How safe is your child in school? Tope Musowo, in this interview with Mrs. I .D . Toye Arulogun, executive director, Movement Against Negligence in Schools,(MANIS) attempts an answer.
Movement Against Negligence In Schools,What informed the establishment of this kind of NGO?
MANIS is a child care advocacy group set up in memory of Morenike Arulogun, my late daughter, who passed on as a result of what was said to be cerebral malaria due to lack of care and negligence in one of the boarding schools in Nigeria, so after she passed on and we heard several stories of such, we decided to set up a movement to sensitise people about the issue of negligence and lack of duty of care in our schools.
What are your operational modalities, how do you intend to take the campaign beyond Lagos state?
Well, beyond the state we use the media such as yours to spread the campaign around because basically all we have done so far, I will say is in Lagos, we facilitate programmes that are sometimes set up by government like Lagos State Safety Commission, we also speak in schools and other gatherings that has to do with education of children just to sensitise them, but outside of Lagos it has been strictly through the media.
How would ensure that government schools key into this vision?
Well, I said the best thing is sensitisation, I also believe that if the authority knows that there are people who are going to ask questions, people who are going to insist on the right thing being done. They will be more sensitive in their duties, indeed the ministry and whatever regulatory bodies, are not just there for private schools alone, they are there for both private and public schools and they are meant to regulate both of them. So, if anything is going wrong, we encourage people rather than keep quiet or move their child to the next school, the best thing is to speak out.
Some students of a Federal Girls Secondary School Kano lost their lives in a fire incident that occurred in their hostel at night. How can MANIS prevent this from becoming a recurring decimal in our schools?
It’s quite unfortunate, the truth is that the much we can do as a body is to sensitise, sensitise and sensitise. People are saddled with these responsibilities, there is a monitoring group even in ministries of education, who are supposed to follow up, we have the safety commission which has the responsibility of ensuring the schools comply with safety regulations, of course, there will still be some schools which are not safety compliance, but our encouragement is that wherever such is found, because it is really the people that can help themselves, we don’t need to always wait for the government, we can do our part by ensuring that when we notice something that is a potential danger it would help if you scream out so that at the end of the day we are not crying about the children and their safety, everybody has something they can do to help.
What are your challenges running MANIS ?
One of the challenges we are facing is that people find it difficult to speak out, they prefer to bury their dead and move on with life. This is a challenge because it is only when people speak out that we can know that there is a problem then we can look for solution.
When we had our summit recently, one of the guest speakers, an Assistant Commissioner of Police, said that some of the cases we call negligence here are act of criminality, what that means is that if people will bother to report some cases. I read on Facebook some days ago, where a 3 year-old was made to sit on a hot container and that child eventually died.
What kind of school is that, what kind of school operators operate that kind of school? It will only take people to speak out, if you don’t speak out how will anybody know, the country is large, even Lagos alone we cannot even be able to scratch the surface because we are just one NGO, but we are doing what we are doing to sensitise people, telling them to speak out, when you speak out, there is a likelihood of issues being addressed.
How do you fund this initiative?
At the moment, its largely self sponsored, I mean my family and I. Don’t forget that the spring board from which MANIS started is as a result of a personal issue because we have been beaten once when we lost our own daughter as a result of negligence in the school she was. We started the movement with the realisation that this didn’t just happen to us alone, it happened and still happening to other people as well, so we felt we need to take up this as a campaign to save other lives, this is not to say that eventually we won’t welcome partners. Just like you earlier asked, we can only be able to do more when we get support, but for now, that is how we fund it.
Are you looking forward to collaborating with other NGOs with similar vision or foreign donors?
Yes of course, as a matter of fact we had some collaborators who worked with us for the last summit we had, so definitely we are looking forward to other NGOs and even corporate bodies who identifies with safety issues, health issues, even malaria because that was what took the life of our own child and we are saying that malaria is something that can be treated, it can be prevented, it is not something that should still be killing our children in the 21st century.
How has the response from stakeholders been?
It has been so encouraging, but as a matter of fact, just immediately when we finished our last summit, the schools were calling us to start planning for another one where we would invite strictly school managers because the last one we had was for all the stakeholders. We invited schools, regulatory bodies, road safety, the police, health care givers, safety professionals and so on, but the next one, we would target school administrators so that some of the issues that were thrown up during the general summit, can be addressed specifically by school owners because when they have framework to work with some of our jobs.
What’s your message to the parents on child safety?
Well, what I have to say is that when it comes to child healthcare, everybody is a stakeholder, because if you are not a parent you are an uncle, you a brother, you are an aunt so everybody should look out for the safety of the children. I will also advise parents that if their children have any health issue, they should not hide it from the school authority, so that they will know the right thing to do.
I will also advise the schools to always have structures in place to take care of a sick child and to keep a contact with the parents because from our own experience, we find out that most time schools don’t get back to the parents in good time until it becomes fatal or near fatal.
So, it does not take anything from the school to quickly inform the parents who might know what to do. The regulatory bodies too need to step up their games because there are so many mushroom schools and stories of needless death of children all around, so we all need to come alive and keep our children safe.
