COVID-19 and the almajiri dilemma

Apart from accentuating the pathetically weak state of Nigeria’s health sector, the COVID-19 outbreak has also exposed the country’s perpetual neglect of its children. These two are of course, amongst several other things that need quick attention if Nigeria and its people hope for any future at all. That there is any such desire is debatable.

 Nigeria is a country that literally lives for the day, eating its seed and the fruit it bears simultaneously and as avariciously as can be. Its leaders make noise about the future, but steps taken are almost always to promote one ulterior motive or the other, which is why there is hardly any evidence of visionary leadership 60 years post-independence.

A former First Lady of the United States of America, Rosalynn Carter, said that “a leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be” but Nigeria suffers a perpetual famine of purposeful leadership. The true essence of leadership as a bridge to the attainment of widespread prosperity eludes most of those in government here; they pursue nothing but the haemorrhaging of public finance and the privilege of the exhibition of the vainglory that attends it.

This is the only possible explanation for the situation of the Almajiri children in the northern part of the country. By the way, one other intriguing thing about Nigeria, which demands stating at this juncture, is the assumption that a problem that belongs to one part of the country, does not concern the other part. How misguided can a people be? This is a point I plan to return to presently.

I understand that Almajiri derives from an Arabic word, “al-Muhajirun,” meaning a person who leaves his home in search of Islamic knowledge. It is said to be a system of education for centuries and renowned for learning Islamic principles, values, jurisprudence and theology. The system also formed the foundation for colonial education, the famous Kano Pyramid and intellectual culture of Northern Nigeria. What this suggests is that some of the characters who lead various aspect of the socio-economic sphere of the north today may have experienced this system. Yet, these leaders -political, religious and otherwise, have allowed the system become synonymous with hunger, insecurity and diseases with very unhealthy consequences for Nigeria.

It would be excusable if the degeneration arose from a reform but no, things have gone from bad to worse not just for the child in Northern Nigeria but all across the country. While most of the leaders of today’s Nigeria have their children tucked away in prestigious institutions across the world, they leave children of the poor either roaming the streets or wasting away under the tutelage of wannabe teachers. Nigeria has become a “we on us” class society where the people are subjected to lifelong poverty.

However, such discrimination puts the joke on us all. Sure, its worst effects are on the children and possibly their parents. But the country is held back by the inequality and mistrust created when more than 13 million children are out of school in different corners of the country and public education is a total embarrassment in this age of Artificial Intelligence. And even the children of today’s men of power will sooner or later come back from their sojourn abroad and get stuck in the mess their fathers and mothers have created.

This is why one finds the lack of concern for the plight of every child by all leaders extremely confounding. Until COVID-19, most leaders in the southern part of the country regarded Almajiri as a northern challenge. However, some states in the South-West and South-East have reportedly intercepted varying numbers of such children being smuggled into their states recently.

In the case of Ogun State, traffic enforcement officers reportedly intercepted 30 boys travelling from the North in defiance of the restrictions on interstate movement. In their desperation, these young men agreed to be hidden under a consignment of pepper covered with a tarpaulin! If you imagine these boys’ threshold of pain, you can then picture how much of humanity has been taken away from them and how easy it would be to recruit them for any venture that will hurt an uncaring country.

The truth however is that Almajiri children and many indigent northern families have found their way into many states outside the North for years before now. Unfortunately, even down South, their lot is not better. It is basically about young children, even toddlers, roaming around motor parks, bus stops and filling stations soliciting alms!  So, how does anyone even imagine that this could be an exclusively northern problem?

This brings up another disheartening event that attends the outbreak of COVID-19 in the North. State governors claim to have agreed on returning Almajiri boys to their states of origin and a lot of that has been happening. The first point to make about this is that it contradicts the restrictions on regional movements recently proposed to the Federal Government by the 36 governors. But more importantly, it tells of the selfish and inept leaderships that has become the curse of Nigeria.

Even though the constitution of Nigerian speaks about state of origin, it also speaks volumes about the state of residence and more importantly, these are children, who if properly brought up will become proud citizens of their states of residence. It is not just that; moving these children, a lot of whom have unsurprisingly been diagnosed with COVID-19, is a very easy way of increasing the burden on their states of origin and national uncertainty. So, you wonder when leadership has become so self-absorbed that nothing or no one else matters.   It is sad that people are just thinking about themselves now, but it is worse that children, who the country has failed, remain the object of this misuse. How come Nigeria’s leaders do not realise that no matter how much or often they repatriate untrained children, no one part of the country is safe in the long run?

Here, in fact is the thing: the unbroken chains of poverty of 89 million men, women and children found in different parts of Nigeria testifies to the fact that progressive governance is not a core interest of power holders in the country. It reflects the numb consciences of the political and economic elite who still sleep seeing this large pool of human bombs scattered around the country.

The collective failure to situate child education and development within the context of generic development as a nation is why Almajiri has become an agent of some of our negative values. An otherwise knowledge-driven, and communally structured institution of spiritual essence has been undermined by lack of care and turned into a ready-made tool in the hands of those who raise arms against society, a human network for the spread of all contagions including COVID-19.

Advisories on the pandemic, for instance, talk about constant handwashing, social distancing, staying home and other preventive protocols. But this is a puerile campaign in the context of hygienic conditions and mass poverty of the Almajiri and other groups neglected, abandoned and disadvantaged by years of poor governance and centrist resource concentration of people placed with public trust.

How on earth are people clustered in want and united by poverty expected to maintain social distance? How do homeless people stay at home when the foot of bridges, which leaves them at the mercies of the elements, is the only home they know? While the world waits for preventive vaccines and drugs to heal and cure the afflicted, the Almajiri continues to be the agent of spread, giving back to society its act of ‘generosity’ and care! The late Nelson Mandela said, “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children.” The Almajiri shows the darkness of Nigeria’s soul and the need for a quick rethink.

Adedokun tweets @niranadedokun