Commentaries
Day of the African Child and the Challenges of The African Child
By Abdulai Baratyay
Jun 16, 2008, 14:23

Since its promulgation in 1991 by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) now the African Union (AU), June 16^th has come to represent the honor bestowed on the mainly courageous Soweto black students that braved the deadly South African Apartheid killing regime in protest over the inferior Afrikaans type of education taught them.

During that fateful day, students from Orlando high school spontaneously took to the streets of Soweto with placards calling on the Apartheid regime to rescind its decision of providing a type of education that would potentially prevent Blacks and coloreds for that matter from attaining any dignified employment. To the chagrin of those innocent and unsuspecting students, the Apartheid government unleashed its human dogs of war, the police, which left scores of student’s dead as several others bled to death.

During this writer’s first historic visit to Soweto, South Africa in 1999, the sordid reality of what notoriously became the Soweto Massacre confronted him with emotional distress when he visited the Hector Peterson Memorial Park, in honour of the first brave and courageous student that was killed in the hands of the Apartheid dogs. “He was killed right here…in front of me. He was just twelve”, one of the tour guards at the symbolic park of the iconic image of the Soweto Massacre, Hector Peterson, told me with some emotional outburst.

In solidarity with that historic event some thirty plus odd years later, one cannot fathom the brazenly exploitation of children in the West African nation of Sierra Leone. Here, recognition of the historic Day of the African Child has over the years reduced to one mantra of political speech or the other without any commitment or political will to put in place child protection laws. This is in spite of the backdrop that there are laws enshrined in the country’s 1991 constitution that prohibit the exploitation of children in all its forms; yet child molesters and predators have often taken advantage of the rather fragile judiciary in perpetuating violations against children in the form of rape, child labour and other infamous acts of human degradation like street trading.

 In fact, children particularly became vulnerable as all sides in the devastating civil conflict from 1991 to the cessation of hostilities in 2002, government troops, civil militias, and rebels of the erstwhile notorious Revolutionary United Front (RUF) not only used children as young as seven- year-old as combatants, but as sex slaves, “wives”, and porters, among a barrage of other degrading chores. In essence, children became both victims and perpetrators through the ironic machinations of adults who should be poised to protect them at all times. That is why as Sierra Leone is about to recognize this year’s Day of the African Child on June 16^th, it would be an anathema if the political leadership, especially the Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs fails to come up with a strategy that will start the long journey of criminalizing any acts that violates the rights of children, among others including trafficking, illegal transport for the purpose of selling them or exploiting their labour.