A Senate advocacy for the Federal Government to build more almajiri schools and integrate the existing ones into the country’s modern school system is a bizarre and wasteful undertaking, unworthy of any national attention. The country has had enough of this manipulation.
In a motion last week, Adamu Aliero, a former governor of Kebbi State, said doing so had become a matter of urgent national importance. Aliero’s submission was riddled with contradictions, which should have rendered his bid nugatory. He said, “Some of the facilities in almajiri model schools are already decaying, as they have never been put to use,” just as he noted that previous efforts to integrate the almajiri system into modern education had not achieved the expected result.
Apparently, the decaying and abandoned almajiri schools the senator was referring to are the 165 schools, which former President Goodluck Jonathan built before the 2015 general election. It cost the country a whopping N15 billion. Some of these schools, which taught Arabic to the almajiris, have been converted to conventional basic schools, while those lying fallow stem from almajiris returning to their old ways of roaming the streets. If they abandoned these schools, there is no guarantee, therefore, that new almajiri schools would not suffer the same fate.
Establishment and funding of religious education is completely unconstitutional as captured in section 10 of the 1999 Constitution: “the Government of the Federation or of a State shall not adopt any religion as State Religion,” it states. Aliero, however, got it right with his observation that “the almajiri happens to be one of the persons covered by the UBE Act 2004 for the purpose of provision of basic education.” The law is well conceived, which, if faithfully implemented by state governments, not the federal, would address the almajiris crisis. The almajiris are less privileged children in many states in the northern part of Nigeria, unleashed on the streets by their parents and guardians, clad in rags with begging bowls. A degenerate social phenomenon, the almajiri system has no religious or cultural justification going by the social and educational advancements in many Islamic countries.
The prevalence of the system is clearly an act of criminal negligence and failure of governance. The UBE Act 2004 and the Child Rights Act are two policy instruments available to governors of the affected states to deal with the social plague. The former ensures that a pupil gets an uninterrupted access to nine years of free and compulsory basic schooling, comprising six years at primary and three at Junior Secondary School. The latter also preserves the child’s right to basic education and protection from abuse of various forms.
Unfortunately, these statutes have largely been observed in the breach, especially in the North, giving rise to the country’s dubious distinction of having 13.5 million out-of-school children, which is the highest globally. As of 2018, when the figure was 10.5 million pupils, UNICEF said the North accounted for 69 per cent of this burden.
But states in the North desirous of changing this embarrassing and retrogressive narrative should emulate Kano State, which outlawed street begging by almajiris last month. It recruited 7,500 teachers for their schools and recalled 1,500 of them from neighbouring states. On the policy, Abdullahi Ganduje, the governor, said, “It is not only that the beggar is caught, but also his parents and/or guardians. Such parents or guardians would be taken to court for disrespecting our law.” His counterpart in Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, had earlier implemented the policy. This is what the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), means and rightly so when he said that it “is the responsibility of the state governments,” to deal with the social menace. He stressed that where it perseveres, it then “means the state governments are not doing their job.”
National revenues are shared among the three tiers of government – federal, states and local governments. The latter two tiers should use theirs to discharge their statutory duty of providing basic education to their citizens. Governance failure in this is put in bold relief against the backdrop of the N84 billion that states failed to access from the Universal Basic Education Commission fund, set aside to assist them to improve basic education. And the reason for this was their inability to provide counterpart funding and abide by the transparency and accountability requirements for accessing the money.
Having overseen the creation of the Nomadic Education Commission whose relevance is now questionable and the North-East Development Commission, to deal with self-inflicted wounds, the North’s drive for the Federal Government to use resources belonging to all the states to solve its almajiri challenge is a sense of entitlement taken too far. The negligence of basic education fostered Boko Haram, cattle rustling and the current wave of banditry ravaging the region. Therefore, the affected states cannot escape the United Nations’ categorical imperative of “Education First,” launched in 2012. The campaign reminds leaders of the need to ensure that every child goes to school and receives quality education.
Evidence from Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar indicates that they take the literacy of their citizens seriously. Qatar had 97.26 per cent literacy rate for its citizens aged between 15 and 26 years as of 2016, while Saudi Arabia has an ambitious programme to achieve 100 per cent literacy by 2024. For the almajiris’ scourge to be tackled frontally there is the urgent need for a massive public enlightenment programme on the rationality of couples giving birth to only the number of children they can cater for. Otherwise, this band of abandoned children on the streets, who epitomise future insecurity, will continue to dominate the Northern landscape.
