The fire next time

The children of the poor you failed to train will never let your children have peace. – Chief Obafemi Awolowo

I do not know when or on what occasion the late sage made that statement but it still rings disturbingly true today. We are piling it on, as if we are gathering twigs for the fire next time. The last time the federal authorities checked, there were 13 million out of school children in the country, three million of whom were said to be almajirai. That number must have gone significantly towards the sky because Zamfara alone claims it has two million of these children. The almajiri system is a peculiar northern problem. The almajirai are part of the growing army of children we fail to train.

I do not see any serious attempts by the northern excellencies to reverse this trend in their various states. Should it worry them? Certainly. But all I see is their cynical attitude towards what is unarguably a major contributory factor to the extreme poverty in the old region. Perhaps these powerful men cannot help it because it is a problem they met and it is a problem they do not intend to touch with a ten-foot pole. It has thus hardened into a policy for each set of governors to reign and then leave it to their successors.

Every one of our state governors has at one time or the other decried the system; some have even banned it as a one-time solution to whatever problems it poses for the states. In any case, you don’t ban a system, you abolish it as part of an effort to rejig or replace with a better system that serves contemporary needs. A ban is short termish. Abolishing the system is fraught with challenges, not least because it serves some vested ethno-religious purposes. It has done so for a long time. It does not lack stout defenders who wish to sustain and protect it.

A system that has lasted this long and become this entrenched is not easy to dislodge with just the say-so of a state governor. It requires a systematic approach possibly through a public enlightenment system. Its abolition, should that be the option, would require the understanding and the co-operation of the Muslim clerics and the teachers. They need to be persuaded that the almajiri system denies these children a future. Denying children a future is criminal on the part of any and all governments and institutions.

I do not yet see any of the governors  adopting a systematic approach to it. We are rather busy piling up the twigs for the fire that will surely come next time. I confess that I am not competent to take on this problem from where the former emir of Kano, Alhaji Muhammadu Sanusi II, was rudely interrupted thus far. These children are some of the children whose future the Nigerian state is destroying by refusing to educate and train them to be useful to themselves. Destroying their future cannot but rub off on the future of our country. Each time the state governors respond to this problem, they do so with a level of cynicism that I find baffling and indefensible.

Here is the latest example of what some of the state governors are doing about the almajarai. No, they are not taking them out of the streets to provide for them. They are shipping them around and out of sight to their various states of origin. Nasarawa has shipped them out; Kaduna has shipped them out and Kano has shipped them out. This appears to be the official reaction of the state governors to the fact that some of them tested positive to the coronavirus. The hairy logic seems to be that if some of them tested positive, it should follow that they are all potential carriers and infectors of the virus. This being so, it makes sense to let each state have its own almajarai, virus and all. The governors of the states of their residence do not want to take responsibility for treating and possibly curing them of the killer virus. These are expendable children.

The implication is that these children have been stigmatized as a group. My bet is that when the evil wind of COVID-19 blows out, these children would have a harder time even in their states of origin. Other states would not readily welcome them anymore. This then presents the governors with the challenge of tackling what some of them describe as a menace. Will they rise up to it? I wish I could be positive about this.

It is such a huge shame for the northern leaders that while President Goodluck Jonathan appreciated the implications of the cynical neglect of the almajarai for the country, they who should need no one to educate them about Jonathan’s appreciation of the implications of the system, chose to continue to sleep on it, believing, perhaps, that a problem to which you close your eyes would have the good grace to disappear on its own. That is strange to human nature.

The former president built and equipped modern schools for the almajarai. His primary objective, and a laudable one at that, was to take the children off the streets as child beggars and educate them and make it worthwhile for them to look up to a better and brighter future.

But what is the fate of the schools today in the hands of the northern leaders? Sad. Pathetic. Makes you want to flog someone on his bare buttocks. The schools are empty. They have never been operated since they were built. But the children for whose sake they were built, continue to roam the streets begging for a pittance under the well-tended noses of their excellencies.

I find it difficult to understand why the northern governors allowed these schools to go to waste and progressive decay. These leaders are callous. It is such a big shame. No Ijaw child is an almajiri; therefore, Jonathan did not build the schools for Ijaw children. He built them to save northern children and save the north from its own political leaders. But the northern leaders would have nothing to do with them. There must be something macho in executive foolishness.