Out-of-school children: North must take responsibility

Northern elite sang discordant tunes at a recent public forum over the humongous number of “Out-Of-School Children, OOSC”. Nigeria holds the unenviable record of harbouring the highest number of OOSC in the world (about 20 million), and the North produces over 80 per cent of them.

At the Government-Citizen Engagement Forum held in Kaduna on Tuesday, July 29, 2025, Chairman of the Northern Elders Forum, NEF, Ango Abdullahi, blamed what he called the Federal Government’s poor allocation of funds to the North for the ugly situation.

”If just half of the 15 trillion Naira national budget were allocated to education, we would have no child out of school,” he said, adding that the North continues to receive “disproportionally low education funding”.

Countering this notion, former Governor of Niger State and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Sir Ahmadu Bello Memorial Foundation, Aliyu Muazu, pointed out that the Bola Tinubu administration inherited the problem from his predecessors. He called on the Northern intellectual and political elite to accept part of the responsibility for failing to educate children of the poor.

Abdullahi, a professor and former Vice Chancellor, chose to shift responsibility to the Federal Government, forgetting that the North has dominated the centre for 50 out of Nigeria’s nearly 64 years of independence. During that period and even up till now, the country’s commonwealth has been shared in a manner that  favours the North. Indeed, Muhammadu Buhari’s government of 2015 to 2023 gave the North the lion’s share of everything.

Northern leaders must take the full blame for the 80 per cent of our 20 million OOSC, and Nigeria’s embarrassing rating as the “poverty capital of the world”, due to selfish, incompetent and corrupt leadership.

The North’s relative educational backwardness is tied to two major factors centred on cultural practices. State governments sponsor mass weddings of people who cannot support families. Secondly, poor people marry up to four wives and have many children who are not educated in proper schools. Apart from Islamic education, children of the poor receive little or no skills training to empower them to escape poverty.

Meanwhile, the upper classes expose their own children to the best Western education that money can buy. This is unlike the South where the children of the poor have far better educational opportunities and often rise to their highest potentials. The Federal Government can only be a catalyst.

Northern leaders must accept this responsibility and address the shameful OOSC prevalence in their region. They should stop blaming others for their failures. Northern leaders must liberate themselves and their region from this Federal Government dependency syndrome. Marginalisation of the poor has fractured the North and made it the breeding ground of all forms of the insecurity destroying the region and country at large.

This must change!

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