Hordes of idle children are daily springing up in different parts of the northern region following the rising challenge of insecurity and displacement of the people by terrorists and bandits. Majority of the children are out of school because their parents have been rendered jobless and incapable of catering for them. Latest global data on out-of-school children by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) puts the figure at about 20 million. The development is capable of snowballing into other daunting challenges for the region and the nation at large, INNOCENT DURU reports.
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20 million children drop out of 11,000 shut schools, says UN agencies
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Idle kids engage in hard labour, hawking for survival
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It’s a time bomb, says varsity lecturer
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‘How our neighbours, relations were abducted, murdered
Faga Auta, an 11-year-old native of Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State narrowly escaped death together with his parents when some bandits invaded their community a few years ago. They had to flee to the Internally Displaced Persons’ Camp in Central Primary School, Gwada, to seek refuge.
Afaga was about to be registered in school when the assailants struck, but that plan has remained a mirage since they settled down in the camp. “I don’t go to school. I play around and nothing more,” he said as he walked away to gambol around the camp.
In cities Lagos, Port Harcourt and other cities where sanity prevails, children of Afaga’s age have gone past primary school. But at 11 years, he is yet to see the four walls of a classroom. Now approaching the teen age, he does not have the faintest idea what the future holds for him.
Although the camp where they sleep and wake up every day is domiciled in a public primary school, Afaga and his peers remain out of school as less than 20 of the 472 children registered in the camp are in school.
Findings revealed that it costs between N6,500 and N7,000 for a child to be enrolled in the school. The sum includes registration fee, tuition fee, school uniform and books. But paltry as it may seem, the majority of the impoverished parents cannot afford it.
“I am not in school. My parents have no money to send me to school. They don’t even have money to buy something for me to sell,” nine year- old Jeniffer Erenia said in a piercing tone.
Her fellow kid inmate, Ishiaku, only knows that there is something called a school because the IDP camp is located in it.
“I have not been to school before. I don’t know if I would ever go because my parents have never told me about it. They are concerned about how to deal with the hunger challenges we are going through,” he said.
Children displaced by Boko Haram hawk to survive
The future of many children displaced by Boko Haram terrorists in the North East has remained bleak since they fled the troubled zone. Some of them who were in school before they were displaced are yet to return.
Mariam Fulani, a 13-year-old girl, nursed the ambition of becoming a medical doctor at an early age, but the situation she has found herself in makes it almost impossible.
She said: “We are from Katsina State, but we resided in Borno State before Boko Haram attacked and killed my parents.
“I had to join others to flee down here in Bauchi. I am out of school but I wish to go back.
“To survive, I sell akara for a living and I don’t know how long this will last.
“I want to become a medical doctor if I have the opportunity of going to school.”
Abdusalam, a 14-year-old boy, was in Primary 2 when his parents fled Borno State to settle in Bauchi following the activities of the insurgents. He hasn’t seen the four walls of a classroom thereafter as his parents lack the wherewithal to send him to school.
He has since resorted to running errands and acquiring skills in a mechanic workshop where he makes a paltry N200 to support the family.
He said: “I was in Primary 2 when Boko Haram attacked our area. I am working at a mechanic workshop at the garage.
“I use whatever money I get from the workshop to buy food items that I take home for my parents to cook for us.
“My father does not do anything for a living. My mother makes hair for people. I make between N200 and N300 every day.”
In spite of the money he is making on a daily basis at the mechanic workshop, Abdusalam still feels unfulfilled.
“I want to go to school to have more knowledge of what I am learning at the workshop. I have the feeling that, that would make me very fulfilled in life,” he said.
Adijat Adamu, a 15-year-old survivor of Boko Haram attacks who sells potage to survive, said her burning desire to return to school remains the reason she has refused to get married like many of her peers.
“Some of my friends are married but I want to go to school. I was in Primary 3 when the insurgents attacked our place. I am from Gwoza Local Government Area,” she said.
From selling potage, she said, “I make between N150 and N200 every day. I take the money home for my parents to provide food for us.”
Zainab Abubakar, 14, has also had to shun the temptation to get married to keep her hope of going back to school alive.
“I want to go to school, not to get married. Some of my friends are married but I don’t want to,” she said.
Zainab said she was in Primary 1 when Boko Haram attacked their area in Gwoza.
“We ran into the bush when they attacked our school,” she said.
“My parents are not doing anything for a living now.
“We really don’t get sufficient food to eat, and when there is hunger, there is bound to be sickness.
“We are often feeling weak.”
‘We don’t know what school looks like’
While the above respondents had the opportunity of having a taste of education, hordes of other children in the host communities in Bauchi have no idea what school looks like.
Ten-year-old Mohammed Mohammed is one of them. He hasn’t gone to school all his life. He has only heard of it with his ears but does not know how it feels to be a pupil.
“I came from Adamawa. I haven’t gone to school all my life, but I have a burning desire to go. My parents are here in Bauchi, doing menial jobs,” he said.
Balkisu, an indigene of Borno State, has similar experience.
She said: “I am eight years old. I have never seen the four walls of a classroom, but I desire to go to school.
“I sell masa (a local delicacy) for a living. I really feel unhappy seeing others going to school while I am busy hawking masa. I want to have a feel of what it takes to go to school.”
Pathetic tales from Benue kids
In Benue State where killer herdsmen have held sway for the past four years, hordes of innocent children have had their lives and destiny set back.
Aside from dealing with the trauma of losing their parents to the swords of the herders, the hapless children have been forced to drop out of school.
One of them, Moses Vendaga, had his parents killed in 2018. Since then, his life has been buried in confusion.
“I am not schooling at the moment. I desire to go to school but there is nobody to pay my bills.
“I now live in the internally displaced persons’ camp. I have no siblings and there is nobody to call my relation,” he said.
At the tender age of 14, the adolescent boy who ordinarily should be under parental guidance has started fending for himself.
He said: “I go out early in the morning to look for people in need of workers on their farms. That is what I do to survive.
“I make about N500 when I am lucky to get people to work for.
“I don’t feed well because the food they give us in the camp is never enough and it does not come every day.”
Another kid inmate at the Logo IDP camp, Iyoku Lawrence, has also not returned to school since his parents were killed in 2019.
His words: “I was going to school before they were killed but I have stopped going to school since then. This always makes me feel sad and depressed.”
He hinted that it is a tug of war for them to get food to eat every day in the camp.
He said: “What I get each day is barely enough to survive on. Incidentally, it is not every day that I get somewhere to clear farms for people. When I don’t get a place to work, I would not have money to eat.”
In an emotion laden voice, Ushenea Samuel, a 17-year-old, said: “I have been left to hustle for survival since my parents were killed.
“I help people to clear their farms and also help them to do other menial jobs in order to get some money forfeeding.
“I could make N500 a day when I have a job to do. When I work at mining sites, I make as much as N1,000.
“It is challenging surviving without my parents or any helper. I desire to go to school but there is nobody to help me.
“I hope that one day, a non-governmental organisation or some kind hearted Nigerians will come to my aid.”
Our children’s future is bleak – IDP leaders
Leaders in the various IDP expressed worries about the future of their children.
A leader in the Logo, Benue State IDP camp, Levy Utim, said the future is pitch dark for the kids.
He said: “Education is key to whatever anybody wants to do in modern times. Without education, these children will certainly not be able to match their educated peers.
“Even though some of them are engaging in farming to survive, modern day farming is technology based and only the educated can enjoy it.
“It is really saddening that our kids are at this level in a jet age.”
He added: “An NGO came to start a school for the little ones a month ago, but we the older ones have no school to attend within the camp at the moment.
“They have to go into the town before they can get a school, but most parents cannot afford the fees.”
In Shiroro, one of the parents, who gave his name as Usman, said the jkids’ predicament was disturbing.
Usman said: “Our prayer is that our children should fare better than us. That could largely only be possible through education but see where we are at this point.
“Majority of us cannot afford the school fees of N7,000. This amount was nothing when we were in our homes but right now it is very huge. We are starving and that comes first before education.”
The leader of internally displaced persons in Bauchi, Buba Musa, said they have had about 11,000 children displaced by the activities of insurgents in the state.
He said: “Most of the children are not going to school. On the average, I can say that about 7,000 of the children are not going to school. They are engaged in hawking. Some of them sell groundnut or garri. The death rate is not so high here.
“The number of children that has died is not up to 100. Hunger is the main challenge confronting us, especially the children. That is the most serious problem here.
“We have no food to eat. Whatever the children get from their petty trading is what they sometimes use to eat.
“Where there is no sufficient food, malnutrition must be the order of the day. You really don’t need a soothsayer to tell you that.”
Decrying the impact of climate change on IDPs who are farmers, the chairman said: “The farming season has also been very poor because we have acute drought here. Some of us have not got any harvest. We also have the challenge of accessing fertilizer and herbicide.
“We have no problem with the host community. In fact, the Bauchi State Government has been magnanimous to us.
“But in spite of their assistance, life has not been easy for us. Getting water is a problem. To get food is a problem.
“We have nothing all these years. We engage in menial jobs to survive. The future of our children would not be as smooth as we wished. It won’t be good.”
It’s a time bomb, says varsity lecturer
A lecturer at the Umaru Musa Yaradua Univeristy, Katsina, Dr Bla Abdullahi Husaini, is worried that the neglect of the kids by the society could spell doom in future.
He said: “They are out of school now. Their parents have been killed and the community is not doing anything for their survival. They are left alone.
In years to come, these out of school children will have no sympathy for any growing economy that is coming because they were not assisted when they were growing up. There was no sympathy or empathy by the host community when they needed it. So, they will now turn into another class of criminals.
“It is only when you grow up in a family setting that somebody will tell you that what you are doing is not good.
“You would have somebody to knock your head when you are wrong and somebody to guide you. But this category of out-of-school children don’t have anybody to do all that.
“Tell me how in the near future they will be sympathetic to the community that they find themselves in. There is no way.
“It is only education that gives people focus, direction, orientation and organisation.”
Sharing his experience with some of the children, Dr Husaini, a specialist in International Relations, Defence and Security, said: “I was able to interview some of these out-of-school children. When they saw a motorcycle, the brand called Boxer, they ran into the host community and started screaming ‘they are coming, they are coming!’ They ran in and shut the door.
“That is the level of psycho-social trauma these people are going through.
“There should be a provision for education in emergency. The aim of that is to cater for those that were chased away by calamites and other man made incidents.
“They are running away from their original homes to a host community that is relatively more peaceful than their own.
“It is now the responsibilities of the state authorities where they are or where they left to cater for their basic needs.
“Again, we are in a situation where the host communities don’t have the shock absorber to absorb them and give them what they need.
“It now puts the host communities in a dilemma. Believe you me, what is happening in the country, in the next 10 to 20 years, it will not end because it is a very lucrative venture.”
Budgetary allocations rise as out of school children’s number increases
A run through the statistics of the country’s budget shows that allocations for security have continued to rise over the years even as investment in education has failed to rise proportionally.
A breakdown of budgetary allocations to combating insurgency in the country shows that more money is being committed annually.
In 2016, allocation to security gulped N1.06 trillion and moved up to N1.14 trillion in 2017. In 2018, the allocation jumped to N1.35 trillion and rose in 2019 to N 1.76 trillion. In 2020, allocation to the sector was put at N1.78 trillion. Put together, the total allocation within the five years under consideration totaled N7.1 trillion.
Between 2011 and 2015, budgetary allocations to the sector by the Goodluck Jonathan administration stood at N4.62 trillion.
The allocation to security in 2011 was N920 billion and N924 billion in 2012. In 2013 and 2014, N923 billion each was allocated to security while the sum rose to N934 billion in 2015 to bring the total to N4.62 trillion.
The United Nations recently raised the alarm that the country may not be able to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 4—universal, inclusive and equitable basic education for all school-age children by 2030 if the Federal Government fails to increase its current budgetary allocation to the education sector from 7 to 20 per cent.
The United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria, Mathias Schmale, who sounded the warning at the official launch of the Reports of Independent Evaluation of Sustainable Development Goals three and four by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, described both reports as the first of their kinds in Sub-Saharan Africa, said, “while the findings of these evaluations show some improving health and education outcomes in Nigeria, the reports also contain some worrying analyses.
“In relation to SDG-4 on quality education, it is, for example, concerning to note that Nigeria is unlikely to achieve the global agenda for universal inclusive and equitable basic education for all school-age children by 2030 if the current very low public investment in the education sector remains the same.
“The evaluation indicates that the right policies (especially around free basic education and gender) are in place but an increase in quality and access to education is critical. In the 2022 budget, there was an increase to 7 per cent on education but the evaluation says it will need to increase to 20 per cent with clear accountabilities on delivery.”
20 million kids out of school, over 11, 000 schools closed – UN agencies
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) last week said that Nigeria now has about 20 million out-of-school children.
The UN agency’s sister orgnisation, the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) had earlier disclosed that a total of 11, 536 schools have been closed since December 2020 due to abductions and security issues in Northern Nigeria.
According to UNICEF the country has since December 2020, had a total of 1,436 school children and 17 teachers abducted from schools across the country, especially the Northern part, out of which 16 school children lost their lives.
UNESCO noted that a new and improved methodology was used to arrive at the latest figures, adding that there are “244 million children and youth between the ages of 6 and 18 worldwide (who) are still out of school.”
According to the statistics, India, Nigeria and Pakistan have the highest figures for out-of-school children globally.
The figures in Nigeria have oscillated between 10.5 million and around 15 million for more than a decade, with the situation growing worse due to the degenerating security situation in the country.
UNICEF on its part said the school closures have impacted the education of approximately 1.3 million children in the 2020/21 academic year. It added that interruption of their learning contributes to gaps in children’s knowledge and skills and may lead to the loss of approximately $3.4 billion in these children’s lifetime earnings.
“This risks to further perpetuate cycles of poverty and inequality”, the agency said in a statement on Wednesday to mark the 8th anniversary of the abduction of 276 students at Government Girls’ Secondary School Chibok.
UNICEF revealed that since December 2020, 1,436 school children and 17 teachers have been abducted from schools, and 16 school children lost their lives.
“Unsafe schools occasioned by attacks and abduction of students are reprehensible, a brutal violation of the rights of the victims to education, and totally unacceptable. Their occurrences cut short the futures and dreams of the affected students,” said Peter Hawkins, UNICEF representative in Nigeria.
“Attacks on learning institutions render the learning environment insecure and discourage parents and caregivers from sending their wards to schools, while the learners themselves become fearful of the legitimate pursuit of learning. The invisible harm school attacks inflict on the victims’ mental health is incalculable and irredeemable.
“Girls have particularly been targeted, exacerbating the figures of out-of-school children in Nigeria, 60 percent of whom are girls. It is a trajectory which must be halted, and every hand in Nigeria must be on deck to ensure that learning in Nigeria is not a dangerous enterprise for any child, particularly for girls,” Hawkins added.
FG seeks help for affected children
The Federal Government early in the year called on stakeholders, good spirited individuals and philanthropists to support out-of-school children in the country get back to school.
Former Minister of State for Education, Chukuemeka Nwajiuba, made the call at an inauguration campaign on out-of-school children , held in Minna, Niger State, He said the ministry in 2018 launched a ministerial strategic plan of 2018/2022 and observed that the country still had high rate of out-of-school children.
“The survey was carried out to ascertain the state with high number of out-of-school children and come up with plans to ensure this anomaly is adequately addresse