Sola Ojo, Kaduna
A total of 190 inmates of Kaduna ‘torture’ house made up of 77 children and 113 adults have been reunited with their families after medical examination while three other children from Burkina Faso have been handed over to the Nigerian Immigration Service for repatriation.
Kaduna State Commissioner for Human Services and Social Development, Hajiya Hafsat Baba, made the disclosure yesterday.
She lamented that failure of some parents was partly responsible for the establishment of such facilities.
The commissioner, who stated this while featuring on a Kaduna-based FM station breakfast show where she was invited to speak on the role of her ministry in the management of rescued ‘students’ of an Islamic school raided by the police a week ago, expressed mixed feelings on registration status of the facility.
While clarifying the 300 figure reported in the media, she said: “The night the police raided the place, some of the inmates escaped because it was raining. But those we counted are 190. It is the responsibility of parents to ensure moral upbringing of their children. I can’t imagine that you cannot control your child and you are pushing the responsibility to someone else.
“Even if you take that child willingly to that institution, I believe that you, as a good parent, should go round the school, look at the facility and ensure it conforms to your own conviction not that you just go and dump the child there because you want to get rid of him.
“On a normal day, when you take your child to school, you will check the basics: how many toilets they have, how many children are there in a classroom and all that.
“When you look at the body of these children and how they were chained, you will be amazed. It beats my imagination when I saw a six-year-old child being beaten. He removed his shirt and you can see the scars all over him.
“We have failed as parents. You can imagine, the six-year-old boy don’t know the name of his mother because both are no longer together and that is the outcome of a broken home.”
She also has words for the operators of private rehabilitation centres. “If there is going to be such facility, then the proper thing should be done. Look at what the situation has brought us to; people calling from across the world. We have nothing to hide. It was an open thing and that was why we allowed to interact with these people.
“Let us do what is right. Let us follow the law. Why is it that we don’t want to follow the law? There must be registration and supervision. We want everything to be done according to rules and regulations