Face-to-face with deprived children of Taraba

The farm kids looked shabby with tattered clothes covering just their waist. Their trunks looked grubby and their unkempt hair matted. But they were happy working on the maize farm. Their long hoes moved up and down in rhythmic precision as they uprooted the weeds among the maize. The eldest of the five kids working […]

The farm kids looked shabby with tattered clothes covering just their waist. Their trunks looked grubby and their unkempt hair matted. But they were happy working on the maize farm. Their long hoes moved up and down in rhythmic precision as they uprooted the weeds among the maize. The eldest of the five kids working on the farm sang beautifully like a parrot in his native Mumuye dialect, but his tone was melancholic. The future looks quite bleak for these kids but that is the lot of many rural children of Taraba State, who are virtually deprived. They lack early child care like most of their peers in towns and cities.

Hammaseyo is a sleepy village in Ardo Kola local government of Taraba State. It is an aboriginal Mumuye village with a handful of Fulani herdsmen and a good number of Tiv farmers. Investigations have revealed that over 600 school age children reside in Hammaseyo but less than a hundred have enrolled in the Hammaseyo Primary School. With a dilapidated block of just two classrooms and no desks, the pupils had to squat on the bare, dusty floor. Primary one to three cram in the first room, each class taking up a space allocated to it by the village headmaster. Primary four and five share the other room while primary six, with just 10 pupils, use a cubicle that in the original plan of the building should have been a store.

When our correspondent visited the primary school on a cloudy morning in July, the population of the pupils was scanty. It was 10 am on a Wednesday morning but just about 20 pupils were seen cleaning the school compound.

A dark complexioned sturdy man with a straggly beard, wearing a tread bare white Kaftan who gave his name as Joseph Gavo stood with a whip behind the poor children. He would have passed for a farmer with his coarse hands but he said he was one of the two teachers in the school. He claimed he has a Diploma in Theology from Christian College, Jalingo but he could barely communicate in English and he confessed that the pupils are given lessons in Hausa. But for that Wednesday morning, no lesson was given yet. Sometimes the pupils take three lessons a day in any of the five subjects that are taught in the school.

Mr Gavo displaying the only three texts books the school has said: “We are only two here and we do not have the instruction materials to teach all the subjects. For now, we teach only five subjects, Mathematics, English, Social Studies, Primary Science and Hausa.”

He lamented that school enrollment has dropped significantly, saying “few children now come to school. The few that do come, come anytime they want. It is 10 o’clock now but some will still come.”

It was noted that no primary six pupil was present in school. Both the school and the teacher looked unattractive and uninspiring and so could not motivate children to attend school. It is a neglected school, government has no real interest here and no inspector has come here in the past one year that Gavo has been teaching in the school. The school has existed for the past 10 years but few pupils have been graduated into post primary schools.

Emmanuel Danladi is a primary three pupil but does not know his age. He however told our correspondent in Hausa that he wants the government or donor agencies to renovate the school and furnish it with textbooks and desks and train teachers that will give them quality education.

Another pupil, Malle Andrews said she was in primary one but did not know her age and when she started school. She was barefooted and looked dirty but said she wanted to continue in school.

Just opposite the school, by the brook, Yunana Yusuf and his younger siblings were weeding a flourishing maize farm. The farm kids were once pupils of the school but they dropped out because there has been no motivation to continue in school so now they have to give a helping hand on the farm. Yunana could be 11 years but was in primary two when he dropped out last term when the rainy season began. His immediate younger sister, Helen could be 9 years but she has never enrolled in school. Alhassan, the youngest of the siblings could be 7 years and was in primary one but now he wants to be a farmer because he couldn’t remember learning anything while in school.

The State Universal Primary Education Board (SUPEB) at Jalingo is aware of the lack of basic facilities and teachers in Hammasayo Primary School but said it has no financial resources to take up the challenge for now. The Executive Chairman of the SUPEB, Mr Buba Joda Mafindi said the board has just finished implementing the action plan for 2010 and do not presently have the financial resources to undertake the construction of classrooms at the school. He however assured that once resources are available, the school will be evaluated and a physical survey carried out to see what can be done to upgrade it.

“Our evaluation report will guide us once we have the resources available. We have many of these schools across the state but there is a formula for allocating resources to all of them so that as many as possible can be renovated,” he said.

He however said there are 1, 514 public primary schools in the state and it was not possible for the board inspect all the schools in a four year tenure. He also said financial resources are not enough to renovate all the schools but said efforts are made to consider communities that have peculiar challenges like Hammaseyo.