Kano’s candlelight
It was Confucius the philosopher who gifted us with the admonition: It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. There is so much bad news all over the place that it is easy to miss some of the good things happening around us. It is good to keep your eyes open. […]
It was Confucius the philosopher who gifted us with the admonition: It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. There is so much bad news all over the place that it is easy to miss some of the good things happening around us. It is good to keep your eyes open. If you shut your eyes because you don’t want to see bad things, you will miss the good things which happen along with the bad. For me, the Nigerian glass is half full; my philosophy is not to focus on its half-emptiness.
We make a sing-song about what is wrong without taking positive actions to reverse the situation. So, I consider every positive intervention more valuable than billions of words. Take the almajiri problem in our Northern states for instance. Millions of children are left to roam the streets in the name of being Koranic students, whereas in Saudi Arabia, the second largest governmental spending goes for education as government spends 8.8 percent of its gross domestic product on education, compared with the global average of 4.6 percent.
Some people have tried to rationalise the almajiri issue. Indeed every well-meaning commentator on the problem runs the risk of being either misunderstood or demonised. If being an almajiri is such a glorious religious undertaking, why is it that none of the children of our pious political leaders and social elite are in the system? Why is it a vocation of the poor?
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said 10 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) have eight million out-of-school children. The states are Bauchi, Niger, Katsina, Kano, Sokoto, Zamfara, Kebbi, Gombe, Adamawa and Taraba states. Many of those states are noted for the high number of almajiri children roaming their streets.
Thankfully, we don’t have to go outside our borders to seek solutions. Controversial Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, Governor of Kano State, has seized the bull by the horns with his declaration of free, compulsory education in the state. Henceforth, primary and secondary education in Kano will be free for all school-age children in Kano. Also, tertiary education for Kano indigenes will be subsidised. The fruits of the seeds being sown by the governor will surely materialise in the years to come as happened in the Western Region of Nigeria which declared free and compulsory primary education in 1954 — 65 years ago.
Nothing spent on the education of children is wasted. Kano is in good company. In the Western Region budgetary allocation and government expenditure on education between 1954 and 1966, education attracted the largest share of the recurrent budget, varying between 28.9 per cent and 41.2 per cent during the period. This, undoubtedly, represented one of the highest proportional expenditures on education, the world over. “Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave”, says Henry Peter Brougham.
According to a UNICEF study, about 69 per cent of the Nigeria’s out-of-school children are in the northern part of Nigeria with about 13 per cent in the FCT.
Mallam Aminu Kano, the philosopher-politician who devoted his life to advocating for the masses, must be smiling in his grave. It was he who prophesied that, “Nigeria will know no peace until the son of a nobody can become somebody without knowing anybody”. Now, how does the son of a nobody become somebody without access to education? Kano State, with a population of 13 million and over 3 million children out of school, has now blazed the trail. Other states with millions of out-of-school children should follow suit.
It isn’t so difficult to understand why Boko Haram and other such terrorist groups find a ready supply of fighters from the ranks of the almajiri and other children of the poor. When the mind is not developed, it can be hijacked by any seemingly fascinating ideology which promises free food and life more abundant in the hereafter.
Ganduje’s Kano State has also lit another candle in the area of cattle herding. The government has provided land and promises to install facilities that would enable cattle rearers carry out their trade in a secure and peaceful environment, free of clashes with farmers. Kano state sits on 20,131 square kilometres.
The government has established five grazing reserves to address the recurring clashes between herdsmen and farmers. Ganduje said it was no longer fashionable for herdsmen to wander through the length and breadth of the country searching for pastures. He said the state government would provide mechanised boreholes, fodder and other facilities in the reserves to make it unnecessary for herdsmen to roam the wilderness in search of animal feeds. As an initial teaser, more than 60 herdsmen were trained in Turkey for animal insemination to improve cattle reproduction.
Again, that is the way to go. That is how Botswana, a smaller nation with a human population of 2.292 million, has 2,554,000 cattle, with the cattle outnumbering the humans. We cannot continue to argue for the continuation of a system of roaming the wilderness when a better job could be done from a well provisioned settlement.
Watch out, Kano is on its way to becoming our own Texas, complete with ranches and local ‘cowboys’.
It is the duty of the elite to help lift the people from the shackles of backwardness, otherwise we will all continue to suffer the backlash of the myriad conflicts arising therefrom, including terror. As Mikhail Gorbachev once said, “Backwardness is the breeding ground of terror, and that is what we have to fight.”
The dark areas of our national life are not beyond remediation. The more candles we light the better.