By IKE WILLIE-NWOBU
As challenges in Nigeria have mounted, everything the country holds dear has come under vicious attack. Family life, societal values, communal living, education, national ethics, and indeed everything the country cherishes has been mercilessly scrutinised.
Perhaps, as Nigeria has struggled to adjust to the rising dysfunction, nothing has come under more pressure than education. In these days when many people are questioning the value of education, with music artistes, many of whom are dropouts, coining hit songs to further question the place of education, the Nigerian government, at different levels, has continued to do embarrassingly little to reverse the ugly trend.
Without a shred of doubt, the place of children in any society is in stable families, loving homes, and in school. Yes, school, because it is in school that children are molded and prepared for prosperous futures that portend peace for the society. A society where children are found everywhere but in school is a society feeding its future to fire. Such a society is one which toys with its most precious resources. Such is a society setting itself up for catastrophe.
When Boko Haram’s calamitous campaigns started in the North, it immediately became apparent that education was a target. The group also made an open secret of the fact that it wanted to bring an end to education and Western civilization. School children have since made up many of its many victims.
Schools have been attacked, students killed, teachers beheaded and school buildings razed. The unending cycle of violence and insecurity has made it impossible for the children driven out of school to return to their schools.
According to reports, insecurity is the greatest driver of the out-of-school children crisis in Nigeria with the scourge making it impossible for about ten million children to return to school.
This is an extraordinary circumstance yielding an extraordinary number that portends great danger in the future.
According to the United Nations Children Emergency Fund, UNICEF, Nigeria is the country with the highest number of out-of-school children in the world. Despite what is clearly an emergency which is gradually evolving into an extraordinary problem, it appears that the authorities in some states could not care less about the number of children who are out of school.
When children who should be in school getting molded and prepared to serve as stewards of Nigeria’s future are posing as mendicants who are well on their way to morphing into petty and hardened criminals, then there is a problem that will indeed prove very difficult to stop.
Recently, in the spirit of the holy month of Ramadan, three states of Bauchi, Katsina and Kebbi states, three states who are knee-deep in the out-of-school children crisis, decided to shut down all schools within the states. The decision generated widespread criticism all over the country. But it speaks to their peculiar hardness of hearing that halfway through the Ramadan, they are yet to reverse the decision.
Education in Nigeria has made an excruciating journey to the decline that is being witnessed currently. It all started when the government began to pay less and less attention to education.
When the commitment faltered, the funding faltered too as education took a firm back seat. As soon as the commitment and funding faltered, school buildings began to fall into disrepair and teachers became demotivated and slid into despair and even depression.
With the degeneration of education has come the decline in moral standards and the rise of a society that is handicapped by the afflictions that are ruthless against those who do not know the value of education.
Nigeria must return to giving education the attention it deserves. Until that is done, there will be no end in sight to the damage Nigeria’s crop of educationally disadvantaged children will do.
Willie-Nwobu, a public affairs analyst, wrote via: [email protected]
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