Not enough time for school: Nigeria’s children in poverty

“I envy your life”, a 15-year-old Seyi told his friend, Praise, 13, one evening after school. Seyi had just gone to Praise’s house to fetch water from their borehole, 300 meters away from his home, sitting in a peri-urban area of Ibadan, Oyo State.

“Why is that?” Praise asked to which Seyi responsed “you don’t have to fetch water, take care of your siblings and tend to your mother’s shop. I bet you don’t even wash your clothes. You have a washing machine for that. You even follow the school bus to school. You have a perfect life. What won’t I give to have your kind of life.”

A typical day for Seyi, as he narrates it, starts at the crack of dawn. He helps his mother, married to a man they hardly see, bathe, cook and feed his three other siblings before seeing two of younger siblings to school. By the time he gets to school, the first period, sometimes the second period, has ended.

Seyi is the first child of his mother and sixth of his father.

Zainab, 12, along with her sister, 8, help their mother, a widowed 35-year-old, put food on the table, hawking all sorts of small priced items at the close of school, and sometimes missing school altogether. It could be pepper today, or okro tomorrow, depending on amount of capital she could raise for the business, their mother, Shakirat said.

In Northern Nigeria, children help their fathers in the farm. Alwali, 13, spends three-hours in his father’s rice farm in the outskirts of Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi State, before heading for school every morning and returning to the farm after school hours. His older brother, Hassan, 16, dropped out of school to keep Alwali in school, this reporter was told late last year.
“These children separately said although they love to go to school, they hardly have enough time to spend in school, or to do their homework after their schools close.”

United States Department of Labor’s data put Nigerian children aged seven to 14 years combining work and school at 28.1 per cent.

Child poverty in Nigeria is often overlooked, sociologists in Nigeria often lament, warning that this is a dangerous trend that needs to be sniffed as quickly as possible.

Seventy (70) per cent of Nigerian children currently live in extreme poverty, while across Africa, 280 million children suffered the same fate 2016, according to a UNICEF report. Worldwide, nearly 385 million children in the world are live in extreme poverty, according to a joint World Bank Group – UNICEF study.

In Nigeria where poverty rate jumped from 27.2 per cent to 69 per cent between 1980 and 2010 according to National Bureau of Statistics’ 2012 data, it is not so surprising that Nigeria is home to a higher percentage of children living in poverty, a development specialist, Kemi Adediran says. In fact, it is an expected trend when there is a severe lack of social investment in a country such as Nigeria, she adds.

Oxfam International and Development Finance International (DFI) recently indicted Nigeria for failing to invest in social spending, thus, failing to tackle inequality in the country.

“Nigeria has the unenviable position of being at the bottom of the Index. Its social spending (on health, education and social protection) is shamefully low, reflected in very poor social outcomes for its citizens,” the report reads in part.

Nigeria ranked 152nd out of 152 countries surveyed for the organisations’ Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI) Index report.

“Nigeria has failed to make use of the tools available to them to tackle inequality…Failure to tackle this growing crisis is undermining social and economic progress and, crucially, the fight against poverty,” the report says.