By Olakunle Olafioye
Fifteen year-old Khalid (not real name) is a primary school dropout. The mentally retarded Kwara State indigene dropped out of school in 2019 after spending almost a decade in primary school without commensurable academic progress.
His parents claimed other efforts to re-enroll him in school since then had proved abortive.
“We’ve taken him to a couple of schools around, but he was rejected on the account of his condition, which inhibits his learning skills. Two of the schools insisted he must sit and pass their entrance examinations, which he failed and was refused admission. Few other schools just simply told us that they did not have the personnel and facilities to cater for his educational need. They advised us to take him to school for children with special needs, but the closest one that was recommended to us is around Dopemu area of Lagos,” Khalid’s father said.
Blessing relocated to Lagos State recently following the death of her father. The 17-year-old SSS 2 student has, however, not been able to continue her education in her new state of residence over the admission policy in the state. “My uncle tried to enroll me in a government-owned school here in Lagos, but he was told the state only admits students into JSS 1 and SSS1. Even if I concede to start all over from SSS1 I will have to wait till next year because admission is already closed for this session. I don’t know how easy that is going to be for me going back to SSS1 in next academic session when I am supposed to be preparing for my Senior Secondary Certificate Examination, SSCE,” Blessing said.
Like Khalid and Blessing, millions of Nigerian children and youths of school age have been deprived of the opportunity to education in many parts of the country including the North.
The United Nations International Children Emergency Fund, UNICEF, said that violence and mass kidnappings have forced the authorities to close more than 11,000 schools in the country since December 2020 especially in the North.
The resultant effect is the spiraling number of out of school children in the country, which according to UNESCO, currently stands at 20.2 million.
UNICEF had last year estimated that 10.5 million children were out of schools in Nigeria with the figure believed to have almost doubled in the last one year. Globally, it is estimated that there are 244 million out-of-school children, including youths, with Nigeria ranking infamous second only after India.
The ranking, which stakeholders considered unacceptable has led to calls on the government to brace up and do the needful to reverse the unenviable ranking.
Head of UNICEF office in Kano State, Ramah Farah, recently revealed that girls accounted for 60 per cent of this figure and blamed it on insurgency ravaging many parts of the country.
Her words: “The numerous attacks on schools by jihadists and criminal gangs in the North have particularly harmed children’s education. These attacks have created a precarious learning environment, discouraging parents and guardians from sending their children to school.”
Since Boko Haram abducted over 200 schoolgirls in the northeastern town of Chibok in 2014, scores of schools have been targeted for similar mass abductions.
In 2021 alone, UNICEF claimed that about 1,500 students were kidnapped by gunmen. While most of the young hostages have since been released for ransom, some still remained in captivity in forests, which are havens of armed groups.
In the predominantly Muslim North, Mr Farah said that only one in four girls from poor rural families finish secondary school. Insecurity, according to him, has continued to widen gender inequalities.
The latest out of school children statistics as released by the global agency is at variance with the position of the Federal Government. The Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, had earlier in August, announced that Nigeria was making progress in its effort to reverse the of out-of-school crisis.
According to him, the number of out-of-school children in the country had dropped drastically in recent years from 10.5 million to about 6.9 million.
Notwithstanding the contention over the unenviable ranking, stakeholders are of the opinion that the state of education in Nigeria remains intolerably appalling and unacceptable.
An educationist, Mr Rufus Oseni noted that the lingering face-off between the Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, bears an eloquent testimony of the nonchalance of the Nigerian government to the problems facing education in Nigeria.
“Over the years, successive administrations in the country have failed to give education the quality attention it deserves. If we know that education is truly the bedrock of the development and we continue to pay this kind of lip service to it, then it shows we are not serious as a country. Lecturers in public universities have been on strike for almost seven months and the government has not been able to resolve the impasse. If education could be treated with such glaring disdain at university level, one can only imagine the depth of the rot that has made education at basic level so repelling and unattractive that over 20 million children of school age will be out of school in the country,” he said.
A renowned campaigner for education rights of the Nigerian child and Chief Executive Officer of IA-Foundation, Mrs Ibironke Adeagbo also expressed her displeasure over the number of Nigerian children that are out of school nationwide.
Describing the development as worrisome and distressing, Adeagbo, in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria, urged the Federal Government to address the challenges bedeviling education in Nigeria.
Experts have identified some of the factors inhibiting access to quality education as reasons behind the unprecedented number of children that are out of school in the country.
Access to education, according to Ms. Margaret Aleleh, educationist and child rights crusader, means free and unlimited, unhindered and unfettered opportunities at each level of education to obtain knowledge, skills, and abilities available at that level needed to optimally participate and contribute to development in the society.
This, according to her, covers the threshold of access or enrolling, attending and completing and possibly transiting to the appropriate level of education. “Thus, lack of access or barrier to educational access means inability to enroll in an educational institution; lack of opportunities to attend school regularly, inability to complete the prescribed programme of study, inability to attain a set goal, and inability to transit to the next level of education,” she said.
She listed some of these factors, as noticed in Nigeria, to include individual differences amongst pupils, selection methods, the quota system of admission, unaffordable costs, gender discrimination, armed conflicts, limited admission spaces, among other factors.
She described the use of a common curriculum, for instance, as injustice since it is deemed unfair to give the same dose of education to two pupils with different aptitudes and interests.
“Put in another way, it is a barrier rather than creating equality of educational opportunity, subjecting the same curriculum to both the mentally retarded and the normal child. In the same vein, it is rather absurd subjecting the same curriculum to both the normal child and the gifted child. What is needed is a diversified curriculum which would cater for the different aptitudes and abilities of individual pupils,” she recommended.
She, therefore, urged the government to convene education summit where issues affecting education in Nigeria can be discussed and solutions proffered.
“These challenges are surmountable. Governments at various levels only need to be more committed and demonstrate more political will to finding lasting solutions to these challenges,” she submitted.