By Samuel Oyejola
Japan experienced a baby boom in the 1950s after the World Wars due to high social expectation in a country that is technologically advanced. But at the moment Japan is faced with an ageing society. Ever proactive, its policies and enlightenment campaign is helping to cater for the ageing population and the elderly in the country.
Japan promoted the establishment of nursing homes and day-care facilities for the elderly and home health programmes and obviously moved the care of the elderly from the family to the state.
Dr. Emem Omokaro, Executive Director at the Dave Omokaro Foundation
The Japanese government introduced long-term care insurance. This insurance offers social care to those who are above the age of 64 on the basis of their needs alone. With this, older people in Japan have access to various range of institutional and community based services. This is a wholesome responsibility the government steps into despite the huge financial implications. A gratuitous compensation for the country’s men and women who have in one way or the other contributed to take the technological and economic advancement of Japan to the level it is today.
Adding up to this, the government encourages younger Japanese to accord respect and dignity to the elderly both in public and private engagements. To this end despite the waning energy and the drop in their level of productivity some older Japanese continue to contribute to the economy of the country through agriculture with the aid of advance technology provided by the government.
The success story of the Japanese government is a model for the world especially for the African continent. Truth be told, the continent has age-long tradition of respect and care for the elderly. This tradition seems to wear out with time and trends. Presently in Nigeria, old citizens rarely enjoy attention and care of the younger generation and the government.
Although, there is the ministry in charge of social development both at the federal and the state level focus is on women and the youth while the elders are miserably left in the cold.
To add to this unfortunate development, a government policy that protects the elderly in the society is lacking. Ordinarily, banks, hospitals, bus-stops and in other public places, serious attention are expected to be accorded to the elders. But with the absence of policy base to enforce these traditional and social obligation, older citizens are left to their fate.
Stakeholders agree that senior citizens in Nigeria suffer from the micro, macro and the corporative levels of abuse. The micro level which is the basis is the abuse they get from their care givers through verbal abuse, emotional and financial and sometimes sexual abuses.
Also the second level where is the absence of communal supportive system that would remove them from isolation and depression which is a major threat to their well being is lacking and thirdly at the larger set up, there is lacking the institutional structures and regulatory framework and supportive initiatives like social housing, transportation, health services delivery and social pension.
To create awareness on this, stakeholders met recently to find a way out of this and care for the elderly in the society. At the forum which was organized by a Non-governmental organization, Agewell Care Initiative, participants observed that senior citizens’ abuse is grossly acute.
“When all that is needed to take care of the older citizens are lacking, it becomes institutional abuse, institutional inadequacies and lacking of these interventions have exposed the older persons to abuse,’’ Dr. Emem Omokaro, Executive Director at the Dave Omokaro Foundation, told Time Nigeria.
Selling the success story of Japan to Nigeria and that the younger generation must show respect and attention to the older ones; these were lessons taken home from the discussion of the First Secretary and Head of Culture Section at the Embassy of Japan in Nigeria, Hideki Sakamoto, said in an interview with Time Nigeria.
Ageing the Japan way is a fundamental model essential for adoption in Nigeria for all round development and continuous contribution to national productivity even at advance age.
