Combating Out-Of-School Children Menace

The United Nations Children Education Fund (UNICEF) has said that about eight million children are currently out of school in 10 Nigerian states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
According to the Fund, these children are unable to access safe and quality education in Nigeria mainly because of the ongoing insurgency and banditry in Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Niger, Sokoto and Taraba States.
Speaking at an event to mark this year’s Day of the African Child in Abuja, recently, UNICEF communications specialist, Mr. Geoffery Njoku, said that about 2,000 youths drawn from the 10 states and the FCT presented petitions to their Governors, legislators, policy makers and other influential persons aimed at drawing attention to the need to commit to ensuring safe and quality education for all children, especially girls.
He noted that the mass action called for improvement in school infrastructure, a massive enrolment campaign to bring all children, and targeted investments to ensure an uninterrupted 12 years of schooling for girls. It also sought for the deployment of more qualified teachers to the rural areas and incentives to female teachers.
Day of the African Child is observed globally to remember the day in 1976 when hundreds of students were shot in the Soweto suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, while demonstrating for their right to quality education.
This year’s remembrance coincided with the celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Convention on the Right of the Child (CRC) which Nigeria ratified in 1991 and is regarded as the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, stipulating that every child has a right to education.
Erstwhile Minister of Education, Mr. Adamu Adamu, recently disclosed that there were about 10.5 million children, aged between six and 14, who were out of school in Nigeria. He claimed that the figure had reduced from 13.2 million following interventionist strategies adopted by the government in conjunction with non-governmental organizations and international donor agencies.
Adamu had enumerated the challenges of reducing the number of out-of-school children to include: insecurity due to insurgency and banditry, misconceptions about value of education, slow implementation of UBEC programmes by state UBE boards, inadequate needs assessment before project execution, inadequate funds for special education, and lack of reliable data for planning, among others.
What the minister failed to point out is that the country’s governments at all levels have consistently failed to make adequate budgetary provisions for the school system.
Experts have often pointed out that the Federal Government’s budgetary allocation to the education sector staggers between five and seven per cent against the 26 per cent that is universally recommended by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). For instance, in this year’s budget, only N620.5 billion (about 7.05 per cent) was allocated to education from the N8.92 trillion total expenditure estimate. This amounts to a marginal raise when compared to the N605.8 billion in 2018. What’s more, only a quarter of the earmarked amount is usually released before the budget year rolls by.
We think that the high cost of accessing education is also to blame for the current out-of-school children menace. With the poor state of the Nigerian economy which led to massive job layoffs, many affected families, now unable to fend for their children, have been compelled to downgrade or outrightly withdraw such from school.
This is where we commend the Rivers State Governor, Chief Nyesom Wike, for his administration’s latest decision to cancel the payment of tuition fees in all public primary and secondary schools in the state. Given the relatively stable security situation in the state, it will surely serve to ensure that more children access safe and quality education.
Government should intensify effort at significantly reducing unemployment in the country. The current situation where university graduates spend much of their youthful years roaming the streets in search of jobs can hardly encourage any parent or guardian.
It did not require the application of rocket science for other African countries such as South Africa, Ghana and Rwanda to stabilise their school systems. Essentially, we believe that peace, security, adequate funding, enhanced teachers’ welfare and good planning and supervision are key to making Nigeria’s education system attractive to her children.
While jobless graduates are increasingly turning to kidnapping, armed robbery, cybercrimes, drug pushing, prostitution, militancy and pipeline vandalism for survival, out-of-school kids have continued to swell the ranks of child labourers, cultists, gangsters, rapists and pickpockets, among others.
We fear that if today’s political leaders do nothing serious to effectively stem or totally reverse this ugly trend, they will be deemed to have simply ignored a festering ailment on the nation’s soul.