There can be no mistake about it, a country that dithers in defining its destiny is one that is doomed to disaster.
Nigeria’s best well-wishers pray fervently that Nigeria does not become such a country. With many of them ocassionally bitten by the bug of spirituality, they also feverishly reject such a fate for Nigeria.
But what are the options open to a country where a sinking feeling is unmistakably forceful? Where are the country’s children? Where are Nigeria’s young people? Just how potent is the spell that binds a country’s brightest lights to the brigandage of darkness?
Data used to put Nigeria’s out-of-school children at 10.5 million. This was before it climbed to 15 million before recently surging to about 20 million. The figures whatever they might be poke fun at the fate of a stumbling and bumbling giant that is yet to put forward its case for realizing the prodigious potentials it first showed at independence in 1960.
But these figures, whatever they may be, hint at something darker. They hint at the hinterlands where in heinous hives heaving with death and destruction, terrorism hisses with fury.
It is all manner of men and even monsters that are being molded out of children that should be in school listening to their teachers, writing and taking notes and interacting with their peers as their intellect takes shapes.
There are hawkers, mechanics, menial labourers, child prostitutes and street children splayed to the human snakes that freely roam Nigeria today.
Children who should know the wonders and consolations of books and education are instead forced to descend into darkness from so early in their lives.
For many of them, because they are so young and so innocent, they hardly realize what is happening to them or just what is being stolen from them until the tyranny of time ruthlessly takes its trophies.
It indicts a country. It indicts Nigeria, the Giant of Africa, that this number of its children are out of school and are being denied the indescribable treasure that education is.
The shocking number of out-of-school children in Nigeria would also appear to spell doom and disaster for the country, but especially defeat. A defeat that particularly stings.
It was in 2009 that the rampaging terrorist group Boko Haram decided that it was finally done with lurking in the shadows. Its decision to go for the jugular of Nigeria had one overarching theme: the sinfulness of western education.
The group’s distaste for Western education was not just whispered or wistful. Its weight was soon tested under the heavy artillery of the terrorists who soon gleefully saw schools reduced to rubble and teachers and students slaughtered. If Boko Haram’s objective was the disruption of western education, it has been a stunning success.
As no child deserves to learn in an atmosphere of conflict and uncertainty, very young children have especially felt the pinch. Many of them have seen their dreams of quality education dashed.
Because insecurity has rocked many of their families which used to provide what little stability they had in the storm-tossed sea that life is, many children have had to put survival before education.
With Boko Haram’s activities leading to the disintegration of Nigeria’s security architecture, banditry has also thrived.
A favorite pastime of the bandits who bare their jagged teeth in the bushes of Northern Nigeria has been to attack schools and abduct students for extortionate sums in ransom.
When children otherwise cocooned in blissful innocence and ignorance suddenly become aware of the danger of doing something as basic as going to school, their wellbeing is gravely jeopardized.
But what has Nigeria been doing about it? More directly, what should it be doing about it?
There is no doubt that combating insecurity is key. Education cannot thrive in an atmosphere of insecurity. No one in their right senses would choose death or grievous bodily harm because of education.
If Nigeria ever hopes to force a steep decline in the number of out-of-school children especially in the North, it must combat the insecurity which drives it.
Nigeria must especially break the sinister symbiosis that exists between the out-of-school syndrome and terrorism in the country. The two monsters voraciously feed off each other.
Terrorism in Nigeria certainly finds an abundance of conscripts from the pool of out-of school children. Other crimes mop up benefits as well.
Nigeria’s work is cut out for it.It can choose to drain this pool or it can choose to leave it undisturbed for those who in fishing in its waters, dish death to Nigeria and her children.
There is also the little matter of the gruelling poverty that sees children taken off school and forced into the streets to support hassled and harassed families.
So much has been made about Nigeria’s combat with poverty. So much has been written. Those who have been in good positions to do something say that so much has been done even if that is not so obvious.
What is so obvious is that a society steeped in poverty and inequality is not a society where the four walls of the classroom hold much allure for children and their families. In such a society, survival is proritised and who will blame them?
Nigeria knows what it ought to do. But it delays and while it delays, the coals that should provide light and warmth for its future are going cold and out.
Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com
