• Decisive action necessary to tackle out-of-school children population
Again, the bloated rank of out-of-school children in Nigeria – in the northern area of the country in particular – has been red-flagged. Minister of State for Education Yusuf Sununu described the ballooning number of out-of-school children as a time bomb that requires urgent remediation. He said the swelling rank of such children in Nigeria, especially in the North, was not only unacceptable but also disheartening, and there must be concerted efforts to address and reverse the trend.
Speaking at the 2023 Bauchi Education Summit lately held at Dr Saad Abubakar Hajj Camp in Bauchi, with the theme, ‘Nurturing a flourishing future: Improving access to quality education in Bauchi State,’ the minister said the Federal Government had taken steps to address the challenge with the newly established National Commission for Almajiri and Out-of-School Children. The commission, according to him, is set to commence activities and will address issues pertaining to, and develop mechanisms for integrating Tsangaya/Madarasa schools into Basic Education. He added that his ministry recently developed a road map captioned ‘Education for Renewed Hope,’ which is a document aligned with the eight-point agenda of President Bola Tinubu.
The minister solicited the support and cooperation of Ulamas and proprietors of Tsangaya/Madarasa schools. He also called on authorities at the sub-national level to establish a similar agency, backed by state laws, to serve the same purpose. He said such a move would ensure better collaboration and synergy in addressing issues of out-of-school children and grant Tsangaya schools the necessary recognition and status they deserve, adding that the challenges confronting the education sector could be best addressed only through collaborative efforts of all stakeholders.
Sununu spoke against the backdrop of a recent disclosure by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) that one in three children in Nigeria is out of school, summing up to 10.2 million children at the primary school level and 8.1 million at the junior secondary school (JSS) level. The reality also is that those children are not just out-of-school. Of the nearly 20 million population of affected children, those engaged in the ‘almajiri’ culture are a considerable majority.
The ‘almajiri’ is a system of Islamic education practised in northern Nigeria whereby kids are sent by their parents to live with, and study Quranic education at a teacher’s place. Most of these kids miss out on formal education as they are often deployed to beg on the streets. Besides the environmental menace of legions of child-beggars on the prowl, the syndrome has turned into a breeding ground for religious extremists and easily impressionable materials for recruitment by insurgents.
A top government official in one of the northern states was once reported saying the system had evolved into a “negative phenomenon where the under-aged who were sent to read the Holy Book are recruited to do all sorts of criminal activities like insurgency, armed robbery, banditry, kidnapping and sodomy, among other crimes.”
Many states in the North, including Kano, Nasarawa, Niger and Kaduna, have formally outlawed street begging, but the syndrome persists. In the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, governments of all the northern states, by mutual agreement, repatriated the ‘almajiris’ within their respective domain to the states of origin, but that measure succeeded in merely moving the children around rather than upend the syndrome.
Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani, while meeting with senior citizens on the activities of his administration last October, put the number of out-of-school children in the state at 680,000. His Gombe State counterpart, Governor Inuwa Yahaya, on the sidelines of the 78th United Nations General Assembly session in September, said his state had over 500,000 out-of-school children as of 2019, and that the number had risen to over 600,000.
Sultan Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III of Sokoto has been a strong voice against the out-of-school children syndrome. He once affirmed that Islam was not against formal education and that parents of out-of-school children should face the full wrath of the law for refusing to send their children to school. And at an event in 2021, he said the begging syndrome that characterised the ‘almajiri’ system as pervasively practised in northern Nigeria was un-Islamic and should rather be replaced with a chemistry of proper Islamic as well as western education.
The Sultan, who is the head of the Muslim faithful in Nigeria, argued that begging is not integral to the traditional ‘almajiri’ system of which he himself and many others in the northern elite were products. Speaking at the closing of a two-day workshop on modernising the Almajiri-Nizamiyya education system in Sokoto State, he said: “Parents must be sensitised against allowing their children to resort to begging. We were not encouraged to beg in any guise (during our time), but to strictly seek knowledge.” He urged the northern elite to unite for the success of initiatives aimed at ending street begging in the state and northern Nigeria as a whole, adding that all hands must be on deck to deepen awareness and sustain advocacy against the begging culture.
Another vocal personage in the North against the region’s poor human development indices is former Emir of Kano Muhammadu Sanusi II. At the 60th birthday celebration of former Kaduna State Governor Nasir el-Rufai in 2020, he warned that the North might self-destruct unless its leaders tackle the myriad challenges, including mass poverty, millions of out-of-school children, high levels of illiteracy, malnutrition and drug addiction, as well as the Boko Haram insurgency, that hobbled the region.
Sanusi, a former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, warned against continued reliance by the North on quota system and the federal character principle prescribed in the Nigerian constitution in getting jobs for its youths at the expense of other parts of the country fielding better qualified youths. He said: “We need to get our northern youths to a point where they don’t need to come from a part of the country to get a job. And believe me, if we don’t listen, there will be a day when there will be a constitutional amendment that addresses the quota system and federal character. The rest of the country cannot be investing, educating their children, producing graduates; and then they watch us, they can’t get jobs because they come from the wrong state, when we have not invested in the future of our own children.”
Besides the religious factor wrongly emblematised by the ‘almajiri’ syndrome, the feudal divide in the northern Nigerian society fosters the out-of-school children phenomenon. Whereas the elite have the resource, and typically send their children to high-end institutions, many outside of this country, the poor who happen to be in overwhelming majority cannot afford formal education for their own children and habitually dump them on Quranic teachers as ‘almajiris.’ Meanwhile, the cultural context is one where high fertility rate is regarded as a virtue, not a function of procreative indiscipline that it is. Unrestrained siring of offspring that people have no resources to cater for has resulted in a huge population falling outside the welfare safety net and, by extension, out of the basic education system.
In his presentation, Sanusi canvassed the need for governments of northern states to be deliberate in staking huge investments on education, and we totally agree with him. Besides, there is a need for intense cultural reorientation of the populace to promote responsible parenting, demonstrated by frugal siring of broods. Such reorientation is largely the call of the leadership elite – religious leaders and political rulers – who must collaborate.
The 2021 intervention by the Sultan fell into that mould and needs to be intensified. In particular, Islamic clerics must join efforts by different state governments to dissuade parents and religious faithful whose abdication of parental responsibility has largely fuelled the syndrome. But there is also a need for the power elite, at all levels of government, to tackle the root causes, including mass economic deprivation, through delivery of good governance.
