Reading to Children

The Nigerian Export Promotion Council has stated that the film industry is the largest employer after agriculture, bringing in about $590 (USD) annually. Another booming sector, the telecommunications industry also has not only contributed to the economy but has enabled ordinary people to better communicate over long distances. The question remains, however, how many Nigerians […]

The Nigerian Export Promotion Council has stated that the film industry is the largest employer after agriculture, bringing in about $590 (USD) annually. Another booming sector, the telecommunications industry also has not only contributed to the economy but has enabled ordinary people to better communicate over long distances. The question remains, however, how many Nigerians are experiencing the economic benefits of the growing wealth in the country? The Oxford Research Group points out that the 2012 Poverty Survey conducted by the National Statistical Bureau put the number of Nigerians living in relative poverty at 71%, whereas “In 2009/2010, the perception index of households living in poverty had risen to 92.5 %.” The numbers show highest numbers of poor in the north. Scholar Hannah Hoechner, who did her PhD research with almajirai in Kano, writes this week about how almajirai experience poverty. Her piece adds nuance to how some of Nigeria’s poorest people experience Nigeria’s economic power and the assumptions people make about the contribution of poverty to the Boko Haram crisis. During her research, Hannah produced the film Duniya Juyi Juyi, which almajirai wrote and acted in themselves, and also contributed a piece to this column in June 2013 challenging a proposed ban on almajiranci. Hannah completed her PhD in Development studies at Oxford University earlier this year and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Belgium at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains (LAMC). I hand over the rest of my space this week to her. -Carmen

Hannah Hoechner
“Your family eats their tuwo without soup!” said a barefoot, maybe seven year-old boy in a football jersey several numbers his size. He explained that this sentence was a good example of an insult. Jokingly I had complained to the children in Albasu, a village in eastern Kano State where I lived for four months researching the almajiri system, that nobody had gone to the trouble of teaching me Hausa swearwords yet. As I did not want to risk failing to even notice potential insults, I sought to mend this gap in my language skills.
I was surprised to learn that children in Kano accuse each other of poverty when they quarrel. Two thirds of Nigeria’s population live below the poverty line. According to recent UNICEF figures, over one million children under five years in Nigeria are acutely malnourished. In Kano State, over half the children under five years are too small for their age. That suggests chronic undernutrition. Even tuwo with soup may not provide the necessary balance of essential nutrients and vitamins necessary for physical growth and cognitive development, nutritionists warn. Many families simply cannot afford meat or fruit.
Why do children experience poverty as embarrassing and even insulting? Many poverty researchers urge us to conceive of poverty as a social experience. Society defines what people need to possess in order to be able participate in the life of the community without feeling shame. Those who do not have the necessary resources are looked down upon. At best, they are pitied for their bad luck. More frequently, they are vilified as lazy, witless or parasitic. Poor people are aware of such negative stereotypes. According to a study done at the University of Oxford, people all over the world therefore feel ashamed of being poor. Their absolute income matters less than their situation relative to the rest of society. To some extent, we all interiorise the expectations of our social environment – even if we stand no chances of meeting them. Many poor people, therefore, seek to hide their poverty.
The larger the gulf between the poor and the rich, the more difficult it becomes to save appearances. Since the 1980s, income differences in Nigeria have been growing ceaselessly. In 1980, one in four Nigerians lived in relative poverty. That is to say, one quarter of Nigerians lived on less than two thirds of mean per capita income. In 2004, one in two Nigerians did.
Inequality makes itself felt in all domains of life. It is well known for example that children from different social strata rarely attend the same school in Nigeria. Those who can afford it send their children to private school. Many parents in rural northern Nigeria enroll their sons in traditional Qur’anic schools as almajirai because they cannot finance a modern education for them. Officially basic education is free, but in reality it implies recurrent costs. Textbooks, writing materials and uniforms need to be bought. Teachers levy informal charges to mend their meagre wages. Many poor farmers need their sons to help them till the fields during the farming season, and few schools are geared towards students who are absent for the better part of a season.
Yet, traditional Qur’anic students and their parents rarely talk about these difficulties. Instead, they reiterate how crucial it is to know the Qur’an and that the hardships of a life as traditional Qur’anic student teach you to endure. The young almajirai in my research emphasised time and again that they were out to seek knowledge. They insisted that the people who accused them of poverty were plain wrong.
Off the record I discovered more complicated life histories. I found out about cases where parents had been ill and households financially strained around the time a boy was enrolled as almajiri. I learned about the death of parents, which triggered a son’s departure to traditional Qur’anic school. Of course many boys become almajirai without there being an acute crisis in their family. Nonetheless, the question remains: why do almajirai not speak openly about difficult circumstances at home? The negative connotations of poverty provide a clue.
That the almajirai prefer to portray themselves as seekers of sacred knowledge rather than as victims of economic injustice comes in handy for the better-off in society. The constituencies of the almajiri system are routinely accused of being culturally ‘backward’ and of lacking appreciation for modern education. Describing them in such terms makes it possible to eschew uncomfortable questions about the inequitable distribution of wealth within the country.
 In the context of the Boko Haram crisis poorer segments of society serve as scapegoats, too. They have been led astray ideologically, we read, and now they provide the ‘cannon fodder’ for the insurgency. Many people also assume that, given their deprived living conditions, the almajirai make for easy Boko Haram recruits. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka for example writes that ‘economic factors have facilitated the mass production of these foot soldiers’ who can now be ‘rendered pliant, obedient to only one line of command, ready to be unleashed at the rest of society. They were bred in madrassas and are generally known as the almajiris.’
How founded are such accusations though? To date still little is known about who actually supports Boko Haram. Suppose that poverty is a chief predisposing condition, how do we account for the millions of poor people who have not joined the sect? If Qur’anic schools are major recruitment grounds, how do we explain that at best a fraction of the 9.5 million children who attend such schools across Nigeria become Boko Haram members?
In brief, we have to examine carefully how poverty and educational disadvantage matter in individual recruitment histories before we jump to conclusions. Simplistic explanations not only fail to offer meaningful solutions to the crisis. They also exacerbate the negative connotations of poverty, thus adding to the disadvantage poor people already suffer due to their lack of material means the injury of stigma.