Nigeria’s Broken Children

SOURCE: www.marcusbleasdale.com

By Adejoh Idoko Momoh.

Do you know Nigeria has an internally displaced population of 3.3million? And most of these displaced people are women and children? As things are these 3.3 million people are only the officially registered internally displaced persons and many other unregistered internally displaced persons may exist. About 850,000 people in Nigeria’s North East region are internally displaced and the National Emergency Management Agency has set up only 23 camps to cater for them. What this means is that this agency expects an average of about 36,956 people to live in any one of these 23 camps which are mostly National Youth Service Corp camps or secondary schools that do not have the facilities to deal with such a population.

Sometimes, I wonder what it means to be displaced. What it means to abandon your home, to run from the certainty of all that is familiar into the uncertainty of mountains and bushes. In all my questing, I have asked a few people what that all important thing they will take is: when they hear bombs in distance and the sound of gunfire approach, what is that one thing they take as they leave, of all the people I have asked two variables kept recurring; certificates and cash. A few people said things like iPads and travel documents, but those were really few.

In justification of the choice of their certificates, most people say that when the insurgents eventually are conquered and there is relative security, only their certificates will help them rebuild their lives. Considering that since the civil war in 1960 at no point have Nigerians been forced to leave their houses such as now and when there is a constant threat of death education mostly becomes secondary, it is encouraging that people still believe in the capacity of education to get them out of hopelessness and into opportunity.

In all of these, children are perhaps the worst hit as they are most times pulled from schools and develop an unwillingness to return to education. It is not hard to imagine why. The insurgents who terrorize them serve to fight and banish Western education, the psychological effects of this is in time schools begin to remind these children of horror, of death and bombs.

Perhaps to alleviate this, in addition to clothing and food drives we carry out for displaced persons, we should provide these camps with teachers and mentors. With guides and matrons, because when you live in such atrocious circumstances there is the tendency that your world becomes small; reduced from beauty and possibilities to the sound of shelling and gunshots.

This by itself is a tragedy we must never allow happen: we must raise structures that empower Internally Displace Persons (IDPs) to change their mindsets from those of victims to survivors. As it is, we are doing dangerously little to help child victims and it is only our help that can help them win the war against the very same insurgents who made them leave their homes and schools in the first place. Doing anything less will amount to the insurgents winning and the children loosing.

Most people argue that from the United States to Kenya and Pakistan or France, Nigeria is not the only country battling insurgency either on its shores or in an ally nation. The thing with the Nigerian state is that we lack the capacities these nations have demonstrated in dealing with these insurgencies and even when we make progress in infrastructure or the economy, lives don’t improve because the basic necessity of security is not provided.

On one of the only times I met a displaced child; I asked her the kind of questions you expect a concerned older person to ask. I asked her ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ I half expected to hear doctor or pilot or hair dresser, but no. Her face turned blank and she said ‘Alive’. ‘I want to be alive when I grow up’. I did not ask any more questions. The tragedy that the Nigerian state has become hit me.

Adejoh Momoh (momoh.adejoh@gmail.com) can be followed on twitter @adejoh

The Red Lipstick-ed Teacher

BY Adejoh Idoko Momoh

We’ve all had that one teacher who was so tough on all her students that she was generally feared. That one in her middle ages who would wear layers and layers of very bright red lipstick and would come to school in stilettos. She mostly would teach a subject like English and would speak it impeccably, such that she would feel somewhat superior to fellow teachers who spoke the language averagely.

‘Take out a sheet of paper and have your writing materials ready’

she would say as she cat-walked into class one morning. She would administer an impromptu test that would form part of our continuous assessment even though she did not prepare us for it. All through primary school as I remember it, I had never felt as much pressure about passing a simple test as I did that day.

I had written about Kenya’s Maasai people and their distinctive, a-little-too-colorful customs. How they believed soil was therapeutic and they buried themselves in the ground for healing. And then I waited, held my breath as she sat at her table with cane by her side scoring our essays.

As she passed by me returning test scripts, I would see red circles correcting grammar on the first page of my essay and I would think of how she now considered me a failure. How the matron when I got back to the hostel would consider me same and my dad… His face as he looked at the test script not saying anything but probably contemplating if it was still a wise decision to have me in school.

I would flip three pages and what I would see would shock me;

97%. With a tiny gold star next to it.

The universally feared teacher who made it a point not to ever give good grades gave me an A. She didn’t just stop there; she stapled a tiny piece of paper just at the bottom of my script that made me feel special, very special.

‘Excellent storytelling. You have an ease with words. You do us all a disservice if you do not consider a career in writing’ 

The words so profound, no one had ever said anything like that to me. Except of course for my mom who in typical mom-like manner would say I was particularly skilled at whatever it is I told her I was interested in and that I was a genius who would redefine everything I set my hands on. This was when I knew I wanted to write. I knew I would purposefully look for something to genuinely compliment about people whenever I met them. For the sole reason that affirming words like these from friends, mentors, teachers, family, strangers even, make us into the people we ultimately become. They point us in the direction of a dream, make us consider or at least contemplate it.

Words carry immense power and it’s no good trying to deny this. My very favorite quote by Nigerian writer, Toni Kan is ‘sometimes the verbal wounds we inflict on others live with us for the rest of our lives’. As far as our words can go to tell someone we believe in them, they can also tear us or someone else down, make them question the very essence of their lives.

This is perhaps why we need to speak a little more kindly, a little more thoughtfully. Make conscious efforts to have our words motivate people rather than discourage them, inspire them as opposed to devastate them. We most often have no idea what impact a few words stringed together can make. 

Share stories of someone who has been an inspiration to you in the comments or send me a private mail at momoh.adejoh@gmail.com.

For Nigerians, it may be time to panic

By: Adejoh Idoko Momoh

Consider these scenarios: 50,000 teachers cannot pass a basic test in elementary English; illiteracy rate of about 70%; only 10 out of 1.6 million candidates that sat for university entrance examinations scored a pass mark of 300 and above out of a possible 500. Add this to a situation where 10.6 million children are out of school - the highest school aged children out-of-school population in the entire world, then relate these to the fact that all these take place in a nation with a GDP growth rate higher than all other African nations except South Africa.

This conundrum is representative of the inherent contradictions in Nigeria, where the government keeps brandishing largely useless growth figures in our faces, but where people are confronted daily by an increasingly divided citizenry, deteriorating security conditions, decaying infrastructure, rising unemployment, unprecedented corruption, impunity and falling standards of education.

Ordinarily, the scenario depicted above would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious. Unfortunately, for 170 million Nigerians who normally should set the pace for the rest of Africa in human capital development and educational attainment terms, the reality on ground is that they are plagued with a largely dysfunctional system that encourages an ever growing population of young people who would constitute an uneducated, unemployable generation with little useful roles to play in society.

The Ministry of Education would be quick to come up with excuses: attribute its many failures to a lack of finance and complain that it is not allocated some 26% of Nigeria’s national budget as is recommended by the United Nations. Yet of its dismal 8% budgetary allocation in 2012, the ministry only expended 20% of its capital provisions as at September the same year. This simply points to the fact that the ministry itself has no vision to accommodate the resources they often put forward as needed.

This immediately brings questions to mind, can this ministry that cannot implement an 8% budgetary provision wholly be trusted with 25%? Can the government afford to fund this ministry as much as it deserves? Is it not a fact that a former Education Minister, Dr Oby Ezekwesili admitted the above, and included the ‘Adopt A School’ program as part of Corporate Social Responsibility? Sadly, no sooner than she left office was her ‘Crisis’ reforms document thrown out too. What place does alternative education have in our current education system? How did our technical schools that served to train experts at skilled work loose relevance?

The truth is Nigeria’s education sector is in need of reforms and every Nigerian should take up this responsibility, demand an education revolution from our government. Peaceful protests like the Occupy Nigeria or the Project Cure rallies that have been beneficial for fuel subsidy as well as currency restructuring would do just as good for education. The creation of specialist universities may prove to be more beneficial than universities that aim to offer all courses. Would it not be a more informed thought if the President considered strengthening the capacities of existing universities as opposed to building new universities in every state? 

Challenges abound with reforming our education system. Time for one; reforms would take a little more than 4 years focused on planning, training, implementing and some more training. Take China as example, the country has had over 50 years of mandatory 9 year basic education and various laws guaranteeing access to education for minorities, women and the handicapped, yet the country has not totally attained universal basic education coverage. Nigeria has not even started. Discouraging as this may be, it is not reason to delay the reform process that would benefit generations of Nigerians to come.

Yes, there is a Universal Basic Education Board and 35 other state versions called State Universal Basic Education Board but what are these SUBEBs doing? Take a state like Kaduna for instance with a school aged out of school percent population of 51.6%, the state SUBEB has a zero capital allocation for the years 2013 and 2014, while there is a recurrent expenditure of N116.5m and N128.2m respectively. In view of the above, you decide if this demonstrates political will to curb the education menace?

This lack of political will to train and develop the people we refer to as Nigeria’s future goes beyond formal education; we see it even in the field of technical education too. The 2013 National budget has a capital provision of N40 million set aside for the National Business and Technical Education Board while its recurrent provision is N1.2billion, also there is a N300million capital provision for the National Board for Technical Education Secretariat while its recurrent expenditure is N1.3billion- about 300% above Capital Expenditure. With miserable capital provisions as detailed above most technical schools are shut down, the few that function do not have updated curriculums and therefore offer training that is of very little relevance to modern trends and realities.

For Nigerians who belong to the dwindling middle class and are rich enough to afford foreign education or training for their children and perhaps feel like the dearth of education infrastructure in Nigeria should not bother them, they are sadly mistaken. I conclude with the tale as narrated below, it is my hope that from it we all have a rethink. 

A man wise beyond his years once said, ‘the children we do not train now would kill those we have trained.’ He then explained how a Harvard trained student came visiting his parents in Lagos for a week and how on a hot afternoon made worse by the failure of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (P.H.C.N) to provide electricity, he decided to take a walk. As he walked, he saw a miscreant steal a lady’s purse and sought to challenge the man. The man simply pulled out a gun, shot this foreign educated student and rode off on his motorbike.

Adejoh Momoh (momoh.adejoh@gmail.com) can be followed on twitter @adejoh