THE ENDANGERED SPECIE

CredoWriters: Wakdok, Samuel Stephen



I am the endangered specie, billions of naira is spent trying to conserve wild life and forestry but little is set aside to conserve me. I am writing this letter with urgency because I may have become extinct by this time next year. I am the endangered specie, in an era where my equals in other parts of the world are getting better attention and quality treatment. Now more than ever I am a target of pedophiles, an object of rape, an item of domestic violence, an article of less national value.



I am the endangered specie, I eat hunger for dinner and drink thirst at lunch, malaria is the only companion I have ;though billions is spent to roll back malaria, the only person who gets rolled is me. Daily I am rolled into life of starvation, deprivation and violence. I am privileged to go to a health centre manned by quacks and I got enrolled some years back into a ghetto called school. In my school the teachers were never students or they were students who didn’t pass their exams; however they are all that could be hired since my situation is a pitiable one.



I want to read but hunger blobs my sight only for me to fail and the blame is put on the standard of education. I have looked every where for standard of education to ask it why it makes me fail but the more I search for it the more I see the faces of the government officials who sent their children to schools abroad with the budget meant for our local education.



I am the endangered specie, I would have loved to send in an entry for this years Children’s day celebration but I suddenly realized that I have failed my exams in advance because our curriculum is either not convenient for the kind of children in my country or my country is not committed to the curriculum. I suddenly realized that our leaders prefer a set of hungry, sick and uneducated children because they hate the idea that we may grow up to step into their big shoes. They prefer we do not grow healthily so that our legs will remain small and unable to fit into their shoes. They are happy when we keep failing exams, a justification of their teething hold on the jaws of our common wealth.



I just wrote an essay meant to be read at this year’s children’s’ day but I have a filling that my legislators are only interested in sharing constituency projects money for their avarice and the civil servants have become the civil gods. The judges are heating my small head with their gavels while the big thieves get patted for introducing dynamism to looting.



I am the endangered specie, our blackboards are so white that we can no more see what the chalk writes, I hawk on the streets and I am being hawked. Those who once lived their childhood to the fullest now deny me the innocence of childhood. I am raped, I am orphaned, I am exploited, I am denied basic amenities, and I am the endangered specie. I am the Nigerian child. Happy children’s day indeed!



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