There is an old story about a lawyer who sold his well to a teacher, then returned demanding payment for the water inside it. The teacher smiled. If the water still belonged to the lawyer, he replied, perhaps the lawyer should remove it or pay rent for storing it in somebody else’s well. Suddenly, the lawyer remembered he had only been joking. It is funny until we recognise ourselves as lawyers.
We tell people with disabilities that public spaces belong to everyone. Then we demand an additional price for entering them. We give them citizenship, but charge for the ramp. We promise education, but make the classroom unreachable. We proclaim equal opportunity, then construct the doorway too narrow for their wheelchair.
That contradiction came home to me when Grace shared her story with me, she titled Public Place Accessible Report for Inclusion. It contained no sentimental appeal. It simply insisted that public places should allow everyone to enter, move, communicate, receive services and participate independently, safely and with dignity. I listened to it in her voice once as a report. Then, I read it again as an indictment.
Behind every line was somebody’s ordinary day made unnecessarily difficult. A mother arrives at a hospital, already frightened for her child, discovering that the entrance has steps but no ramp. A young man preparing carefully for an interview, only to find his opportunity waiting upstairs without a lift. An older woman confronting a pavement that has forgotten her legs cannot move as quickly as they once did.
These are imagined scenes, but the barriers Grace identified are painfully real. Poorly enforced building standards. Toilets that exclude. Transport that humiliates. Signs people cannot read. Public information people cannot hear. Facilities built without consulting those who will use them.
Grace’s intervention mattered because she did not reduce accessibility to a construction problem. Her story and experience understood something profound: every inaccessible entrance is also a message. Sometimes it says, “We did not think of you.” Sometimes, more cruelly, it says, “We thought of you, but you were not worth the expense.” What does that message do to a child’s heart?
Imagine a girl with cerebral palsy watching other children rush into a school assembly while she waits outside for someone to carry her over the steps. Imagine her learning, year after year, that she must be grateful for help rather than entitled to access. Imagine how quietly a society can teach someone to apologise for existing.
On 3 October 2026, at GlowingStar Empowerment Initiative and Development’s World Cerebral Palsy Day commemoration in Bukuru, I delivered a keynote titled Beyond Therapy: Seeing the Whole Person, Not Just the Condition. Its central argument was simple: a person has cerebral palsy; cerebral palsy does not have the person.
A diagnosis is information, not identity. Therapy is necessary, valuable and sometimes life changing. But therapy is supposed to be a bridge into life, not the whole landscape of living. Beyond treatment are friendships, classrooms, jobs, ambitions, relationships, leadership, laughter, choices and dreams that deserve room to breathe.
We can celebrate a child’s progress in therapy while failing that same child at the school gate. We can praise a parent’s devotion while exhausting that parent with inaccessible transport, expensive care and the endless labour of explaining why their child deserves a chance. We can call ourselves compassionate while our architecture remains indifferent. At the commemoration, parents spoke of stigma, costly therapy and limited support. Their courage was unmistakable, but courage should not be the currency families must spend to secure ordinary human rights.
That was why I argued that admission is not inclusion. Allowing a child through the gate means little if the classroom, teaching methods, toilet, playground or attitudes inside still tell that child to remain on the margins.
And communication must never be confused with intelligence. When someone speaks differently or needs more time, our responsibility is neither impatience nor pity. Ask. Then wait. Listen without finishing their sentences. A human voice does not lose its authority because it travels by an unfamiliar route.
I returned to Grace’s story and noticed how practical her demands were: sensible ramps and handrails, usable toilets, safe pathways, accessible transport, clear signage, Braille, captions, audio information and regular audits. It called for architects, officials and contractors to understand universal design, and for people with disabilities themselves to help plan and evaluate the spaces they use.
Nothing about us without us. That principle is not a decorative language for conferences. It is what stops a well-meaning official from installing a ramp that is too steep, or declaring a school inclusive without asking the students to navigate its corridors.
Nigeria has legal commitments against disability discrimination. Yet a law that cannot travel from the statute book to a bus stop, hospital, workplace or classroom remains a promise stranded on paper. Rights should not require influential relatives, public sympathy or a viral photograph before anyone honours them.
Sometimes, as I said in that keynote, society needs therapy. Our buildings need rehabilitation. Our policies need rehabilitation. Our assumptions, professional habits and careless language need rehabilitation. We must stop asking only how a person can adapt to a hostile environment and begin asking why we made that environment hostile.
I keep thinking about Grace, my newfound friend. As she shared recommendations, their moral weight was larger than the suggestions itself. She reminded me that inclusion often begins when someone refuses to look away from what everyone else has learned to step over. It begins with the uncomfortable decision to measure progress not by the elegance of our speeches, but by who can actually enter the room.
The lawyer in the story wanted to sell the well while keeping its water hostage. Too often, our society offers people with disabilities belonging without access, opportunity without accommodation, dignity without choice. Then it calls every concession generosity. But the water was never ours to withhold.
Every child deserves more than survival. Every caregiver deserves more than exhaustion. Every adult with a disability deserves the freedom to work, love, contribute and belong without performing gratitude for rights already theirs. The purpose of inclusion is not to make people feel fortunate to be tolerated. It is to build a country where nobody must beg to be considered human.
So, Grace, thank you for disturbing our comfort with something as unromantic, and as revolutionary, as sharing your story with me. May we answer it with budgets, redesigned spaces, enforced standards and genuine listening. May the next child approaching a public doorway find no argument waiting there, only an opening.
Beyond politics and all the drama of nationhood l, let us remember we sold them a well. It is time we stopped charging for the water—May Nigeria win
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Prince Charles Dickson