On March 27 2014 at the invitation of Education As a Vaccine, I met with 30 young unwed mothers from Ijah and Daka in the Kwali Local Government Area of the FCT. Only two who had attended school for a while had a grasp of conversational pidgin. The rest could only communicate in their local dialect.
These girls live in small communities shut out from the rest of the world between May and September at the height of the rainy season. Many of them had never been to school or had to drop out due to lack of funds and cited the preference of their families to spend whatever funds were available on the education of their brothers. They lived in villages where no one sold recharge cards, where not a single grinding machine to blend tomatoes or beans existed and where they were forbidden by their village chief from frying kosai (akara) at night for fear of attracting witches. No education, no work, no commerce. Idle and frustrated, it is no surprise why these girls, some allegedly as young as 12 were considered eligible to learn about HIV/AIDS and reproductive health.
Nigeria has some of the most woeful statistics on education in the world. One of the five countries with the highest number of ‘out of school’ children in the world (10 million), UNICEF reports that 40% of the children between 6-11 are not in any primary school and the gender gap in some parts of the north is as high as 1 girl to 3 boys. As a result, basic education in general and girl child education in particular is a major source of concern. The Universal Basic Education Act passed in 2004 was supposed to be the backbone of the Federal Government’s plan to deal with the problem of millions of unskilled and unemployable youth (linked to violence around elections and most recently the Boko Haram insurgency) but the plan has not worked well. While the focus has been on rebuilding and renovating schools, building new ones and furnishing them, the strain of the large number of students means that the facilities still remain inadequate with reports of 1 toilet per 600 students. In turn, presuming that the quality of the teachers is unassailable, the ratio of 1 teacher to 100 pupils, means that the quality of the students who happen to beat the 30% primary school drop out rate is low.
This is the foundation upon which our secondary and tertiary education is built on and it is no coincidence that Nigeria has had an average failure rate of 70% in the secondary school certificate examination (WASSCE) for the last few years. It is also no wonder that the complaints about the quality and employability of graduates from public universities have increased.
There is a fierce urgency with which Nigerians need quality education in order to escape a life of zero options or a life limited to biological and physiological functions. Especially girls who unless things change for the better, will grow up to be women in a society with little social justice and security for them.
It is against this backdrop that the families of the students of Government Girls Secondary School Chibok decided that their daughters/sisters/wards need an education. The thinking must have been, that no matter how limited, education remains the most secure ticket out of a life of poverty and ignorance and one of the safest means of insuring a person’s future and freedom. Ironic then, that this pursuit for a better life resulted in the loss of freedom of over 200 girls who were captured by Boko Haram on April 14 2014.
Six months after their abduction, it is not clear if the irony and tragedy of what has happened to these girls and their families has hit enough Nigerians. I recently left my 11 year old in boarding school for the first time and I struggle daily to believe that he and his mates are safe there. Schools are supposed to be havens, a place to be inoculated against the vagaries of the future. We do not expect to hear students have been murdered or abducted by terrorists.
After security, education should be the next most important item in our national agenda – access, quality and safety of teachers and students. In a country where so many have no options and where people are dying to exercise the benefit, we really have no other alternative.
