Opinion
Dowen College, cults and the beast in our children’s hearts
In the last one week in the American and Nigerian cities of Michigan and Lagos, 1983 Nobel Literature winner and British author, William Golding, was literally woken up from the dead. Golding, novelist, playwright and poet, wrote the highly celebrated novel, Lord of the Flies.
If you underestimate the holy writ’s admonition that foolishness resides (is bound up) in the heart of a child, then you need to read this Golding’s 1954 debut novel. Woven round myriad thematic concerns, chief of which was the innate bestiality in man, Lord of the Flies, as a name, derived its etymology from the word, which in Latin means Prince of Devils and in Hebrews, a Philistine god, the Beelzebub.
It is the story of a group of British schoolboys, while Britain was entrapped in a raging war, who had the plane evacuating them shot down and were lucky to survive in a deserted tropical island. Stranded on this desolate and uninhabited island, the boys then resolved on the need, which eventually turned disastrous, to govern themselves. This led them to the process of formation of rules and a system of administration of their island. However, lacking the civilizing impulse of an adult, they eventually relapsed into their Hobbesian state of nature, exhibiting feral, warlike behavior, violence, brute force and cannibalism, with Golding teasing out the theme of man’s fundamentally savage human nature from the novel.
Last Tuesday, three students were killed in a shooting which occurred at Oxford High School, Oxford, Michigan in the United States. The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office identified the victims as Tate Myre (16), Hana St. Juliana (14), and Madisyn Baldwin, (17). Eight other victims were shot but sustained various degrees of injuries, including a teacher in the school. Of the lot, three’s cases were dire, including a 15-year-old boy who got shot in the head, a 14-year-old girl who was hit by bullets in the chest and is on a ventilator, as well as a 17-year-old girl, who was also shot in the chest.
The students were shot by their fellow student, Ethan Crumbley, a 15-year-old sophomore, in whose custody a semiautomatic handgun was found as at the time of his arrest. Police’s preliminary investigation revealed that the instrument of violence, the gun, was purchased by Ethan’s father on November 26, with three 15-round clips. Police also said that the suspect had recently posted photos on social media of himself shooting at imaginary targets and from investigations, the weapon of crime appeared similar to the gun Ethan practiced with. Immediately, James and Jennifer Crumbley, parents of the teenager, who has since been charged in the shooting, were arrested and charged with four counts each of involuntary manslaughter.
In Lagos, Nigeria, one of the raging subjects of the people’s anger today is the death of Sylvester Oromoni (Junior), a 12-year-old pupil of elite Dowen College, in the Lekki area of Lagos State. Two diametrically opposed allegations have been made about circumstances surrounding his death. While the family claimed that the lad sustained fatal injuries from wounds sustained from his colleagues’ attempt to forcefully initiate him into a school cult, hinging their claims on the disclosures made by the now deceased boy, the school claimed that Oromoni died from injuries he sustained from a football game.
The above two cases are one of the many incidents of adolescent asocial behavior that the world is grappling with today. Not strictly a new phenomenon, antisocial behavior operates as a cluster of related behaviours which range from aggression, violence, temper tantrums, lying, burglary, stealing, substance abuse, early sexual behavior, among others, rampant among adolescents. Though psychologists say the behavior is normative and is one of the features of certain ages of child development, these malevolent manifestations among children act as strong predictors of potential criminal behavior in adulthood.
Many of the adults who eventually grew into responsible parents and citizens today were at some point in their developmental growths notorious antisocial elements who gave their parents and society headaches. However, the reality is that, a huge chunk of these adults, weaned from the ashes of these antisocial behaviours, never recovered from the blows of the effects of their antisocial behavior. By the time they attempt to take up their destinies in their hands, it is almost always too late, thereby consigning them to the heaps and dustbins of life.
So many reasons have been adduced as reasons why children, many of whom hail from responsible homes, dither into reprehensible antisocial behavior. While peer group pressure and pollution by playmates who themselves are products of fractured homes, are factors that loom large in reasons why children go off the handle in their adolescence, parental influence is another major factor. Studies have revealed that antisocial parents, in their display of these behavioural patterns at home, rub off hugely on their wards who internalize these behaviours, unbeknown to them. Thus, psychologists have established that possessing an antisocial parent is a major force in the prediction of violent or serious delinquency found in adolescent and young children.
Lord of the Flies and the holy writ earlier cited above tell us that within the child is resident innate bestiality that parents and society must pertinently and painstakingly tame in a child. The problem is that parents have very wrong conception of the period of childhood and adolescence. They misinterpret the period as a time when the child is naïve and incapable of taking on delinquent behaviours. This is why parenting is a big job, something in the mould of the structural platform of a house construction which bespeaks the kind of super-structural objects that may be placed on the foundation. In the Michigan shooting event, unknown to James and Jennifer Crumbley, the couple was the ethos that Ethan learnt by rote. When they thought he was inattentive or absent from occurrences in his surroundings, he was fascinated by the piece of metal that his father had just purchased and perhaps secretly wished that someday, he would get to that same level of accomplishment of wielding a weapon that conferred on him power over the unknown other. The fatal shooting at Oxford High School, Michigan, for Ethan, was the culmination of that dream, the power to subjugate the other under his awesome powers.
The holy writ earlier cited was not oblivious of the constitutive innate bestial nature of the child. It recommended that “the rod of correction shall drive it (the Beelzebub) far from him.” Traditional African society also learnt early enough that the heart of the child is stony and only chastisement could soften it. Unfortunately, the technological modern age has purged punishment from the list of objects that can be used to rid the heart of the child of the Lord of the Flies. In some western societies, it is even criminal, a violation of the child’s rights, for parents to administer cudgel on their children. This has made the Beelzebub in the children to acquire multiple notorieties like the biblical Madman of Gadarene and the inability of society to dimension its bestial inclinations. Technology has further worsened the lot of the children, literally ensuring that a community of maggots meanders out of the bodies of our children. They have access to occurrences in practically all parts of the world within a twinkle of an eye and, rather than being a blessing, this exposure has further aggravated the rot in their hearts.
The world is witnessing a complex metastasis of violence, in nodes that are unprecedented. Weapons are acquiring frightening sophistication and small arms are as widespread as mushroom on the farm. Our children, whose brains are admittedly more sophisticated than ours, their parents, are moving with the tide of a sophisticated world. Deploying technology and the wizardry of their brains, they get involved in antisocial behaviors and crimes which, in our wildest imaginations, we cannot grapple with or anticipate in them.
While not prejudging what the outcome of investigations into the Dowen College death from alleged cult initiation will be, our society is just crying where we should exhibit admittance of our errs. The incidence of secret cultism in our schools has become a matter of concern to those who know how this negative growth is becoming a crisis. By 1999, more than 56 secret cults were said to have existed in Nigeria’s 133 higher institutions of learning and had penetrated secondary and even primary schools. Right now, the figure must have quadrupled because, the more civilization we receive, the more we sink into complex notorieties.
I have spoken in earlier pieces about the power of the dreaded ancient secret cult, Ogboni fraternity in Yoruba traditional African society. Membership of it is borne out of search for power, protection and fame/wealth. Cultism is one of the carryovers of traditional African society that has survived to this age of modernism. It arose from the need to protect and sustain some basic interests among a group of people, whose details are shrouded from being exposed to outsiders. Cult membership is usually a restricted affair and members are known to swear themselves to oaths of allegiance. This is how secret cults/societies have festered in centuries.
There are a plethora of metaphysical powers that initiates of blood, especially in fraternities and cults like Ogboni cult, wield and which entrap those in search of such authorities. Believing in the potent power of the Earth as a binding force, Ogboni use the edan (a twin object of a man and woman pegged on a cylindrical brass spare) in their lledi (shrine house) and sprinkles of blood to subtly encode obedience to rules and secrets. Not only does Ogboni ensure secrecy of affairs among its initiates, an espirit de corps is prized out of the initiates by blood oaths, thus suborning potential squealers off revelations of Ogboni secrets and dark acts of the initiates.
Peter Morton-Williams, former pro-vice chancellor of Ulster University and an eminent anthropologist, who worked for many years in Nigeria and Ghana, researching West African social anthropology, a leading authority on the history and culture of the Yoruba people, did an anthropological study of the Ogboni, entitled The Yoruba Ogboni cult in Oyo and An Outline of the Cosmology and Cult Organization of the Oyo Yoruba (1964). In them, Morton-Williams outlines the potency of blood in sacrifices and oath, explaining the interface with and how the public sphere is being recently inundated with hackneyed recounts of the cultic oath mess of our children. This work is a study in what probably drives interests in secret societies and why the elite take unqualified voyage into it, in spite of rapacious embrace of Christianity and Islam, and why the Ogboni still has controlling importance in Yoruba religious organization, centuries after it was established.
If it was found out that indeed, the pupils of Dowen College were attempting to recreate what their fathers and forefathers practiced for centuries, with same ferocity and manifest wickedness, how does our society want to blame the messenger and refrain from blaming the message? Golding’s Lord of the Flies, represented in boy characters like Ralph, Simon and Piggy (with his perceived metaphysical eyeglasses) not only built a central paranoia among the boys, it elasticized the concept of struggle and contestations in a metaphysical felon that must be battled. This, the novelist represented in the boys’ belief that a supposed monster called the “beast” existed on the island. The “beast” which at one point was felt to be the pilot who ejected from a crashed plane and whose carcass hung on the tree, soon became a fetish around which the whole of the children began contestations. The Dowen College students, while not likely to have totally apprehended what a cult was, perhaps also had the paranoia of power contestation that the boys in Golding’s had. Flexing of muscles, mixed up with violence and toughness, are fed into this game of wanting to behave like their fathers at home.
While we wail and cry over the calamity that befell the Oromonis and the victims of the Crumbley murders in Michigan – if it is found to be true – can we also press charges against the parents of the allegedly offending pupils at Dowen, especially if they are found to be accessories after the fact of the violent behavior of their wards, as the police did with the Crumbleys?
The greater worry for us should be that antisocial behaviors of all kinds have wormed themselves into the hearts of many of our children. It behooves parents and guardians to create time for the proper moral and psychological nurturing of their children, especially in this age where everyone is busy in the rat race for existentialist desires. Now is the time to mould their future, rather than heap on teachers the responsibility of keeping our wards on the straight and narrow, forgetting that the teachers also have their own demons that they daily contend with.
Celebrated columnist, Dr. Festus Adedayo writes from Ibadan
On Monday and Tuesday last week, workers and political operatives within the precincts of the new Senate building in the National Assembly complex, Abuja, were treated to a replica of the Theatre of the Absurd. This type of drama originated in Europe and later spread to America in the 1950s. It was influenced by existential philosophy and Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus.
In that work, Camus captured the fundamental human needs and compared the absurdity of man’s life with the situation a figure of Greek mythology, Sisyphus found himself, where he was condemned to repeat forever the task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, and repeatedly sees the same roll down the hill as he approaches the top.
He, thereafter, juxtaposed life’s absurdities with what he called the “unreasonable silence” of the universe to human needs and concluded that rather than adopt suicide, in frustration, “revolt” was required.
82-year-old Dr. Muhammed Adamu Fika, former Clerk to the National Assembly and former Chairman, of the National Assembly Service Commission (NASC), who calls himself the “smaller Adamu Fika,” must have come across the Camus essay in deciding to lead an emergency meeting of the Council of Retired Clerks and Secretaries of the National Assembly on November 18. The emergency meeting, which was jointly held with members of the Association of Retired Staff of the National Assembly was meant to salvage the pathetic plights of the National Assembly retirees.
Eighty-two-year-old Fika can hardly gather the pace to navigate round the corners of the National Assembly, but he insisted on making the trip to enable him to preside over the meeting as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Council of Retired Clerks and Secretaries. As his retiree colleagues, many of whom are far younger, saw him struggling to walk the required distance from the Bola Ahmed Tinubu Library, originally fixed as venue to the new Senate building, they had to provide some shoulders to lean on. At one stage, an office chair was converted to a wheelchair to ensure the elderly Fika got to certain locations. It was a sad tale, especially if you look at the essence of Fika’s trip to the National Assembly. He was there to preside over a meeting to press home the need for the payment of the entitlements of National Assembly retirees. An alarm had earlier been sounded on the different Whatsapp platforms of the retired workers of the National Assembly to the effect their members were dying in numbers. It was revealed that no fewer than 20 retired workers had died awaiting the payment of their entitlements in the recent past. Another set of retirees numbering 12 were said to have been bedridden in different hospitals across the land. That alarm was more than enough to prompt Fika and his retiree colleagues to an emergency meeting. But the sight of an elderly man, fighting a just cause on an improvised wheelchair was more than absurd.
Payment of the entitlements got stalled after former President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act, 2023, which mandated the National Pensions Commission (PENCOM) to hand over assets of the staff of the National Assembly in its custody after the passage of the National Assembly pension law.
In the beginning, there were no signs that things would go south on the implementation of the Act. Three months after the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act came into effect, PENCOM had written the management to convey its decision to hand off the pension assets of the staff of the National Assembly, while requesting the National Assembly management to provide it with account details to remit the accrued funds. The 10th Senate and the House of Representatives also provided hope for the retirees by providing a take-off grant to the tune of N2.5 billion in the 2024 budget. However, the NASS management could not comply with the request from PENCOM because the Pensions Board had not been inaugurated. Months after months, the retirees waited. Those who were already enjoying their benefits when PENCOM was administering had the payments terminated, while the waiting game ensued.
In trying to fast-track the implementation of the Act, Fika, as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Council of Retired Clerks and Secretaries had forwarded a letter to the President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tajudeen Abbas, intimating them of the council’s recommendations for positions in the National Assembly Service Pensions Board.
Fika said in the letter, dated February 27, 2024, that “Considering the pathetic health conditions of our retired colleagues, Your Excellency will agree with me that the establishment of the National Assembly Pensions Board is overdue five (5) months after Mr. President’s assent.” He said that his letter was premised on the provisions of Sections 2 and 17(3) of the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act, 2023, which indicate that the presiding officers of the National Assembly shall make the appointments subject to recommendations of the Council of Clerks and Secretaries. But some persons are insinuating that the undue delay might have been instigated by two strange bedfellows-politics and money. Where the two are involved, simply things hardly follow a straight course. However, nothing justifies the nearly 20-month delay in inaugurating the Pensions Board.
At the end of the emergency meeting on Monday, further meetings were said to have been scheduled at the instance of the Senate President, Akpabio, his deputy, Jibril Barau and others but there were no conclusive steps, yet.
A communique released after the meeting indicated that the retirees observed that the National Assembly Service Pensions Board Act, 2023 went through full legislative process in the 9th National Assembly and was assented to by President Muhammad Buhari. It further noted that the delay in implementing the Act has caused undue and untold hardship to the retirees who are unable to access their retirement benefits, adding that while a number of the retired Staff have died, many others are bedridden due to sufferings occasioned by the non-payment of their entitlements.
According to the communique, the meeting decried the pains the retired staff have been subjected to and recalled that appropriate recommendations as per the composition of the Pensions Board have been made to the Presiding Officers of the National Assembly, in line with the enabling Act.
Like every lover of Yoruba traditional music, language and culture, I have of recent been inundated with requests to lend a voice to the newest raging fire in the Fuji music genre. Since the passage of Alhaji Sikiru Ayinde Balogun, popularly known as Ayinde Barrister or Agbajelola Barusati, there have been longstanding tiffs on whom of the trio of Ayinde Omogbolahan Anifowose, KWAM 1; self-named King Saheed Osupa (K.S.O.) and Wasiu Alabi Pasuma, was the “King.”
These musicians’ recent quest for supremacy is not new. From time immemorial, supremacy battles have been part and parcel of Yoruba music. Apparently now tempered by modernity, in the olden days, the battles were fought with traditional spells, incantations and talisman aimed at deconstructing and liquidating their rivals. Mostly fought on genre basis, I submit that pre and post-independence entertainment scene would have been livelier, far more robust than it was but for the acrimonious liquidating fights of those eras.
In the Sakara music, Abibu Oluwa, a revered early precursor of this Yoruba musical genre, who reigned in the late 1920s and 1930s, had Salami Alabi Balogun, popularly known as Lefty Salami, Baba Mukaila and Yusuff Olatunji as members of his band. Oluwa praise-sang many Lagos elites of his time, especially Herbert Macaulay to whom he sang his praise in the famous track named “Macaulay Macaulay.” In it, he sang the foremost Nigerian nationalist’s alias of Ejonigboro – Snake on the Street and prayed that he would not come to shame.
Sakara also produced the likes of S. Aka Baba Wahidi, Kelani Yesufu (alias Kelly). It was sung with traditional Yoruba instruments like the solemn-sounding goje violin whose history is traced to the north, and the roundish Sakara drum, beaten with stick and whose appearance is like that of a tambourine. Sakara music is often called the Yoruba variant of western blues music because of its brooding rhythm though laced with a high dosage of philosophy.
When Oluwa died in 1964, he literally handed over to Lefty who, born on October 1913, died December 29, 1981. Lefty, a talking drummer under Oluwa, churned out over 35 records before his demise, one of which was a tribute to Lagos monarch, Oba Adele (Adele l’awa nfe – Oba Adele is the king we want) and another to the Elegushi family. I dwelt considerably on Sakara because it is believed to have had considerable influence on other genres of traditional African Yoruba music, especially Apala and Fuji, with the former sometimes indistinguishable from Sakara.
Apala music, whose exponent is said to be Haruna Ishola, originated in the late 1930s Nigeria. Delivered with musical instruments like a rattle (Sekere) thumb piano, (agidigbo) drums called Iya Ilu and Omele, a bell (agogo) and two or three talking drums, Apala and Sakara are the most complex of these genres of traditional Yoruba music, due to their infusion of philosophy, incantations and dense Yoruba language into their mix. Distinct, older and more difficult in mastery than Fuji music which is considered to be comparatively easy to sing, Ayinla Omowura, Ligali Mukaiba, Kasumu Adio, and many others were Apala leading lights of the time. The three genres have very dense Islamic background.
The latest entrant of all the three genres is Fuji. Pioneered by Ayinde Barrister no doubt, for an Apala musician biographer like me, I am confused that Omowura, as far back as early 1970s, asked listeners in need of good Fuji music to come learn from him – “Fuji t’o dara, e wa ko l’owo egbe wa…” Sorry, I digressed.
While KWAM 1 emerged with his Talazo music from the ashes of his being a music instrument arranger for Barrister’s musical organization in the early 1980s, the feud in the house after Barrister’s death erupted when narratives allegedly oozed unto the musical scene that KWAM 1 referred to himself as the creator of Fuji music. He however promptly denied the claim. For decades, Osupa and Pasuma were locked in horns over supremacy of the Fuji music genre. In August 2023, the two however seemed to have decided to thaw their feud as they shared stage with Wasiu Ayinde, at Ahmad Alawiye Folawiyo, an Islamic singer’s 50th birthday celebration in Lagos. KWAM 1 glibly acted as their senior colleague at the event.
As an indication that they are no bastards of the teething and recurrent supremacy battles that emblemize traditional Yoruba music, the three Fuji music icons seem to have gone into the trenches again. It first started with Taiye Currency, an Ibadan-based alter-ego of Pasuma picking a fight with the musician who self-styled himself Son of Anobi Muhammed’s Wife. In a viral video, Currency had disclaimed reference to Pasuma as his “father” in the music industry. In another video not long after, KWAM 1, like some kind of father figure, was shown asking Currency to apologize to Pasuma.
A few days ago, a video of Osupa went viral. Therein, he was chastising a particular hypocrite he called “Onirikimo” and “alabosi”, who is “stingy and is ready to shamelessly collect money from those under him.” Osupa also claimed that this “shameless elder” had strung a ring of corn round his waist and should be ready to be made fun of by hens. Watchers of the endless tiffs among these Fuji icons swear that KWAM 1 was the unnamed Fuji musician Osupa was casting aspersion on.
The trio of Sakara, Apala and Fuji music also witnessed such petty squabbles. While many claim that the fights were promotional gambits aimed at having their fans salivate for their hate-laced musical attacks against one another, some others claim that the rivalries were genuine. In the Apala music scene, Haruna Ishola and Kasumu Adio fought each other to the nadir, with Adio, who sang almost in the same voice and cadence as Ishola, suddenly vamoosing from the musical scene. Rumours and speculations had it then that a mysterious goat bit Adio and rendered him useless. While Ayinla Omowura also fought Fatai Olowonyo, Fatai Ayilara, among others in the Apala genre, the duo of Yusuff Olatunji and S. Aka also feuded till their last days. This is not to mention the interminable fight between Kollington Ayinla and Barrister.
If the tiff between the trio of KWAM 1, Osupa and Pasuma is about age and Yoruba traditional respect for elders, KWAM 1 would easily go away with the trophy of the best of the three. However, if philosophical depth, musical elan, research of lyrics and deployment of Yoruba language are at issue, none of the other two musicians can unbuckle Osupa’s sandals. Osupa began his musical career in 1983 as a teenager and has gone through the mills, his late father being a musician, too and Awurebe music lord, Dauda Epo Akara’s musical contemporary.
Unlike their predecessors, the three Fuji musicians are literate and should thus address their musical issues in more mature manner. Osupa even recently bagged a degree from the department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. One thing they should know is that, whether one is supreme to the other or not, their fans will readily queue behind the brand that delights them.
Two incidents happened during the 1994/95 NYSC service year, which I was part of in Birnin-Kebbi, Kebbi State, and they gave me profound culture shocks that I still remember till today. I would equally say that those incidents probably justified the Federal Government’s decision to float the scheme.
We were told that part of the reasons General Yakubu Gowon floated the NYSC was to ensure national integration, cohesion and exposure of young Nigerians to cultures of other parts of the country other than where they were born.
First was the shock of seeing a director that I was attached to in the then Government House, who had just taken a new wife, and sat among drivers, gate men and other junior staff to dine. I saw them seated round a huge iron pot of Koko, a local delicacy, exchanging one big spoon made of calabash, as each took turns to use the spoon to eat the delicacy. It was as if I was witnessing a scene where children of a big family were struggling to catch a portion of food or where people were eating Saara, as they say it in Yorubaland.
As I walked past the noisy crowd, I was transfixed seeing the newly-wedded director among the lot. He saw me standing still, as I couldn’t comprehend what he was doing there, and he got the message. ‘Taiyo, (as he used to call me) you won’t understand,’ he said as he waved to me to keep going. When we later saw, he explained that what he just did was a way of assuring the commoners that ‘we are all one,’ as they felicitated him on the new bride. But I could not fathom how the occupant of a ‘huge office’ as that of a director in a Government House , would sit among “commoners” on a tattered mat to share a single spoon and eat in public.
The other incident was quite pathetic. My friend, Tunde Omobuwa, was posted to a school in Yauri, in the southern part of the state, for his primary assignment. But he found the place boring on weekends. So, he arranged to always be with me on weekends.
One such weekend, we decided to take a stroll round the streets near the Government House. We took off from the place of my primary assignment, the Federal Information Centre; bought corn beside the office, and started ‘blowing’ the ‘mouth organ’ as we strolled. We were too engrossed in our gist and the sweetness of the corn to note that some young boys were trailing us, praying that some leftovers of the corn would drop for them to scavenge. Somehow, the two of us dropped the corn cob almost simultaneously. We were more than taken aback by a commotion that erupted at our back. Four eight or nine year-olds had descended on the supposed leftovers and broken the corn cobs into pieces. I was again transfixed as if one was hit by an electric shock. Remember that feeling when you play with electric fish?
I was moved to tears as I had never ever seen a group of children scavenging on nothing as it were. I beckoned to the kids and offered them N20, which was the highest denomination at the time, and with some smattering Hausa words told them to go buy their own corn from the same place we got ours. As they left, heading to the corn seller, I couldn’t erase that ugly sight from my mind. Was it really possible that some people scavenge on nothing this way? I was later to see incidents of children swarming around restaurants and pouncing on near empty plates.
These incidents told me clearly that the North was a different place and that the life of the boy child is not only risky and endangered but sold to stagnation and deprivation, unless you are one of the lucky few.
Having benefited from the free education policy of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) between 1979 and 1983, when the Second Republic was terminated, I knew that there is a lot the government can do in educating the children. In my secondary school days, I was the Library Prefect at one point, and so I saw an excess of books supplied by the government to our school. So, I was an example of the feasibility of free education. It was the same way the Action Group government had handled education in the years preceding Nigeria’s independence and the First Republic.
So why can’t the state governments in the North declare free and compulsory education for the young ones out there? Why should children be made to scavenge on empty corn cobs just to see if they can find pieces of seeds left over?
And why was my director giving drivers and gate men in the Government House false hope that they were all the same, instead of him to challenge them to seek to lift themselves up the social ladder?
I think there was no excuse for the North not to have adopted a free education policy, just as Chief Obafemi Awolowo did in the South-West. And if we say the North needs to look itself in the mirror, you again remember the efforts by President Goodluck Jonathan to educate the multitude of Northern children through the Almajiri Schools. That government built more than 400 of such schools, which were abandoned because it could upset the oligarchy. The oligarchs forgot the truism that the children of the poor they refuse to train today won’t let their children sleep peacefully.
But the governor of Borno State, Prof Babagana Zulum, appears to have got the message. Last week, I was thrilled to see him organise a summit to reform the Almajiri system.
The Almajiri education system is a traditional Islamic method of learning widely obtained across states in northern Nigeria. Through that system, which is tied to Islamic teaching, youths, especially boys are kept out of the formal western education system. I don’t know why the teachings by Islamic scholars cannot go alongside that of Western education as it obtains in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and other Islamic countries that are doing well economically and in the world of science, technology.
While addressing the summit, Zulum had mentioned the need to address the root causes of insecurity through the provision of education for citizens of Borno, adding that improper teaching of Islamic studies has contributed to the emergence of Boko Haram insurgents in the state.
According to him, to curtail whatever is the adverse effect of Almajiri education; the Borno State Government has established the Arabic and Sangaya Education Board to introduce a unified curriculum for Sangaya and Islamic schools. He said that the reform would include establishing Higher Islamic Colleges to cater for Almajiri children and blending the religious teachings with the secular curricula as well as skills.
He said: “The Sangaya Reform is a great development. It will give Almajiri a better chance in life, particularly the introduction of integrating western education, vocational, numeracy, and literacy skills into the centres, which are also described as Almajiri and Islamic schools.
“Distinguished guests and esteemed educationists, government’s intention was to streamline the informal and formal education systems to quality integrated Sangaya School for admission into colleges and universities.”
One would have thought that governors with radical postures like Nasir el-Rufai and others before him would have proposed this type of reform, but it is better late than never. Zulum should be supported to get something out of this.
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