A former national chairman of the Youth Democratic Party (YDP), Georgina Dakpokpo has lamented the agony Nigerian children are undergoing in the hands of their abductors in the country.
The former deputy secretary of the Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP), in an interview with LEADERSHIP said as a mother, she was heartbroken over the incident in Oyo state where children as little as two years had been kidnapped.
Dakpokpo, who previously served as secretary-general of the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) expressed worry that in the face of all these atrocities in the country, politicians were all about either primaries or the forthcoming general election.
“That we have children in the forest of Oyo state is heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking. On Children’s Day, I couldn’t even put up my children’s pictures or the normal Children’s Day messages on my WhatsApp status.
“I had those kidnapped children on my WhatsApp status because we have never had it this bad in our country. A two-year-old child to be kidnapped, three-year-old, four-year-old children. It’s unimaginable. It’s inhuman. I can’t comprehend it. I can’t.
“As a mother, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t imagine what the parents of those children are going through, the emotional turmoil, the mental torture. I can’t. We have one of the teachers who is a nursing mother and those children are just lying down on the bare floor in the forests and our politicians are all about primaries and elections. All flags should be at half-mast,” she said.
Dakpokpo recalled that, “it started with Chibok. Those girls were taken away and there was so much noise and we don’t know where those girls are today. And then it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And now we are having two-year-olds kidnapped.
“How low, what is going to shake us as a country and we’ll say, no, enough is enough. How low are we going to get and we’ll say, enough is enough. It’s not about politics, it’s about lives.”
According to her, “those children deserve a future as well as Tinubu’s son deserves a future. Well, I don’t know.
I just thought I should express this because anytime I see those children, pictures of them, news about them, I can’t hold myself. I’m a mother.”
The learned counsel insisted that something needs to be done drastically fast, saying “we need to stop playing politics with the lives of Nigerians.
“We need selfless, visionary leadership. People at the helm of affairs in Nigeria, we can’t go on like this on the grounds of religion and ethnicity. We cast our votes on that. We’re killing our future.
“Aside from the immediate impact of putting people that are not qualified into offices, we are telling our younger ones ;the future of Nigeria, that it’s okay to be stupid.
“We are not looking at the far-reaching consequences of these actions taken by politicians in the name of being smart. I remember my brother, Oshiomhole because we’re from the same state, saying that elections are for the smart or something like that.
“No, I was taught in primary school in the eighties, civic studies. I remember very clearly the qualities of a good leader. The first quality is a leader is a good follower. Leadership is service, basically. We don’t have that in Nigeria.”
