We have a folk song that relates to the bone of a tortoise, eegun alabahun. We sing this song during the masquerade festival. The song forewarns of the consequences of eating the bone of a tortoise. Why? Mystically, it is believed that eegun alabahun are in two parts. One part is capable of bringing wealth to the eater. The second part is capable of making the eater experience uncommon poverty. Unfortunately, nobody has the capacity to differentiate the two parts. Hence we sing: “Ti o ba gbo guru, maje. Eegun alabahun; o ni ti osi, o n iti ola;eegun labahun (when you hear the cracking, don’t eat it, tortoise bone is of wealth and of poverty). When the elders say “what is not sufficient should not be wasted”, they are simply admonishing us to guard jealously, the very little that we have.
A man with scarce resources should not be profligate. The wisdom here appears to be lost in what is happening around us. The recent happenings in the nation’s educational system, especially in the Northern part of the country, where bandits and gunmen, storm schools at will and haul school children in their hundreds into the bush, call for concern.
Concern not only by those who live up North, and have their children at the mercy of the felons, but of concern to everybody, who wishes this country well. The level of insecurity, especially in schools in the North has reached a stage, which in my own estimation, is enough for the Federal Government to declare a state of emergency in that area.
The orgy which started on April 14, 2014, at Chibok, Borno State, has traversed its incubation stage and has spread like harmattan wild fire to other states in the North East, North-west and North-Central zones.
Incidentally, the madness of school abduction has reared its ugly head in the South-South, with the isolated kidnap of two students and a teacher at the Institute of Construction Technology, Urhomi, Edo State.
In essence, what we felt was a northern preserve is gradually coming home to us anywhere we are in Nigeria. Just four days ago, the Saturday Tribune did a story entitled: “S/W govts tighten security at schools”.
The magazine story externalises the anxiety of governments, school owners, parents and guardians in the South-West, where though no such abduction has taken place, is becoming apprehensive that it could happen. The fears in the South-West and any other zone are not misplaced. When your mates begin to die in their numbers, it is a sign that your day too is close and you should begin to put your house in order.
Since 2014 when the first mass abduction of school children took place in Chibok with 276 school girls taken into captivity, the nation has recorded a total of 724 of such victims. Of the lot, however, only two were abducted in the South. This indicates that something is wrong somewhere in the North.
Why am I particular about the North and the insecure schools over there? I will answer presently.
Since the unfortunate 1914 amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates into what we have now as Nigeria, the destiny of an average man or woman living down South has been intertwined with that of an average man or woman in the North. The same applies to any Northerner. What this means is that once a section of the chequered nation refuses to grow, its retardation affects the other parts that are making progress.
Education and literacy level, no doubt, is part of the parameters used to measure and stratify a nation into developed and underdeveloped. Nigeria remains largely underdeveloped because, a very massive part of the country keeps moving in reverse order. In the nation’s educational history, the North is largely regarded as disadvantaged in many ways. The first time I heard the phrase, “Educationally Disadvantaged States”, EDS, was in my secondary school days when I wanted to fill the Joint Admission Matriculation Board, (JAMB), form. What EDS simply means is that for candidates from the Northern part of the country, there are special considerations for them in terms of placement in tertiary institutions; such that even with low scores in the matriculation examination, they stand the chance of gaining admission into the institutions, whereas, their counterparts down South with higher scores will not get the same concession.
The policy, discriminatory as it is, aims at bridging the educational gap between the North and the South. The policy gives undue advantage to the Northern candidates over their Southern counterparts, but even at that, the North, has never at any time been able to fill its quotas in the nation’s institutions of learning.
While one may frown at the unequal treatment of natural equals in that JAMB admission policy, one also needs to consider the fact that the fate of the nation is jointly determined -and in most cases, primarily determined by the North. So, it is easy to just let it go so that there will be a semblance of determination to grow from the North. That is the goodwill and the concession the South has to give in the spirit of nation building, unity, love and progress.
Sadly and very disturbing too, it is the same goodwill that is being wasted by the bandits, who themselves are creations of leadership failure, who keep abducting school children in their hundreds from their dormitories.
Why the North is doing this to its own educational system, knowing the yawning gap between it and the South, beats my imagination. The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, (UNICEF), in an article published recently, stated that “One in every five of the world’s out-of-school children is in Nigeria. Even though primary education is officially free and compulsory, about 10.5 million of the country’s children aged 5-14 years are not in school. Only 61 percent of 6-11 year-olds regularly attend primary school and only 35.6 percent of children aged 36-59 months receive early childhood education. In the north of the country, the picture is even bleaker, with a net attendance rate of 53 percent. Getting out-of-school children back into education poses a massive challenge”. The organisation went on to paint the sorry state of things, educationally, in the North thus: “Ensuring educational provision in predominantly rural areas and the impact of insurgency in the northeast present significant challenges. In north-eastern and north-western states, 29 percent and 35 percent of Muslim children, respectively, receive Qur’anic education, which does not include basic skills such as literacy and numeracy. The government considers children attending such schools to be officially out-of-school. In north-eastern Nigeria, 2.8 million children are in need of education-in-emergencies support in three conflict-affected States (Borno, Yobe, Adamawa). In these States, at least 802 schools remain closed and 497 classrooms are listed as destroyed, with another 1,392 damaged but repairable”.
Now you may wish to ask: if the situation is that bad in the North, what are the leaders there doing?
The first mass abduction of students took place in April 2014 in Chibok. By February 19, 2018, 119 school girls were abducted in Dapchi, Yobe State. 104 were released on March 21, 2018, with five of them dead and one, Leah Sharibu, remaining in captivity till date. The dare-devil bandits became more audacious when they marched into the Government Science Secondary School, Kankara, Katsina State and kidnapped 300 students. The interesting part of the Kankara abduction was that it took place the very day the Commander-in -Chief, General Muhammadu Buhari, entered Katsina for a short holiday.
On February 19, 2021, again in Niger State, gunmen invaded a school in Kagara and abducted 27 students, three staff members and 12 members of their families. Eight days later, on February 26, another set of students, all females, were hauled by gunmen at the Government Girls Science Secondary School, Jangebe, Zamfara State.
The situation trickled down to Uromi, Edo State on March 11, 2021 as some gunmen invaded the agrarian community and took hostage of two students and a lecturer. The bandits returned to the North three days after the Uromi experience and kidnapped three teachers of a Primary School in Kaduna.
Theories abound as to how the abductions began, especially in the North. There were political theories that the 2014 Chibok incident was aimed at getting the then president, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, out of office. As a matter of fact, the Chibok abduction was the major political weapon in the hands of the now ruling All Progressive Congress, (APC), which was in the opposition then. Buhari and his supporters promised that in their administration, a repeat of the Chibok mishap would never happen. True to their promise, Chibok has not happened since then but we have had Dapchi, Kangara, Kadara, Jangebe, Urhomi and Kaduna! Who knows where the next abductions would be!.
In all these however, what I find most intriguing is the ease with which the bandits abduct those students without any resistance.
Read the rest on www.tribuneonlineng.com
How on earth do you get 300 students to enter trucks without any form of friction? How do you drive a convoy of vehicles containing hundreds of students aged between 9 and 17 without drawing attention? How come there are no security intelligence pre-knowledge of the attacks? The children did not cry or shout while being driven to captivity? The villagers around the schools where the children were kidnapped are the ‘see-no-evil, say-no-evil’ type? What about the security agencies in the areas? Why did, for instance, Niger and Zamfara States not learn from the Kankara episode? Who, allegedly, withdrew the military from the post in Dapchi to pave way for the 5.30p.m abduction of the 199 school girls?
The questions are unending and one can only hope that one day, the truth of the shenanigans behind schoolchildren abductions will be known. But while we wait for that day to come, may we begin to question the competence of the leaders who watch helplessly or mischievously while this kind of anomaly is visited upon our psyche as a people.
The North needs to catch up with the South, education wise; though the South itself is not stagnated. But that catch-up cannot take place in a situation like we have at the moment in the North. Allowing school children to be kidnapped at will interrogates the desire of the North to catch up with the South. A zone with such a poor report of school enrolments, huge number of out-of-school children and an abysmal record of girl-child education cannot afford what is happening to it right now. The people in the region must ask themselves genuine questions. Those of us down South must not keep quiet too. What the North is eating now with the frequent mass abduction of school children is akin to eating the bone of a tortoise (eegun alabahun). In this case however, this bone is one too hard for the tiny esophagus of the North to swallow without sounding its death knell. Should that be the case, we, down South, must be on our guard lest the North drags us down to Hades!
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