The Nigerian Child and the Rights Denied

By Raji, Rasaq

In 2003, the Nigerian government signed what is today known as child rights act, years after ratifying and had domesticated regional and international laws on the child's rights. Despite this feat, the Nigerian child still faces myriads of denials, scuttling their chances of reaching their full potentials. These challenges range from acute poverty, extreme hunger, little or no access to quality and affordable education, inequality and gender discrimination, insecurity, diseases and sicknesses among others. Incidentally, of all these, education remains the only key that unlocks the solutions to other bottlenecks.

While acknowledging the denial of access to good education as the most destructive weapon by the elite and the duty bearers against the Nigeria child, it is imperative to dwell on the  immediate, underlying and the root causes of the denial to quality education, its undesirable impact on the child as well as the way forward.

In a recent data released in February 2018 by the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics (UIS), said "about 263 million children, adolescents and youth worldwide - one in every five - are out school, a figure that has barely changed over the past five years". According to the report, "a gulf between out-of-school rates in the world's poorest and richest countries, with an upper-secondary out-of-school rate of 59% across the world's low-income countries, compared to just 6% in high-income countries".

Another survey conducted by the UNESCO reveals that Nigeria has the largest

out-of-school children in the world, the number, having increased from10.5

million in 2015 to 13.2 million in 2018 (GLOBAL CITIZEN, December 2018).

Also, the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) Executive Secretary,

Dr Hammid Bobboyi said the 2015 Demographic Health Survey confirmed this

negative development (The Punch, October 5, 2015).

In his inauguration speech on June 12, 2019, President Buhari assured Nigerians that his administration would lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty by 2029, apparently targetting the United Nations plan for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG, 2030). According to him, it was a matter of setting in motion, policies that would ensure that the country's GDP grows by 2.7 per cent in 2019. According to him, "China and Indonesia succeeded under authoritarian regimes. India succeeded in a democratic setting. We can do it. With leadership and a sense of purpose, we can lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years." (The Cable News, June 12, 2019).

This is quite laudable, yet too Utopian, considering the snail-pace of policy implementation in this part of the world. When poverty and hunger become the least of our national headache, virtually all other items on the United Nation-Millennium Development Goals, UN-MDG  (2000-2015) will have been taken care of.

Unfortunately, Nigeria is rated as the 55th nation with the lowest Gross domestic product (GDP) based on purchasing-power-parity (PPP) per capita (International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook April 2019). This seems too dismal for Mr Buhari's projection.

      

Little wonder, eradication of extreme hunger is the number one list on the UN-MDG. As it stands, poverty and extreme hunger have been the immediate cause of denial of the Nigerian child to education. Unfortunately, governments, particularly in the third world countries often pay lip service to this problem. The resultant effects of this are inevitably illiteracy, poor human development index and backwardness in all human endeavours. Unfortunately, extreme hunger and poverty persist in most poor countries of the world, including Nigeria. Hence, more children of school age are still found on the streets during school hours.

Despite the effort of the Nigeria federal government to address the issue of hunger by introducing the Home Grown School Feeding Programme, there seems not to be much significant improvement in the number of school drop out, left alone improving on the new entrants. As at May 2019, Federal Government claimed that at least 9.3 million children were benefiting from the programme. Part of the aims of the programmes was to increase school enrolment and completion, improve child nutrition and health as Nigeria remains the third-largest population of chronically undernourished children in the world.

At the root of all these denials, apart from hunger as the immediate cause, experts have cited gender discrimination, social-cultural and economic environment barriers, and negative perceptions to formal education. For instance, UNICEF's Deputy Representative in Nigeria, Pernille Ironside (at a Northern Nigeria Traditional Leaders Conference on Out-of-school Children held in Kaduna in 2018) said more than half of the school-aged girls were not in school, particularly in the North-east and North West of Nigeria. The official said, "There are several reasons why these children are not in school. Gender is an important factor in the pattern of educational marginalization" (Premium Times, October 11, 2018).

In most cases, parents in poor homes exacerbate gender disparity by sacrificing the girl-child education so that the male-child can be educated. This attitude has had such devastating effects on the chances of girl-child in several instances. Many of them end up as stark illiterate, end up in early marriage, forced marriage, and incapable of making a meaningful contribution to either immediate society or the nation at large.

Similarly, in terms of social-cultural and economic environment barriers, cost of education and negative perceptions to formal education, Nigerian society has often played down the negative effects certain practices have on a child's education. For instance, many parents, particularly those with conservative views about discipline rarely see anything counter-productive in child-battery, even by teachers in schools. This often takes the form of excessive flogging and injurious punishment. As a result of this, hundreds of children play truant when the behaviour of some errant teachers becomes militant. Child-battery has been a social form of imparting discipline in the Nigerian homes and schools up till the year of the millennium when private school education was on a rapid rise. Private school education introduced a paradigm shift to the narrative around child-beating in schools. Unfortunately, private education itself has created a sort of barrier for the child because the cost is unimaginable.

Economic barriers are a social issue, arising from parents' inability to foot the child's school bill. To fill the gap, the child is engaged in hawking and other economic activities to support the family upkeep, even during the school hours. In consequence, the child, not only gets used to unruly behaviour associated with street urchins and thuggery, they get vulnerable to rape leading to unwanted pregnancy or death, kidnapping for rituals or ransom, and all sorts of accidents that tend to maim, destroy or kill. The child not only suffers the agony, but the parents also live with the loss and the society losses a future leader.  

The negative perception of formal education is still what many stakeholders in the child-education advocacy have to continue to grapple with. This is still inherent in the northern part of Nigeria. Many poor and illiterate parents in the North feel much comfortable with quranic and Arabic education, to the exclusion of western education. Incidentally, quranic and Arabic education, beyond religious and moral design, is quite not lucrative in Nigeria. Hence, the child, having spent much of their youthful age to acquire it, finds it pretty difficult to find their rightful place in the scheme of things.  

The Future is not Gloomy after all

First and foremost, every child must know and be made to know their rights. Of all rights, the child should be aware of their right to education. Once, this is delivered by the duty-bearers: Parents, Guardians, Custodians and Government, others shall be effectively taken care of.

In May 2019, UNICEF launched what is called "Passport to Your Rights", a publication in furtherance of the Convention on the Right of the Child (CRC) in child-friendly language, in pocket format. The aim is to get the Nigerian child acquainted with their rights. The childhood is the period during which the child is expected to play, learn, grow and develop. Once the child can grow with the knowledge that the rights exist, they can adequately demand them.

Again, governments, particularly at the state level, must adopt and ratify child rights in their states. Having done this, it is not enough that governments ratify and domesticate the Act, enforcement is very crucial. Up till now, not much evidence exists, (apart from Lagos State that has scaled up the fight) that parents and guardians who have blatantly breached the provision of the Act are facing the law. The child is found still begging for alms, hawking the street, and facing inequality and undue discrimination at homes and schools. All these must stop or reduced with will and passion.

Beyond enforcement and prosecution, governments must assist the poor fight hunger and poverty. Homegrown School Feeding is a good project in the right direction. However, the real impact is yet to be felt as hunger remains the scar on the faces of the Nigerian child. State governments must adequately be involved to make sure that the real child is the beneficiary of the scheme. Up till now, most state governments still put up some garb that highlights the scheme as, not theirs, but the federal government's initiative. Wrong attitude. All hands must be on deck.  

More importantly, it will benefit the child more if that educational policy is made more inclusive. Particularly in the north, the child is socially and culturally more at home with quranic/Arabic education. It, therefore, means that the child will learn and grow conveniently if the formal education system is woven around what is familiar. Couple with this, teaching skills and content of both should be blended in such a way that avoids undue dichotomy that highlights the so-called "Western/Islamic". With this, the distrust for western education will fade out.

Some critics have argued in favour of the extinction of the Almajiris system of education in the North to pave ways for western and more formal education. I doubt if this will work. Rather, a world of symbiosis should prevail. 

Raji Rasaq, head of media monitoring, IPC (rajirasaki2015@gmail.com)