TWO incidents that happened during the 1994/95 NYSC service year which I was part of in Birnin-Kebbi, Kebbi State, gave me profound culture shocks that I still remember till today. I would equally say that those incidents probably justified the Federal Government’s decision to float the scheme.
We were told that part of the reasons General Yakubu Gowon floated the NYSC was to ensure national integration, cohesion and exposure of young Nigerians to the cultures of other parts of the country other than where they were born.
First was the shock of seeing the director I was attached to in the then Government House, who had just taken a new wife, among drivers, gatemen and other far junior staff. I saw them seated round a huge iron pot of koko, a local delicacy, exchanging one big spoon made of calabash, as each scooped a portion of the koko and gulped the same. It was as if I was witnessing a scene where children of a big family were struggling to catch a portion of food or where people were eating saraa, as they say it in Yorubaland. As I walked past the noisy crowd, I was transfixed seeing the newly wedded director among that crowd. He saw me standing still as I couldn’t comprehend what he was doing there and got the message. “Taiyo (as he used to call me) you won’t understand’, he said as he waved me to keep going, so we see later. When we later saw, he explained that what he just did was a way of assuring the commoners “that we are all one”, as they felicitated him on the new bride. My young brain could not process how the occupant of a ‘huge office’ as that of a director in the Government House would sit among “ commoners” on a tattered mat sharing a single spoon and eating in public.
The other incident was quite pathetic. My friend, Tunde Omobuwa, was posted to a school in Yauri in the southern part of the state for his primary assignment. But he found the place very boring at weekends. So he arranged to always be with me on weekends. One of such weekends, we decided to take a stroll around the streets near the Government House. We took off from the place of my primary assignment, the Federal Information Centre, bought corn beside the office, and started blowing this thing they called ‘mouth organ’ as we strolled. We were completely engrossed in our gists and the sweetness of the mouth organs to note that some young boys were trailing us, praying that some leftovers of the corn would drop for them to scavenge. Somehow, the two of us dropped the cob almost simultaneously: we were more than taken aback by the commotion that had erupted behind us. Four eight or nine-year-olds had descended on the supposed leftovers and broken the cobs into pieces. I was again transfixed. It was as if one was hit by electric shock. Remember that feeling when you play with electric fish. I was moved to tears as I’d never ever seen a group of children scavenging on nothing as it were. I beckoned on the kids and offered them N20, which was the highest denomination at the time and with some smattering Hausa words told them to go buy their own corn from the same place we got ours. As they left, heading to the corn seller, I couldn’t erase that ugly sight from my mind. Was it really possible that some people scavenged on nothing this way? I was later to see children swarming around restaurants and pouncing on near empty plates. Those incidents told me clearly that the North was a different place and that the life of the boy child is not only risky and endangered but sold to stagnation and deprivation, except you join the lucky few.
Having benefitted from the free education policy of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) between 1979 and 1983 when the Second Republic was terminated, I knew there was a lot the government could do in educating the children. During my secondary school days, I was Library Prefect at a point and so I saw excesses of books supplied by the government to our school. So I was an example of the feasibility of free education, the same thing the Action Group government had done in the years preceding Nigeria’s independence and during the First Republic.
So why can’t the northern governments declare free and compulsory education for the young ones out there? Why should children be made to scavenge an empty corn cob just to see if they can find pieces of seeds left over? And why was my director giving drivers and gatemen in Government House the false hope that we were all the same, instead of challenging them to seek to lift themselves up the social ladder?
I think it was inexcusable for the North not to have adopted the free education policy like Chief Obafemi Awolowo did in the South-West. And if we say the North needs to look itself in the mirror, you again remember the efforts by President Goodluck Jonathan to educate the multitudes of Northern children through the Almajiri schools. That government built more than 400 of such schools, which were abandoned because they could upset the oligarchy. But the children of the poor who you refuse to train today won’t let the children of the rich sleep peacefully tomorrow. That’s a truism.
But the governor of Borno State, Prof BabaganaZulum, appears to have got the message. Last week, I was thrilled seeing him organise a summit to reform the Almajiri system.
The Almajiri education system is a traditional Islamic method of learning widely obtained across states in northern Nigeria. Through that system, which is tied to Islamic teaching, youths, especially boys, are kept out of the formal Western education system. I don’t know why the teachings by Islamic scholars cannot go alongside that of Western education as we have seen in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and other Islamic countries that are doing well economically and in the world of science and technology.
While addressing the summit, Zulum mentioned the need to address the root causes of insecurity through the provision of education for citizens of Borno, adding that improper teaching of Islamic studies had contributed to the emergence of Boko Haram insurgents in the state. According to him, to curtail whatever is the adverse effects of Almajiri education, the Borno State Government established the Arabic and Sangaya Education Board to introduce a unified curriculum for Sangaya and Islamic schools.
He said that the reform would include establishing Higher Islamic Colleges to cater for Almajiri children and blend the religious teachings with the secular curricula as well as skills.
He said: “The Sangaya Reform is a great development and will give Almajiri a better chance in life, particularly the introduction of integrating Western education, vocational, numeracy and literacy skills into the centres, which are also described as Almajiri and Islamic schools.
“The Sangaya Reform is a great development and will give Almajiri a better chance in life, particularly the introduction of Western education, vocational, numeracy and literacy skills into the centres, which are also described as Almajiri and Islamic schools. “Distinguished guests and esteemed educationists, government’s intention was to streamline the informal and formal education systems to quality integrated Sangaya schools for admission into colleges and universities.”
One would have thought that governors with radical postures like Nasiru el-Rufai and others before him would have proposed this type of reform. Better late than never, though. Zulum should be supported to get something out of this.
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