The increasing number of out-of-school children in the country has become so alarming that the Federal Government now plans to criminalise the conduct of parents who promote the abuse. The move appears to tick all the right boxes. From 10.5 million children as of 2010, the figure has jumped to 13.2 million, going by UNICEF statistics.
The Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, who hinted at this last week, said government’s intervention in basic education in the last four years had gulped N350 billion. He said, “Unless not sending children to school is made a crime, and parents who refuse to send their children to school are prosecuted, we may not see the desired changes.” But the concern is the lack of political will in Nigeria to enforce extant laws. Basic and secondary education should primarily be the responsibility of state and local governments.
This social disaster is dominant in the Northern part of Nigeria. It is a fact some of its elite and UNICEF often decry. A UNICEF Communication Specialist, Godfrey Njoku, said in November last year that the region accounted for 69 per cent of the 13.2 million out-of-school children, adding that only 45 per cent of girls were enrolled in schools. Lamido Sanusi, as Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, in 2013, presented a scarier account. A report credited to him said 93 per cent of girls from the region hardly completed secondary school.
A spade must be called a spade: anti-progressive religious and cultural practices are at the root of the anomie. Without uprooting them, any remedial measure will be a mere placebo. There are more than seven million children in the Almajirai system, according to the National Council for the Welfare of the Destitute. These are unfortunate, innocent victims of reckless procreation. Throwing underage children into the streets to fend for themselves, toleration of paedophilia and child marriage of girls constitute the toxic mix of the scourge, which the minister must address first, for the campaign to reverse this embarrassment to gel.
But make no mistake about it: the burden of out-of-school children is not borne by the North alone. In the South, giving out girls of school age as home helps is still rampant, just as children hawking sachet water, groundnut, soft drinks and other consumables in major cities while their mates are in school are familiar ugly scenes. Only irresponsible parenting promotes such vagrant and dangerous early childhood life.
The Child Rights Act expressly states that no girl child should be given out in marriage until the age of 18. This is the “full age” of consent, according to Section 29 (4) of the 1999 Constitution. It is sacrosanct. The case of abduction of 14-year-old Ese Oruru, a schoolgirl from Bayelsa State, in 2015 and her forcible initiation into marriage in far away Kano, which provoked national outrage, underscore this point.
The free primary education programme introduced in 1999, reinforced with the Universal Basic Education Act 2004, should not be undermined in the national interest. Under it, nine years of formal education, comprising six years at primary and three years at junior secondary, was made free and compulsory for every child of school age. The policy was also complemented by the CRA of 2003, which discourages child abuse incidents such as child labour and girl-child marriage.
Yet, these laudable policies have been rendered ineffectual by the abysmal failure of governance in many states of the federation. Some governors, by their conduct, do not give meaning to the life of the Nigerian child. For instance, only 23 out of the 36 states have in the past 16 years domesticated the CRA. This means that 13 other states are indifferent to the social protection of the child. Those who have done so, hardly enforce it.
As of October last year, N67 billion was not accessed by some states at the Universal Basic Education Commission. The money is meant to assist them improve their basic education. Unwilling to provide counterpart funding and abide by other due process imperatives that guide the expenditure of the fund, Adamu said that defaulting states’ counterpart funding was deducted from the last tranche of the Paris Club refund to states.
While the action is commendable, such compulsion alone will not tackle the crisis until the state chief executives begin to appreciate the challenge as a priority concern and act accordingly. If the implementation of the UBE policy had been so treated, the idea of considering out-of-school case as felonious could not have arisen in the first place. This is so because the UBE law provides punishment for such delinquency. According to Section 2 (2) of the UBE Act, a parent who fails to enrol a child or withdraws him or her from school faces a fine of N2,000 or one month imprisonment; or both. A N5,000 fine or two months’ imprisonment or both, await any parent that is subsequently convicted of the same offence.
This drift should be halted as it is ominous for the society. To do otherwise is to continue to grow an army of illiterates, hoodlums and bandits for the immediate future. Nigeria, Afghanistan, Sudan and Republic of Niger are among the 10 countries that account for the highest global burden, which UNICEF considers a humanitarian crisis. These obviously abandoned children belong to the group our political leaders often volubly refer to as Nigeria’s future. But they are not. Where they are left to be anywhere, other than the classroom, during school hours, any attempt to extol them as future leaders is irresponsible and the height of hypocrisy in governance.
