By Providence Ayanfeoluwa

The Chairman of Ifako Ijaiye Local Government, Prince Usman Hamzat, has attributed Nigeria’s problem to a lack of family institutions and not government.

Speaking at the Down Syndrome Foundation Seminar which is part of the Awareness Month themed: “Embrace Inclusion – Transform Lives”, he said: “For me, the problem we have in this country has to do with the family; every politician elected into a position in this country came from a family. When a good man marries a good wife, they produce good children”.

Hamzat cited that in the past, when a child was punished in school, he/she found it difficult to come home and tell the parent, but today, even the parent goes to school to beat the teacher for punishing their wards.

He said: “We all have family institutions, but from what we are seeing today, we do not have a family institution that is good, I think for me, the family is the problem and not the government.

If the family is good, our country and the government would be good. When we have good children from good families going into government, the narrative is going to change.

“Any reasonable government that wants to do something good would want to partner with bodies that care for the vulnerable in the community, that was why, when we came into government, we understood that there was no government that can employ 50 percent of the workforce in a community, we had to partner with bodies that can help in employing people in the community. “In our local government, we have been able to partner with bodies that have helped us to employ not less than 2000 in Ifako Ijaiye community. I am not saying it to say the local government is working but I am encouraging us to be part of those that would help in any community we are”, he said.

On her part, the President of Down Syndrome Foundation, Mrs. Rose Mordi, said that the society still sees children born with Down syndrome as not capable of doing anything, “and that is the impression we want to change, that is why we are advocating for full inclusion. When they are fully included their lives would be transformed.

“It is not that they have a plight, but they have this condition that has made them to be stigmatized and society has left them behind even in the disability sector, where persons with intellectual disability of which Down syndrome happen to be the commonest in the disability sphere.

“There is no provision that had been made to train them; some of them are not given opportunity to live because most of them are born with health concerns”, he said