DEATH OF THE FUTURE LEADER

A popular clichés says that the children of today are the leaders of tomorrow. But then, what would the future be like if the leaders of tomorrow all die off today?The cliché above is not new to many but it had never really occurred to some of us how the non-challant attitude of parents can jeopardize this future until recently. I am in my third year in the university studying Biochemistry and during the course of a lecture, a lecturer said we all had to be very careful so as not to end up as a murderous parents. I couldn’t but wonder what he meant, so I patiently listened to him as he sighted an example of a pregnant woman who decided to spend the night in an environment where there were a lot of mosquitoes and her husband, due to his lack of knowledge, allowed her. Soon, she ends up with malaria and she had to take some medications after consulting a pharmacist. She later gets well but the unborn baby has been infected with jaundice. The baby dies after birth.

This kind of event is a recurrent one in our environment, especially in Africa. It happens not only to pregnant women but also to mothers of young infants. Every day, about 29,000 children die between the ages of 0 and 21 years mainly from preventable diseases like diarrhoea, measles, malaria, malnutrition and pneumonia. It saddens me to find that most of these deaths occur in Africa. WHO says that under-5 mortality rate is a leading indicator of the level of child health and overall development in any country. Though, circumstances like poverty and disease outbreak can lead to the sudden and unwonted death of children, the rate should be alleviated to the minimal so as not to lose the agents of change and success of the future.

My vision for the future is to keep today’s children alive and healthy because they are indeed the future. Diseases are not inevitable and children with these diseases don’t have to die. I know everyone is going to die someday but we don’t have to cause our own deaths. Every child has a right to life and no reckless parent should allow life to be taken away from any child. Children are the joy of life. An amazing thing about them is that no one knows what they would grow up to be till they get a chance to live their lives. The little child that died of jaundice from my lecturer’s story might have been the one who would cure cancer or produce the drugs for the cure of AIDS but we will never know because he is dead and his death could have been prevented.

All the children dying in Africa can be saved if their parents pay a little more attention to their health and their well-being. Parents of young infants should be admonished on the benefits of breastfeeding and of using insecticide treated bed nets. Parents should also be enlightened on the danger of living in filthy environments and the benefits of keeping their homes clean and also keeping a keen and conscious monitoring of what their kids eat and drink.

All of these I believe will help us protect our children and hence our future. We don’t have to be biochemists to keep our children alive, we just have to be.