Commissioner seeks tribunal for failed parents

 Commissioner seeks tribunal for failed parents

 

Osun State Commissioner for Information and Civic Orientation Mrs. Funke Egbemode has urged the National Orientation Agency (NOA) to set up a failed parents’ tribunal to restore traditional family values.

She said this is part of efforts to address the menace of child labour, among other eroded values in the society.

Egbemode advised journalists to refocus their agenda setting responsibility towards the problem by calling the society’s consciousness “to our collapsed family values.”

Opening a four-day step-down training on the elimination of child labour for NOA workers  and journalists yesterday  in Osogbo, the commissioner said the government was committed to abolishing child labour, especially in the agricultural and mining sectors.

She said: “Villages, towns, communities and even nations fail first from the home. Regardless of the terminologies we have adopted to describe them, the ills in our society are a failure of parenting.

“We must work together to focus on what the actual problems are, and it begins with everyone of us. We are in a lot of trouble that didn’t start and won’t end with child labour. These failures are not what we lay at the doorsteps of the government.

“Of course, we can issue a statement from the government banning child labour. We can push for the National Assembly to pass a law making it a capital offence to use children for labour. But the question that follows is that how exactly will one more law among several others change the attitude of the people?

“The National Orientation Agency needs to consider setting up a failed parents’ tribunal. Some parents are as bad as bandits, and what they inflict on the society is what we are grappling with in sectors and spheres of our social life.

“The purpose of the tribunal will be to educate such parents with sufficient illustrations and visual materials on the implications of reckless handling of children, who are expected to assume leadership roles in the society in a few years.

“For the media, let us pay more attention to parenting columns and issues, and less attention to interviews and breaking news about politicians.

“We need to do better by setting agenda and reporting stories that show that the system has failed because family values have collapsed.”