•Groups disagree over inclusion of Almajirai into school feeding programme
From Okwe Obi, Abuja
Divergent opinions have trailed the proposed inclusion of Almajiri into the ongoing school feeding scheme by the Federal Government.
Senior Special Assistant to the President Bola Tinubu on School Feeding, Dr. Yetunde Adeniji, hinted at this during a visit by Nasarawa State governor, Abdullahi Sule.
Adeniji, in a statement by his Senior Special Assistant, Oyedokun Oyewumi, explained that a head count would be conducted to ascertain the accurate number of Almajiri in the country.
Also, Sule corroborated the move, saying: “The incorporation of the Almajiri, a group of traditional itinerant Islamic students, into the programme would help in taking them off the streets and provide them with proper nutrition and education.”
Almajiri are children in the North who wander in search of Islamic education and in the process beg for food and other humanitarian needs.
The National Homegrown School Feeding Programme was set up during the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari as a strategy to encourage out-of-school children to acquire formal education.
According to the dashboard of the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, 9.9 million pupils are being fed in 56,918 primary schools across the country.
But development pundits have questioned the inclusion of these kids who majorly mill from place to place. Some are sighted under bridges, at mosques, walkways and crescents, among other places.
They are sometimes perceived as public nuisance by their conduct and shooed away.
While criticising the initiative, the national coordinator, National Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), Emmanuel Onwubiko, doubted the possibility of the government to track them down to denounce their stock in trade, which is begging.
Also, he questioned the outcome of the gesture of the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, who established schools across the northern states, to take them off the streets, which largely flopped after leaving office.
Onwubiko interrogated how government would source for funds to accommodate these kids when those already enrolled are poorly fed, going by the lean budgetary allocation and the malfeasance of handlers of the scheme who allegedly hoard food items.
For him, the initiative is a political plot by the present administration to curry votes in 2027, especially in the North.
He said: “I do not think it is going to work. I think it is just one of those strategies for some political elements in the North to be empowered.
“It looks like the President is already preparing for his second term campaign and he just wants to use that as a way of raising funds for his supporters in the North who are on the field. How are they going to go about collating statistics on the Almajirai when they are always on the move?
“These children do not stay in one place. Today, they may be in Lagos, next day, they are somewhere else. It is just a ruse, a gambit by the politicians to corner the resources of the people.
“It is just like what happened during the last administration when the then minister told us that she fed schoolchildren during the lockdown when people where at home for over four months. They continuously claimed that they were feeding schoolchildren. You then ask: where were the schoolchildren? Which school did they meet them?
“They said they took the food stuff to their homes. Which home? What about those who had travelled and gone on holiday? There was no transparency.
“I think this Almajiri challenge is another gambit to corner the resources of the public. If the government does not know what to do with money, it should stop wasting the money by telling us that they want to feed Almajiri.
“Which Almajiri are you feeding when it is the duty of state governments to ensure that children are meant to go to school because we have a law under the Constitution of compulsory primary education for the mass literacy of children up to junior WAEC?
“So, why do you have to bring this kind of policy when you already have a law put in place to compel state governments to ensure that children enrol in school? There is already a law establishing UBEC that has been created and a lot of public funds have been invested in the scheme and most of those benefiting are in the states.
“I do not understand why the Federal Government, through the Humanitarian Ministry, now wants to jump into Almajiri feeding. What the government needed to have done was to find out what happened to those educational institutions that were set up by the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan.
“They should do an audit of schools that were built for Almajiri students. Where are those schools? What are they doing with those schools?
“Have the schools been taken over by state governments? Billions of naira were spent, and it was done by the current minister of the FCT.
“He was the one that carried out that project at a time. A lot of resources went into it. This government should stop confusing itself.
“They will not solve the economic problem by feeding Almajiri students because the policy of withdrawal of subsidy that was done by the government has turned more than 130 million Nigerians to Almajiri.
“So, how many are they going to feed? Are they going to feed 130 million Nigerians that are absolutely poor? Those children are Almajiri.
“Almajiri are not better than those Nigerians that the National Bureau of Statistics evaluated to be 130 million households. One household in Nigeria could have like seven people.
“If you multiply it, you will see that there are over 150 million households that are absolutely poor. Almajiri and these absolutely poor Nigerians are the same. So, government should get serious about the policy it implements to resolve part of the crisis it created.”
But the executive director of Africa Youth Growth Foundation (AYGF), Dr. Arome Salifu, said there was nothing wrong with the inclusion. He stressed that the government’s plan to incorporate these children would increase literacy level and reduce the social menace that some of them constitute.
According to him, some of these kids are victims of circumstance that are ready to turn out better, if properly guided.
He said: “It is okay. It is a way to drag them into formal education in order for government to incentivise learning among the out-of-school children. It is something that will increase literacy.
“I do not think extending this to Almajirai is going to affect those who are already in the regular or conventional schools. It is just for government to increase the budget and the coverage and the scope of the programme.
“They are first and foremost Nigerians. They need to be captured in the educational plan of government.”
Asked about his assessment of the school feeding scheme, he said: “The school feeding itself is not bad, it is the management. It should be thoroughly interrogated. To what extent is the process corrupted? It is a system that is abused and the approach compromised.
“So, those are the critical analysis and interrogation that stakeholders should be worried about. Basically, it is not the school feeding that is bad, the handlers and the process of getting the expected results that is more important.”