After five years of facing frequent murderous attacks from Boko Haram, students in Northern Nigeria will soon get some measure of relief. The United Nations has corralled some of our business leaders to set aside a $10 million fund that will be used to make the schools safe.
The World Economic Forum for Africa, which ended last Friday in Abuja, provided a platform for the initiative. A total of 500 schools, mostly located in the North-East zone, will benefit from this initial intervention, in response to challenges posed by the April 14 abduction of 276 Chibok schoolgirls. The outrage and outpouring of sympathy from the international community have been torrential.
The Safe Schools Initiative is highly commendable and it came at the instance of the UN Special Envoy for Education, Gordon Brown. Typical of leadership in Nigeria, neither the state governors in the North, nor the Federal Government, had thought about this necessity, despite the fact that what Boko Haram stands for —Western education is forbidden – ought to have alerted them to the need to guarantee the safety of the pupils, who, by going to school, seem to have dared these mindless, rabid Islamists.
Brown, a former British Prime Minister, said, “Such attacks reveal with stark clarity that providing education is not only about blackboard, books and curricula. Schools across the globe, from North America to northern Nigeria, now need security plans to ensure the safety of their pupils and provide confidence to parents and communities.” He was dead right.
Truly, millions of children remain locked out of school around the world, as Brown explained. “This is not just a moral crisis; it is also a wasted economic opportunity. In Africa, for example, education is particularly crucial as the continent’s economies increasingly shift from resource extraction to knowledge-driven industry. Providing a safe environment for learning is the most fundamental and urgent first step in solving the global education crisis,” he added.
Lamentably, this is not a priority here. Were it so, serious steps to curb the gunmen’s proclivity to invade schools to kill, maim and raze buildings to the ground ought to have been taken since October 2012, when the fundamentalists stormed the School of Health Technology, Federal Polytechnic and Adamawa State University, all in Mubi, in the night, and massacred about 40 students. Similar attacks killed 42 students in July 2013, at a secondary school; murdered 50 while asleep in September 2013, at School of Agriculture, Guijba; and shot dead 59 students of Federal Government’s College, Buni Yadi, in February this year, all in Yobe State.
Abuja’s only noticeable response was the closure of all federal colleges in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states. Students of the affected colleges were transferred to schools in more stable areas. But state-owned schools continued, while many parents who could no longer risk the lives of their children stopped them from schooling. This is precisely what Boko Haram wants to achieve; not reversing this trend means utter capitulation to these terrorists by both the citizens and the state.
A non-governmental organisation, ActionAid Nigeria, said in February that 800 classrooms and 200 schools in Borno and Yobe states had been destroyed by these violent extremists since 2013. It noted, “Since February 2013, over 15,000 children have stopped attending classes in Borno State alone. Every child has the right to learn in an environment free of danger.”
Dejectedly, the North-East zone has the worst girl-child school enrolment, mortality rate and other human development indices in the entire country. If this number of children has been intimidated out of school even before the Chibok saga, a worse outlook after it is a sure bet. Educational crises in the entire North are so huge that a regional Marshall Plan is now imperative. Out of the 10.5 million out-of-school Nigerian children contained in UNESCO’s report, over nine million are almajiris (child beggars) from the North.
Therefore, the Northern Governors Forum, whose activities have been largely divisive politics evident in its anti-fiscal federalism and rejection of state police stance, should immediately own the Safe School Initiative. The 19 governors of that forum can do it much the same way they resolved recently to make secondary education tuition-free to scale up enrolment as part of efforts to redeem the North from backwardness. The safe school project should be part of this rescue endeavour.
For inspiration, they should draw from Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State, who applauded the concept, which he said was one of the salient outcomes of WEFA. He said, “I hope we will latch on to the idea and pursue it for its ideal, in the purest sense….” Where the youth are left uncared for, like sheep without a shepherd, any attempt to appropriate them as future leaders is clearly hypocritical and irresponsible.
As it is, the need for safe schools is rational, a project too big to ignore. As Brown noted, 10,000 violent attacks on schools have been recorded globally in the last four years, according to a report by Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack. This means that other countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Colombia, Somalia, Syria, and Sudan where insurgents had operated before Nigeria’s experience could be useful study on how to face the problem. Already, Nigeria is fourth on the list of 10 countries that account for almost three-quarters of the world’s illiterate adults, according to another report.
It riles that many schools, whether in the North or South, are as open and vulnerable as Nigeria’s porous borders. A fenced school, with a gate and manned security post, will at least have a register of movement of persons in and out of school; thus checkmating cases of students sneaking out to roam the streets during school hours. Part of the solution is for religious leaders in troubled areas to promote and safeguard the education and future of these innocent children.
It is hoped that our political authorities will, as Fashola advocated, embrace the Safe School Initiative to save the country’s future.
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