Fisayo Fadelu
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
June 17, 2019: villagers are watching a Women’s World Cup football match. Suddenly, their respite is violently disrupted by the deafening sound and destructive force of three bomb explosions. More than twenty are dead. It is another suicide bomb attack in Borno State. The villains? A man and two young girls — children. For the residents, this — the invasion, the loss — is the new normal. Tears dry quickly and life goes on. Surely, there must a way to salvage the future.
As with many things in Nigeria, how we got here is both obvious and complicated—a combination of causes. I focus on education. “Brainwash” is the established explanation for why a seemingly sane man offers his life as a sacrifice (a human bomb), for the sole purpose of gratifying another man’s thirst for mayhem. I believe that one explanation is the fact that we, as a society, failed the boy who has now grown to find his manliness in militancy. Armed with no formal education, no technical training; in this station, there is little to lose. Our children should be in school; and because they are not, their illiteracy will continue to cost us all dearly, and much more so, in time.
In 2017, the British Broadcasting Channel (BBC) reported that Nigeria has the largest number of children out-of-school in the world. If nothing changes, we are on track to have the largest number of illiterate adults in the world in only a few decades. The yin-yang of education in Nigeria: many have too much of it, and a sizeable number have none. For the “have-nots”, society’s neglect eventually stunts the intellect, equally nourishing vice. With little effort, the external forces that prey on the idleness of our youth easily find him a fallow field for sowing evil. Education could have saved him. So, it is up to us to set aside tribalism, to become universal in our thinking, to fight for the minds of not only our individual children, but also for the right to quality education for every Nigerian child.
To the one in the South who asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Yes, we have no choice. We are joint-heirs of this land—its blessings and misfortunes alike. Our destinies are inescapably intertwined. “The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people’s children” — Marian Wright Edelman . Indifference is an action in the wrong direction. If there be hope of salvation for this nation, we may find it tucked in the yields from investment made in securing compulsory pre-tertiary education for all of our nation’s children.
