Adamawa: The story of abandoned adult literacy classes

When an adult literacy instructor told Bawuro Hamman Joda that even in his old age, he could go to school and learn how to read and write, the old man couldn’t believe it. In fact, he claimed, he reproved the instructor for such disrespect or humiliation! Maria John, 22-year-old, maybe an adult but she doesn’t […]

When an adult literacy instructor told Bawuro Hamman Joda that even in his old age, he could go to school and learn how to read and write, the old man couldn’t believe it. In fact, he claimed, he reproved the instructor for such disrespect or humiliation!

Maria John, 22-year-old, maybe an adult but she doesn’t look it as she has a girlish face. She successfully enrolled in a Numan Primary School and joined 14-year-olds in class. Her mission was simply,’’ to acquire knowledge.’’

She has been at school for over three years. She came without knowing how to pronounce a word in English, but now she is proud that nobody can “backbite” her. Maria enrolled because she wanted to learn how to communicate in English.

Like Maria, eight years down the road, Hamman Joda, 42, doesn’t regret the young instructor’s ‘insult’. The man enrolled for the adult literacy, class that convenes at one of the town community colleges and has since learnt how to speak and write in many languages, including English.

He may not be as fluent in English but the man quite communicates with much ease, sustaining a conversation to the very end.

Having learnt how to speak and write, he was preparing to go all the way through formal schooling until he acquires a diploma certificate, and even go beyond, Bawuro Hamman Joda told Sunday Trust.

For now, Bawuro and his adult classmates, age is not a barrier to searching for knowledge, hence their desire to enroll into the adult literacy class. To them, adult education, having picked up about 12 years ago, is more than a welcome relief to most of the aged who see the need for schooling.

Instructor’s testimony

Malam Salihu Tola was an adult instructor with the Adult Centre for Literacy Education, a local NGO that promotes adult education in Ganye Chiefdom. Tola says that initially, most people would look at adult education as an activity of people who didn’t have what to do, but as time has proved, it’s more than a necessity.

“In the previous decades, one would slip through life without ever going to school and still live comfortably, but not anymore given today’s challenging world,” explains Tola.  The economic, political and social pressures have forced even the elderly to attain basic functional literacy.

The beginning of mess

However, while Malam Hamman Joda and others are working assiduously to achieve their dreams of being educated, the yearning of many Adamawa adults who are not opportuned to attain formal education continues to remain a pipe-dream for the past seven years. This followed alleged abandoned and suspension of adult literacy classes by the state government.

Sunday Trust was told that all the 400 classes across the 21 local government areas of the state were closed down in 2004, following the inability of the state government to pay the 400 instructors engaged to handle the classes of their monthly allowance of N1000 each per month.

The government‘s decision was based on the said advise of some top government officials who considered the N400,000 being spent monthly for the payment of the allowances nothing but a waste of resources.

Lamenting the plight of the state Mass Literacy Agency, the Executive Director of the Agency, Malam Aliyu Khalid, urged the state government to resuscitate the mass literacy class programme in rural areas which was suspended for nearly seven years ago.

“The allowance was just N400,000 monthly; that is N1000 each for the each of the 400 instructors but some people advised the state government to stop it saying it is a  waste of public fund,s”  Aliyu lamented.

He said since the stoppage, staff of the Agency were sitting idle until, in 2009 when the federal government introduced literacy by radio, “It is the federal government programme that is keeping us busy and so far, we have graduated 991 people out of the 1439 who enrolled for the literacy by radio programme for 2009 session,” Aliyu said.

He explained that out of those who graduated for 2009 session were 684 women and 337 men, while another set of 2088 people enrolled for the 2010 session are currently undergoing the programme.

The director said that out of the 2088 enrollees for 2010, 1070 are women and the remaining 1018 are men.

While urging the state governor, Murtala Nyako to intervene to check the continuous neglect of the mass literacy programme in the state the way he did for primary education, the director also noted that mass literacy deserves priority attention if the MDGs goal in education must be achieved, “Parents need to be educated or know the basics through the mass literacy programme for them to appreciate the need for their children to be educated,” he said.

Sunday Trust independently gathered before the present situation, government facilitates the learning through the functional Adult Literacy Programme This programme was hugely supported by UNESCO, Federal government  among other goodwill agencies, while now that the rural functional adult scheme suffers several setbacks, the most severe being limited financial resources.

In the previous budgetary allocation, government allocated hundreds of thousands of naira to the programme, but as Sunday Trust reveals, not even running cost is given for running the programme.

To worsen the matter, facilities like mass literacy vehicles, instructional materials are not only grossly inadequate but grounded, while weeds and reptiles battle to take over offices.

In the meantime, efforts to draw commenting from the State Commissioner of Education, Mr Gabriel Hamma Adama, proved abortive as this reporter was told that the commissioner was “somewhere for official engagement”.