The National Centre for Senior Citizens says it is developing a five-year Strategic Implementation Plan to address challenges facing older persons in the country.
The Director General of the Centre, Dr Emem Omokaro said this in Abuja, at the maiden edition of the Senior Citizens dialogue.
According to her, older persons are the most abused emotionally and verbally hence the need to come up with strategies to protect them
“The plan first of all is to engage our constituents, to engage our senior citizens. We’ve started that and the next plan is to engage all the relevant Ministries, Departments and Paratatals who have the core mandate to fashion out very strategic mechanisms, for instance Primary Health-care, legal aid, SDGs and so on.
“We are going to mine data from PITAD, NASSCO and anywhere we can find administrative data, we are going to start building data system so that we can now start looking at the framework for creating an implementation plan for each domain. Each domain will have a subject matter based on the assessment needs”, she said.
Ageism
Dr Omokaro further noted that the Centre will also engage the Media and the entertainment industry to sensitise the public on Ageism and its dangers.
According to her, there’s a huge economic opportunity in investing in older persons.
“We will engage the media, the entertainment industry to be able to mobilize support so that everyone will understand and reorient the public that aging is an industry, there’s economic growth opportunity in aging; as we grow the capacities of older persons, they become the resource persons.
“The African culture has respect for the elderly. We want to educate people on what older persons abuse is, because many people don’t know that they’re abusing them by compelling them to do what they don’t want to do. We will develop call centres so that we can report and investigate cases of abuse against the older persons and call for redress. Nigeria is quite expansive; we can create a model somewhere and campaign against Ageism”, she added
Ageism is having a negative opinion and discrimination against one’s age especially the older person by excluding them in policy making, building protocols and not making provisions for the aging.
Nneka Ukachukwu
