. It is reported that they and the mallams live off such alms and food.

The Almajiri system is said to be Islamic, nobody knows how true is this claim because other Muslims in southern Nigeria don't engage in this practice. Again many feel even if the practice is Islamic, it is no longer suitable for the 21 century where it should have been reformed along the lines of modern education. But the ruling elites in north reforms nothing since such old and archaic practices suits a design to keep the majority in ignorance and therefore subject them to manipulation. Children of emirs, the ruling elites are sent to top grade universities in the United States of America and other parts of the Western world while the children of the poor languish on the streets without any hope for a meaningful future. They become tools when the northern elites want to disturb the peace of the nation for selfish causes, when they want to kill southerners who live in their midst, they become ready tools when the elites want to wage their religious wars against people of other religions in the country.

Even when these political and religious elites run to the south to drink alcohol and even when these minors also take all manner of illicit and dangerous drugs, they become tools to hypocritically prosecute the no alcohol stance of the elites. They kill and main with impunity. It happens frequently each time the god of oppression in the north want the blood of southerners. Often government in the Center which has been in the grip of notherners for most of our independent years look the other way and indirectly and silently put an endorsement on the violence of these minors. It was different this time round because Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a Yoruba from the south, is in power at the Center. He won't look the other way. The security system rounded up as many as these minors and some adults as it could lay hands on. And the Attorney General of the federation, Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, decided they must be tried for treason even if they just came out of their mother's birth canal a day before. According to reports, they had been in prison cells without much food for three months. Don't be surprised, there was a provision made not much long ago that the Prison would no longer have funds to feed detainees again. That obviously put the minors at the mercy of hunger. Even when there was provision for the feeding of detainees, the money rather fed the pockets of the prison officials.

Their lots are no better out of prison. The Tinubu administration had made life so difficult in the nation. More parents have joined the ranks of those who cannot feed their children again. Food inflation because of astronomical and almost daily increase in the price of petrol has shot up by almost 300 percent. Even palliatives introduced by the government to cushion the inflation got more to the elite who cornered them to their homes. So when these minors entered the court room and were put in the dock, they were in various stages of starvation. Eventually one of them who could no longer stand on his feet dropped to the floor. Some others rolled on the floor holding their stomachs obviously in pangs of hunger. The case against five of them who could die because of serious ill health were quickly withdrawn. The rest were asked to provide bail bond in 10 million naira guaranteed by a civil servant who must be in Abuja, the nation's capital and one of the parents. These are minors who have no homes, whose parents threw them on the streets and who nobody knows or cares where they are. Minors who are scavengers, who society had consigned to perpetual poverty. To secure bail for 10 million naira! A huge joke. Did Tinubu or Attorney General Lateef Fagbemi know their situation. Where would they meet that bail requirements. Obviously Tinubu is intentional about exacting a pound of flesh from these minors.

But where are the men who gave them money and distributed Russian flags to them and told them what should be their war cry: soldiers must return to government? Some are said to have been arrested but we are not seeing them. In Nigeria, justice is cash-and-carry. If you have sufficient cash and you can hire a senior advocate, you can buy your way into the Nigerian kind of justice system. If you have enough money and your lawyer knows judges you can pay your way out of punishment even if you have killed or have stolen billions of naira from the nation's treasury. It is common joke among lawyers now that there are two kinds of lawyers: lawyers that know law and lawyers that know judges. Lawyers that know the law will get you out of offence you duely commit through legal technicalities and lawyers that know judges will help you pay your way out of conviction.

But these minors have no money and their parents are impecunios. They live on the streets. Even the mallams that are supposed to teach them are not known. They are the children of the president, Bola Tinubu. But does the president know that. I'm sure Bola Tinubu will disagree that they are his children. He will deny them. He knows Seyi Tinubu and others that his wife, Oluremi Tinubu bore for him. But his denial of these children is the reason Nigeria has not been built as one nation since 1960 when the nation became independent. Any president who will get Nigerians out of the woods must be ready to be the father of all children of the nation. He must think of them as the future of the nation. He must be the father to those who have been thrown on the streets by careless parents. He must give parents example of good parenting. But not only Tinubu, the leaders in the north and the south must be fathers of the nation's children. Good fathers will not steal the money meant to take care of their families.

But this is what leaders in Nigeria do, they steal so much from the collective partrimony, they leave the treasury empty and having stolen the nation dry they declare: "we can't fund education." They shout "we can't provide health facilities." Yet for ordinary headache they and their wives and children jet abroad for treatment. I would have expected Oluremi Tinubu, the wife of the president, a mother who knows what it is to go into the labour room and come out successfully, to have come to the rescue of these children. I would have expected her to feel the pains their mothers felt as she gave birth to them and to talk to her husband, Bola Tinubu in the soft hours of the night while they engage in pillow talk to have compassion on these minors. She would have remembered that it is the president's harsh policies that drove these minors into the hands of predators who used the opportunity of Tinubu's inhumane policies to bribe these minors into what they did.

Having been thrown back into jail because they couldn't meet the condition of their bail, they met a prominent social media influencer, Veryblackman who also the police had thrown into detention for an infraction, ( he was said to have worn a police uniform to do his campaign on the social media). Veryblackman seized the opportunity of a common cell with these minors to bring their suffering and inhuman treatment to the attention of Nigerians. These children were dragged into issues they didn't understand, they were pressured into protests because of their precarious social situation, the only language they understand, the language of hunger happened to them. So when the predators gave them some money and told them have been hungry because of Tinubu's policies, they accepted the money and the Russian flags without knowing that what they were asked to do could land them in serious trouble. Now is the time for Tinubu to be a true father of the nation by releasing these minors; all of them and listen to the nation. Nigerians are hungry and no amount of oppression by scary court sentences can suppress them. Only being a father to us, to our children and to his children will lift Nigeria to enviable heights among the comity of nations.

Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos