Children’s Day and the Emotional Absence of the Nigerian State, By Crispin Oduobuk

Every country eventually reveals what it truly values. Not merely through budgets and policy speeches, but through instinct. The reflexes of leadership matter. The issues that draw immediate presidential attention matter. The silences matter too.

You see, a country can survive hardship. It can survive political disagreement. It can survive even periods of institutional weakness. What slowly poisons a republic is when citizens begin to sense that those who govern them no longer feel anything about the suffering of the people they lead.

That is why the initial absence of a Children’s Day message from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu unsettled many Nigerians.

The timing carried unusual emotional weight. Across different parts of the country, children remain trapped in captivity after abductions carried out by criminal groups. Some were taken from schools. Some disappeared alongside teachers and family members. Some have spent birthdays, religious celebrations and now Children’s Day itself in forests controlled by kidnappers. Thousands more endure hunger, displacement and a future clouded by uncertainty.

Children’s Day therefore arrived not as a routine ceremonial date, but as a moment when the nation’s highest office could visibly affirm that Nigerian children still occupy a central place in the conscience of the state. Instead, the Presidency appeared to move past the occasion without acknowledgment until criticism began to mount publicly. A statement eventually emerged later that night.

The problem is not simply that the message came late. The deeper concern is what the sequence communicated.

A Children’s Day statement released in the name of the President may well be handled administratively by aides, communication officials or ministries with statutory responsibility for child welfare. No one reasonably expects the President to personally type every commemorative message issued by his government.

Yet leadership is also about emotional signalling. Ceremonial gestures carry meaning because they reveal what power instinctively prioritises. When public pressure appears necessary before Nigerian children receive presidential acknowledgment on the one day specifically dedicated to them, citizens naturally begin to question the depth of attention their broader struggles command within the governing structure.

This perception becomes even more troubling because President Tinubu has previously spoken eloquently about children and their place in Nigeria’s future. Last year, he described Nigerian children as “the heartbeat of our nation’s future” and pledged a constitutional and moral commitment to protect them. He also assured Nigerians that no effort would be spared in securing the future of children and improving their learning environment.

Those are important words. They establish a standard. Presidential words carry their greatest force when matched by visible instinct and sustained moral attention.

Children’s Day is not merely about school parades, commemorative banners and cheerful photographs from official events. It exists to focus national attention on the actual condition of children. It should, this has to be emphasised, force difficult reflection within government.

How many Nigerian children remain out of school despite repeated policy promises?

How many live inside displacement camps?

How many roam our streets hawking “pure” water instead of sitting in classrooms?

How many underage girls have disappeared into forced marriages?

How many families have watched childhood collapse beneath economic hardship?

How many children now associate education with fear because schools have become targets for abduction?

And now, painfully, how many children remain in kidnappers’ dens while officials circulate reassuring phrases from secured offices in Abuja?

For families whose children remain in captivity, these are not abstract policy conversations. They define daily existence.

That is why presidential attentiveness matters. Not because symbolism alone transforms material conditions, but because symbolism reveals emotional investment. Citizens study what leaders appear moved by. They notice what receives immediate response and what requires external prompting before recognition arrives.

This is especially important in a country where many citizens already suspect that governance has become emotionally distant from ordinary life. Security convoys move efficiently. Official ceremonies proceed elegantly. Political calculations receive rapid attention. Party primaries proceed on schedule. Yet many vulnerable Nigerians increasingly feel that their pain reaches power only after public outrage forces acknowledgment.

Children should never belong in that category. A government genuinely committed to the future cannot appear emotionally absent from the lives of the young, especially at a time when insecurity continues to define childhood for far too many Nigerians.

The President therefore owes Nigerian children more than annual speeches filled with inspiring language.

He owes them visible urgency on school safety and abduction prevention. The Safe Schools framework must become an emergency national priority rather than another policy slogan buried beneath conference speeches.

He owes them measurable progress in reducing the number of out-of-school children.

He owes them stronger investment in nutrition, healthcare and social protection systems that preserve childhood instead of abandoning families to desperation.

He owes them a governance culture in which their struggles command immediate and unmistakable attention from the highest office in the land.

Most importantly, he owes them presence. Moral presence. Emotional presence. The kind of presence that assures vulnerable citizens that the state remains personally connected to their condition.

Nigeria cannot continue normalising a pattern where public institutions respond to moral issues only after criticism erupts. Leadership should arrive at moments of national significance through conviction, not compulsion.

Children’s Day offered the Presidency an opportunity to demonstrate that instinctive conviction toward Nigerian children still exists at the centre of power. The delayed response unfortunately created the opposite impression.

That impression deserves correction. Not through defensive explanations, but through a more visible, consistent and deeply human commitment to the safety, dignity and future of Nigerian children.

Because, and this is another point that must be emphasised, the measure of a republic is ultimately revealed in how seriously it treats those who depend on it most.

■ Crispin Oduobuk is Snr Programme Officer, Policy & Advocacy at the African Centre for Media & Information Literacy (AFRICMIL).