PRESIDENT Goodluck Jonathan has touched off a furore with his
controversial programme to build 400 almajiri schools with public funds.
By committing federal resources to Quranic schools, the President has
taken a dangerous step that could entangle the government in a messy
constitutional, political and bureaucratic quagmire. When recently, he
inaugurated a special school for almajiris in Sokoto, he took two wrong
steps.
First, he dabbled directly in primary school education, a function reserved for the states and local governments. Second, he stepped into a constitutional trap since the basic law expressly forbids the government from promoting any religious faith.
The constitutional breach has broad implications. By succumbing to pressure from some quarters, he failed to realise that he was somehow conceding to the blatant attempt by some interest groups to shift responsibility for the presence of over 10 million child-beggars in the North from the host states, where it rightly belongs, to the centre and, by extension, the rest of the country. Giving aid to any religious institution violates the Constitution. Jonathan should back out.
Almajiris are youths, some as young as seven, who are pupils of itinerant Quranic teachers. They are consigned to unmanaged fates. Their entire existence revolves around instruction in the Islamic faith and begging for sustenance, since no one fends for them. They are homeless; some may have left their parents in Maiduguri to end up in Kano, 600 kilometres away. The anachronism in this outmoded form of child abuse has long been acknowledged. What have been lacking are political will to outlaw it, the discipline to enforce free education by the northern states and principled and visionary leadership to declare the practice inhuman.
Babangida Aliyu, Governor of Niger State and Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum, has admitted this: “The system of almajiri served a good purpose in the past…but we have passed that stage now. We have now reached a situation with respect to almajiri where we have to be ‘wicked’ in order to be good to ourselves. We must say, ‘No,’ to this system and then work out how to integrate them (almajiris) properly.”
Modern society requires and deserves a truly secular state. We get into problems often because the Nigerian state has a penchant for breaching the Constitution. Nigeria is not a binary nation of Moslems and Christians or of North and South. We boast many faiths (countless profess no faiths at all) and myriad cultures and languages. The 1999 Constitution states: “The Government of the Federation or a State shall not adopt any religion as a State Religion.” The government cannot escape censure for violating, at the least, the spirit of the law, by building, funding and maintaining 400 schools catering exclusively to members of a faith, whose core curriculum is a particular religion. Will the government build schools for other faiths when some states irresponsibly abdicate their responsibility to provide child education and create a mass of beggars and social miscreants?
The Federal Government, through the Universal Basic Education Commission, substantially funds and supports primary education in the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory through grants for buildings and equipment while it provides teachers’ salaries. But not on a discriminatory basis. Even at that, most states cannot access UBEC’s matching grants because they fail to meet their own counterpart funding commitments. While most southern states can be faulted for this lapse, the northern states, with their excessively high levels of illiteracy, can be described outright as negligent.
Between 2005 and 2009, most states failed to access their UBEC grants. Shamsudeen Usman, the National Planning Minister, at a presentation in June 2010, quoting World Bank findings, recalled that Northern Nigeria had the highest number of children not going to school in the world. “The level of education of a people has a direct correlation to their living standards,” said Usman. In a report locating the 10 poorest states in Nigeria in the North in 2007, the Central Bank of Nigeria said that between 1980 and 2004, poverty increased in the Northern states from 36 per cent to 71 per cent compared to 13 per cent to 35 per cent in the southern states. Jigawa had 95 per cent poverty rate in 2004. The same state, with a 77 per cent illiteracy rate, spent billions of naira on information technology education for a few instead of promoting mass primary and secondary education for its millions of illiterates.
Ibrahim Gambari, a former foreign affairs minister, lamenting the dire situation of the North, said, “If you take the education of the girl-child, you see…the South-East having an enrolment rate of 85 per cent, South-West 85 per cent, South-South 75 per cent, North-East 20 per cent and North-west 25 per cent.” According to Nyesom Wike, Minister of state for Education, Borno has overtaken Kano as the state with the highest number of almajiris with 1.9 million child beggars.
Who is to blame? It is the states that should adopt mass education and public enlightenment programmes to get their children into conventional school system. The northern states should begin the task by “domesticating” the Child Rights Act, which makes education compulsory from age six to 15 years and forbids the marriage of girls less than 15. They should devote a substantial part of their resources to mass education and stop politicising religion.
Interrupting violence and transforming almajaris into vibrant citizens require joint efforts. But Jonathan’s approach is wrong. Other stakeholders should challenge the scheme, using legal means. Jonathan has simply caved in to the ongoing blackmail to make the central government accept responsibility for the incompetence, failure and negligence of the states that have created the almajiri problem. This should never be so. The Federal and State governments should stay off religions and their trappings.
First, he dabbled directly in primary school education, a function reserved for the states and local governments. Second, he stepped into a constitutional trap since the basic law expressly forbids the government from promoting any religious faith.
The constitutional breach has broad implications. By succumbing to pressure from some quarters, he failed to realise that he was somehow conceding to the blatant attempt by some interest groups to shift responsibility for the presence of over 10 million child-beggars in the North from the host states, where it rightly belongs, to the centre and, by extension, the rest of the country. Giving aid to any religious institution violates the Constitution. Jonathan should back out.
Almajiris are youths, some as young as seven, who are pupils of itinerant Quranic teachers. They are consigned to unmanaged fates. Their entire existence revolves around instruction in the Islamic faith and begging for sustenance, since no one fends for them. They are homeless; some may have left their parents in Maiduguri to end up in Kano, 600 kilometres away. The anachronism in this outmoded form of child abuse has long been acknowledged. What have been lacking are political will to outlaw it, the discipline to enforce free education by the northern states and principled and visionary leadership to declare the practice inhuman.
Babangida Aliyu, Governor of Niger State and Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum, has admitted this: “The system of almajiri served a good purpose in the past…but we have passed that stage now. We have now reached a situation with respect to almajiri where we have to be ‘wicked’ in order to be good to ourselves. We must say, ‘No,’ to this system and then work out how to integrate them (almajiris) properly.”
Modern society requires and deserves a truly secular state. We get into problems often because the Nigerian state has a penchant for breaching the Constitution. Nigeria is not a binary nation of Moslems and Christians or of North and South. We boast many faiths (countless profess no faiths at all) and myriad cultures and languages. The 1999 Constitution states: “The Government of the Federation or a State shall not adopt any religion as a State Religion.” The government cannot escape censure for violating, at the least, the spirit of the law, by building, funding and maintaining 400 schools catering exclusively to members of a faith, whose core curriculum is a particular religion. Will the government build schools for other faiths when some states irresponsibly abdicate their responsibility to provide child education and create a mass of beggars and social miscreants?
The Federal Government, through the Universal Basic Education Commission, substantially funds and supports primary education in the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory through grants for buildings and equipment while it provides teachers’ salaries. But not on a discriminatory basis. Even at that, most states cannot access UBEC’s matching grants because they fail to meet their own counterpart funding commitments. While most southern states can be faulted for this lapse, the northern states, with their excessively high levels of illiteracy, can be described outright as negligent.
Between 2005 and 2009, most states failed to access their UBEC grants. Shamsudeen Usman, the National Planning Minister, at a presentation in June 2010, quoting World Bank findings, recalled that Northern Nigeria had the highest number of children not going to school in the world. “The level of education of a people has a direct correlation to their living standards,” said Usman. In a report locating the 10 poorest states in Nigeria in the North in 2007, the Central Bank of Nigeria said that between 1980 and 2004, poverty increased in the Northern states from 36 per cent to 71 per cent compared to 13 per cent to 35 per cent in the southern states. Jigawa had 95 per cent poverty rate in 2004. The same state, with a 77 per cent illiteracy rate, spent billions of naira on information technology education for a few instead of promoting mass primary and secondary education for its millions of illiterates.
Ibrahim Gambari, a former foreign affairs minister, lamenting the dire situation of the North, said, “If you take the education of the girl-child, you see…the South-East having an enrolment rate of 85 per cent, South-West 85 per cent, South-South 75 per cent, North-East 20 per cent and North-west 25 per cent.” According to Nyesom Wike, Minister of state for Education, Borno has overtaken Kano as the state with the highest number of almajiris with 1.9 million child beggars.
Who is to blame? It is the states that should adopt mass education and public enlightenment programmes to get their children into conventional school system. The northern states should begin the task by “domesticating” the Child Rights Act, which makes education compulsory from age six to 15 years and forbids the marriage of girls less than 15. They should devote a substantial part of their resources to mass education and stop politicising religion.
Interrupting violence and transforming almajaris into vibrant citizens require joint efforts. But Jonathan’s approach is wrong. Other stakeholders should challenge the scheme, using legal means. Jonathan has simply caved in to the ongoing blackmail to make the central government accept responsibility for the incompetence, failure and negligence of the states that have created the almajiri problem. This should never be so. The Federal and State governments should stay off religions and their trappings.