Babajide Kolade-Otititoju reacts to Christland student scandal

Reactions have continued to trail the s£xual violence video involving 10-year-old schoolgirl and her classmates at Chrisland Schools, VGC, Lagos in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates during the recently concluded World School Games.

The 10-year-old minor, who was seen in the viral S£x tape, was reportedly lured to male students’ hotel to collect her phone charger, and she had since been the girl in the eyes of the storm. She was seen taking part in a s£xual act with other male schoolmates of hers.

While many Nigerians have blamed the parent of the embattled girl over parental negligence, others have faulted the school management for not taking proper monitoring of the minors during their trip to Dubai.

But veteran journalist Babajide Kolade-Otititoju breaks silence over the tape on Tuesday’s edition of Journalist Hangout. According to the referred journalist, he expressed sadness that parents no longer have time to monitor their children, hence they left the bulk of child molding behavior in the hands of teachers.

He said parenting has been going down in the country just like Nigerian currency has been going down for years without paying attention.

He blamed today’s parents for thinking that the only thing to take good care of children is to give them anything they want.

He added, “I was on a flight to Abuja one day and I would never forget. There was this boy of barely 5-years old. He would climb the airplane seat and then jumped down. He would repeat the routine again and again. And at a point, I said little boy: Stop that. Do you know the woman screamed at me and said don’t shout at my son. And I said to myself that somebody put this one at home as a wife. That boy could even break his back in the process.

“How can we continue to play to the gallery, and blame schools when parenting has collapsed. The skills that those kids showed in that video can only be the result of constantly downloading adult contents on their phones.”

Kolade-Otitoju said the parenting has so much degenerated to a level where parents now see scolding their children for wrong things as an act of molestation or hostility towards them.

He said in the past if a father wanted to beat a child and the wife came in his way, that wife would also be beaten along with the pampered child, or the husband asked to leave the home for taking sides with child.

He sadly lamented that such fear are not in women of today and that the school shouldn’t be blamed for a child’s misbehavior.

He said nowadays parents buy gadgets for their children without monitoring what they listen to and watch on the phone.

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He, however, said there is nothing wrong in buying a phone for a child to learn, but that a pass code request app should be installed on the phone, so that the child won’t be able to download adult contents without them. He said the PIN for downloading apps on the phones should be known only by the parents to checkmate what they are doing.

Meanwhile, Lagos State Government had shut down all branches Chrisland Schools in the state and the mother of the schoolgirl had also insisted that her daughter was gang-raped by her male classmates after being drugged, but still some people who had watched the video said it wasn’t a case of rape, because of the skills displayed by the students involved in the s£xual act.