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By Cosmos Omegoh
In many parts of the North, it is no longer news that most communities no longer have access to formal education.
The children born in these communities have been driven into Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps by the gale of insecurity sweeping across the areas. There they take solace in running around completely unaware of the uncertainty that waits them.
In some other areas, young adults who have managed to break the glass ceiling, making it to the tertiary level of education now have their pursuit under threat.
Every now and then, bandits and marauders storm students’ hostels and abduct them in their numbers.
They keep them in the bushes for as long as their parents are not able to pay ransom for their freedom.
Some don’t even make it home alive. The tempo of the vice keeps rising.
Meanwhile, experts in education have been bemoaning the gargantuan tragedy falling on the North like acid rain, lamenting that there is no solution in sight.
Looking at the current challenges, the trio of Tom Maiyashi, a veteran educationist; Prof Lazarus Maigora of the University of Jos; and Hassan Taiwo, an education rights activist, return the verdict that greater tragedy looms over the North.
They feared that if insecurity in the region does not abate anytime soon, education in that part of the country would become perilous.
The stakeholders stood together in urging the government to take drastic actions to starve off the challenges that lie ahead.
Insecurity in North worrisome
“Insecurity is attaining a level that is being perceived as a hopeless situation,” Maiyashi, a one-time commissioner for Education in Kaduna State, and chairmen of Commissioners for Education in the 19 states, said, adding “yet no one seems to be doing anything about it. We are in trouble.”
He told Sunday Sun that part of the trouble was that parents who are looking for excuses not to send their children to school had begun to have legitimate reasons not to do so.
The trend, according Prof Maigora, a former ASUU president in UniJos and an expert in History and International Studies Education is worrisome.
Hear him: “Education is being taken away from the citizens, a community that has a large number of uneducated people, of course, has huge consequences staring at it in the face. Such community is open to all sorts of vices.”
Taiwo on his part is unhappy that “the rampant abduction of students and their teachers in Nigeria’s northern region has become the greatest threat to public education and the future of children in an area that has been historically disadvantaged education-wise.”
The activist is equally unhappy that “at the moment, the North is failing in every index when it comes to education outcomes, having some of the worst enrollment and retention figures in the entire country at primary and secondary levels¸ and having one of the worst figures when it comes to the percentage of the student population that is able to progress from secondary to tertiary levels of education.”
Impact of insecurity on education
In today’s world hugely driven by education, Maiyashi is disturbed that insecurity is rather increasingly taking over the Northern space, causing huge disruption to the region’s slow march to quality educational attainment.
“The impact of insecurity in the North is very, very severe.
“When parents send their children to school, there are key things that are very vital to them.
“First, they are sending them to school believing that they will be secure. They also believe that they are going to enjoy quality teaching and learning.
“But if there are disruptions to those expectations, then there is a big problem. No parent or guardian will send their children to school when they know their children might not come back home or that they might be harmed,” he said.
Reeling out statistics to buttress the enormous harm insecurity had done to the North, he said: “As at December 2023, for instance, not less than 4,000 teachers lost their lives as a result of insecurity; so many schools have been closed down. And now in most places, the children are at home. They cannot access basic education. This presents a whole lot of problems.
“When you have a society that is illiterate, it means that it will be producing an army the politicians will be recruiting for all sorts of vices.”
He also expressed worry about girl-child education in the region, lamenting that the problem of convincing parents to send them to school and keep them there up to a certain level still exists.
He also lashed out at the elite in the region, claiming that they “are reckless and irresponsible. Their activities have always discouraged parents from keeping their children in school.”
He insisted that “part of the danger we have is that when you have an army of the uneducated, then you have an army of occupation to be used by the political class for all sorts of evil.”
For Prof Maigora, insecurity in the North has indeed unsettled education and interfered with the region’s aspirations.
His considered view was that the area has become largely under threat.
“If you are not secure, you cannot feel safe; if you are not safe, even if you are sitting in the classroom, your mind will not be stable to learn,” he said.
The don held that an environment where students are attacked and kidnapped is not conducive in any way for learning.
“Because of those attacks, some parents are no longer sending their children to school. That is an albatross the North has to live with for now until insecurity is sorted out,” he said, adding, however, that “it is not every part of the North that is affected.”
He regretted that in the states where insecurity is rife, academic activities are so brutally interrupted when students are attacked and mass abduction carried out leading to schools being closed down.
“In Kaduna State for instance, a private university was closed down. Of course, the owners of the school would have lost their investment, expect that the parents of the students want them to return to school. But then, fear had already been planted in the minds of the students. So, it is likely that some of the students might have moved away to other schools,” he pointed out.
The implication of what is going on is wide ranging for the individual and society at large, Taiwo reasoned.
He said that “means that for the most part, a large majority of children in the North are destined to a life of no or half-backed education and poor social mobility, low skill jobs and a life of poverty and diseases. This is not acceptable.”
Other factors killing education
As a veteran teacher and a former consultant to the World Bank on education, Maiyashi said that he had long observed that the country’s education curve had been looking down.
“Education faces challenges not only in the North, but across the country.
“It is national, but more pronounced in the North. I will say it is national in the sense that today, the education system is no longer effective,” he said.
He disclosed that there are two most important persons in the education ladder: the learner and the teacher.
“If the learner is not there, there is no school. The second most important is the teacher. The quality of contact between the teacher and the learner is what brings about quality learning.
“If the two are not somewhere called classroom, we cannot have the Commissioner for Education or the Permanent Secretary. They cannot be!
“Now, the quality of education has gone down drastically, including the pre-service training. The trained ones cannot teach especially in rural schools all over the country; the quality assurance which is called inspection is no longer effective.”
He warned about the harm the social media is doing to education in the country, saying: “Right now, we have another invasion which is becoming increasingly worse than insecurity and that is the social media. This invasion is more serious than Boko Haram. The children don’t read any more. You give them an essay they simply Google the answer, copy and hand it over to the teacher.
“Now, part of the tragedy right now is that those in authority are not appreciating this danger weaving into education.
“Aside these national challenges, the impact of insecurity in schools in the North is devastating. Many schools have been sacked; teachers have been killed, particularly in the rural areas. Some villages have been ruined, the residents driven to IDP camps.”
Education in next decade
Judging by what is going on right now, the fate of education particularly in the North, seems to be dire.
“The system may crash in the next decade,” Maiyashi said.
He is worried that currently, learning is becoming a huge problem.
He said: “With insecurity in the country and children unable to attend school and cover the prescribed syllabus, it means that we are going to have an up surge in the army of occupation trudging through the land and ready to wreak havoc at the slightest opportunity.”
He also expressed worry that insecurity had further destroyed respect for societal values, predicting that in no distant time, the country might be producing a crop of men and women who cannot think critically, yet they will be the ones running the government.
Maigora estimation is that in the few years to come, the number of out-of-school children in the North will increase.
“In the areas where banditry is rife: Kaduna, Katsina, Zamfara and even Niger states, the schools are momentarily closed down. The students don’t have access to education again. So it is a very serious situation,” he said.
And the danger there for the society, he said, is that “we will have an uneducated society which will not develop economically, educationally because we have a critical mass that is uneducated.”
Way forward for education in North
Now pointing to the road out of the present quagmire, Maiyashi’s solution is laced with humour and parable. But they underscored how serious he feels they should be handled.
His words: “I usually give this prescription whenever I’m exchanging banters with my friends and those big people in the government.
“Each time they ask me ‘where do we go from here?’ I say to them ‘pack the current generation of political elite into Ekene Dili Chukwu luxury busses, ship them down to the sea and drown them. Then come back and let’s start afresh. It is that serious!”
Now here is his next solution. “What do you think about a leader who makes promises to provide quality education and healthcare; then after acquiring power through democratic process, he goes on to purchase an official car worth N162 million. It shows that he is completely detached for reality.
“We don’t have a leadership that is responsible to the yearnings of the people. All we have are ministers who within one year in office are moving N500 million into personal accounts.
“How then can you rely on this crop of people to solve this kind of debilitating national problem?
“The solution we need to apply, therefore, should not just be pragmatic, but revolutionary.
“Things are getting to the point the people might begin to say to hell with this situation. Yet, the political class is thinking in its delusion that the people are dormant, and mute. But as they say in local parlance, ‘one day, monkey go go market e no go return!’”
For Prof Maigora, the society needs to stand up to sensitise its people to shun insecurity.
He believes that the bandits live in societies and are known people.
So, he enjoined parents and other stakeholders to begin to talk their loved ones out of various vices.
“The security agencies need to do more. The bandits have telephones. It is surprising that they are not tracked. So, the security agencies need to be up and doing to curb the situation. Sadly, some of them are getting involved in the mess and compounding the situation.
“Of course, we will urge the government to equip the security agencies to stand up to the challenge,” he added.
He also urged families not to be deterred by what is going on, but rather resolve to send their children to schools without counting the cost.
On that note, Taiwo charged the government to live up to its responsibility of protecting the lives and property of the citizens, and ensure they have “ample access to all the means of a decent life which includes quality and affordable education regardless of the circumstances of their birth.”
