The Sultan of Sokoto has exonerated Northern elites from the spectral out-of-school children crisis haunting Nigeria, especially the North. At a ceremony in Bauchi, the Sultan was quick to blame poverty and ignorance for flooding the streets of the North with countless confused and impressionable children, who have unwittingly become an army of conscripts for the ruthless terrorists trying to overrun Nigeria from the North.
For Nigeria, which has a very young population, out-of-school children are in their millions. These children who should be in school but aren’t as a result of various factors are an ominous sign that Nigeria’s immediate future long rendered bleak by colossal corruption is at best blighted.
When children who should be in school beg for a living, starting out their daily lives as mendicants and begging past the time when school children who have returned from school have been fed, rested and put through their school work, a soothsayer is not needed to discern that trouble is brewing on the horizon.
It should worry the North that it is the region which has the highest number of out-of-school children in the country. This massive problem should give every leader in the country sleepless nights. If the North is today light years behind the rest of Nigeria in many indices that indicate development, it is because it has failed over the years to send its children — boys and girls — to school.
It is no coincidence that terrorism, which has emerged as Nigeria’s biggest problem recently has found such a sure foothold in the North. The conditions are there to support it. Multifaceted and multigenerational poverty, plus ignorance and religious fanaticism.
The Sultan may have gone on record to absolved the Northern elites of blame in the region’s shocking education levels. He may have blamed ignorance and poverty. But to attempt to divorce poverty and ignorance from lack of education is to fail to see the problem.
Poverty and ignorance may have come about in the beginning as a result not lack of education, but since the advent of education, it is its lack that waters the ground for poverty and ignorance. A well-educated population is one better equipped to resist the pernicious effects of poverty and ignorance. In fact, it is education more than any other resource the gives the educated the tools to combat poverty and ignorance, successfully.
Nigeria is undoubtedly one of the most difficult countries in which to be a child. Children face all manner of challenges in a country that continues to grapple with poverty as well as unemployment and underdevelopment. In 2003, Nigeria passed the Child Rights Act, which was a watershed legislation in guaranteeing and protecting the rights of children. It is simply scandalous that more than two decades later, a couple of states is yet to domesticate the law in their states. Worse still, many states, especially in the North, continue to refuse to enforce the salient provisions of the Act, citing religion and traditions.
More than any part of the country, the elites in the North hold a strong influence on their people. This is as much a way of life as it is a reality. This means that if the elites in the North recognize that education can transform the fortunes of the largest region in Nigeria and advocate and invest in it accordingly, children will be taken off the streets and prepared for a future unlike anything they are living now.
Until the elites in the North do this, they are very much responsible for the region’s absolutely alarming number of out-of-school children. More than anything, it is one of the more egregious effects of elitism.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
