That riot act to parents

Minister of Education Malam Adamu Adamu recently said the federal government will soon prosecute parents who refuse to enroll their children in schools. He said at a ministerial briefing that parents who sabotage efforts to reduce the number of out-of-school children would be made to face the wrath of the law. The minister said, “Unless […]

Minister of Education Malam Adamu Adamu recently said the federal government will soon prosecute parents who refuse to enroll their children in schools. He said at a ministerial briefing that parents who sabotage efforts to reduce the number of out-of-school children would be made to face the wrath of the law.

The minister said, “Unless the issue of parents who refuse to send their children to school is made a crime and we start jailing parents, the menace of out-of-school children will not be resolved.” He said there are many parents who are still hiding behind culture and religion to deny their children the right to education. “The ministry”, Adamu said, “is to effect this policy so that any parent who refuses to take his school-age child to school will be jailed.”

Primary education was supposed to be free, universal and compulsory since September 1976, when General Olusegun Obasanjo launched the Universal Primary Education [UPE] scheme. Twenty three years after that, President Olusegun Obasanjo re-modeled UPE and launched the Universal Basic Education [UBE] scheme in Sokoto in September 1999. This policy extended free and compulsory primary education to cover three years of junior secondary education.

The Universal Basic Education Act [2004] provides for “compulsory, free universal basic education for all children of primary and junior secondary school age in the Federal Republic of Nigeria.” UBE aims at ensuring an uninterrupted access to 9-year formal education by providing free, compulsory UBE for every child of school-going age and reducing school drop-outs. Every learner who has gone through nine years of basic education should have acquired appropriate level of literacy, numeracy, manipulative, communicative and life-skills as well as the ethical, moral and civic values needed for laying a solid foundation for life-long learning.

The UBE Act provides that a parent who does not enroll or who withdraws his/her child/ward from school contravenes Section 2 (2) of the Act and therefore commits an offence. He is liable on first conviction to be reprimanded; on second conviction to a fine of N2,000 or one month in prison or both; and on subsequent conviction to a fine of N5,000 or two months in prison or both. These sanctions are meant to compel every parent to act responsibly towards ensuring that his/her child or ward attends and completes primary and junior secondary school education.

Forty three years since we launched UBE, the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria keeps rising. This is despite the Buhari Administration’s commitment to the School Feeding Program, a strategic feature of the UBE Act. 2018 statistics given by Universal Basic Education Commission’s [UBEC] Executive Secretary Dr. Hamid Bobboi put the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria at 13.2 million, one of the highest in the world. This shows an increase of two million over the ten million that remained unchanged for many years.

If the high rate of out-of-school children as part of government failure to cater for the basic education right of the Nigerian child is still a matter of concern, something must be wrong with the implementation of the policy. Beyond the Federal Government’s School Feeding Program, there is the need for state governments to be proactive in their commitments to basic education.

Unless essential teaching and learning facilities are adequately provided in schools, more school-age children would continue to be alienated from basic education. Owing to the lackadaisical response of states to UBE counterpart funding, the minister recently said “the federal government will have no choice than to sustain its strategy of deducting counterpart funding of states from source.” Section 9 (b) of the UBE Act provides for the disbursement of matching grant from the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) of 75 percent to states on equality basis.

It is one thing to threaten parents, but state and local governments must also place higher priority on basic education. Otherwise, they lose the moral authority to prosecute parents that fail to send their children to school.