Former President Olusegun Obasanjo yesterday raised the alarm that Nigeria is not safe as long as the issue of 20 million-out-of-school children in the country is not addressed.
Obasanjo expressed concern about the development while speaking as a panelist at the National Summit on Tertiary Education Reform held in Abuja under the theme ‘Re-imagining Tertiary Education in Nigeria: Issues, challenges and solutions.’
Obasanjo summit was organised by the office of the speaker of the house of representatives.
He said the army of uneducated children would turn out to be another form of Boko Haram insurgency if the students were not sought and returned to school.
He said the number constitutes 10 percent of the country’s population which should not be ignored.
“The greatest resources we have in this country are the people. How many are we today? We are about 216 million and that is a great resource. Tertiary education is very important. But education, particularly education that has left 20 million of our children out of school and those twenty million have no access to education.
“They cannot be effectively part of nation building because they have not had the opportunity to develop their innate capacity to the extent that they can be useful to themselves, to their families and to their community let alone their nation, let alone Africa,” he said.
“Tertiary education is important, but my emphasis will be on education broadly…though we have the issue of Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the government, and that will be unending…In my time we had it. And if any government had done anything for ASUU my government did. They all started buying cars and building houses. Even primary school teachers were buying cars. But we must find a solution.
“So, what are the issues? The issues to me are that we are cutting more than we can chew. Who is looking at our population ahead of time, five years from now and ten years from now, and what can we do about it? And apart from food which is very important, who are the people thinking about that and working forward on that.
“After food and after health, the next important aspect of our life is education. Now, if this is the position and these are rights that we must have, what do we do? We know that if we continue the way we are going, by the year 2030, 2040, 2050 what our population would be. We have to think about it and how we would sort it.
“And I believe, that you ask where did we miss the road? We missed the road when the whole world is talking of free education, education for all. And we did not follow that. It was bad news. Today, we have 20 million out of school children. Almost 10 per cent of the population. We continue to miss and we are still missing. That is a very bad one. Can we do anything about it? I believe we can,” he said.
Obasanjo said it is possible to get the 20 million children back to school stressing that “if we do not get them back to school, we are preparing for Boko Haram of tomorrow.
“It will happen as sure as daylight. What can we do? Where are these 20 million children? Where are they located? Can we have schools in the morning and afternoon to get them in at least for six years?
“In the period of six years where this is happening, we would prepare for the transition from primary school to secondary school. And if we are able to do that, we have started the process of lifting education, an instrument of nation building,” he said.
Obasanjo contended that Nigeria has the resources to see its children through secondary school education.
He added that all the levels of education, primary, secondary and tertiary require attention.
“I believe anybody who is able to go through secondary school has the basic to prepare himself as a working person. And that is possible, and that must be the minimum. And I believe that Nigeria has the resources to able to get all the children of Nigeria through secondary education. All the children, no exception, male and female,” he said.
Besides, he said education is not responsibility of government alone.
“It is the responsibility of all. What of parents, religious leaders, community. They all have responsibility in the education of the child.”
On the issue of a loan bill to help indigent students fund their education, Obasanjo wondered if the right people would have access to it.
Any Nigerian child should never be deprived of the right of education for lack of means. I believe it is very important. The point is that can we run it without corruption? Can we bring integrity into it? Can we really make sure that only those who deserve get the loan? Now, my own children should not go to university and be asking for loan.
“I believe that we cannot say at the university level everything should be free. There will have to be certain amount of money to be paid. If they do it in private universities why not in government universities? And if you don’t have money, there has to be loan that at the end of the educational process, you can start paying back”, he said.
In his welcome address, Gbajabiamila described education as the silver bullet that could eliminate poverty and lack.
“Allow me…to speak the truth as I see it, so that together we can agree on what we need to do to overcome. Time was when the tertiary institutions in our country were centres of excellence, comparable to the best institutions elsewhere in the world. There was a time when our brothers and sisters from across Africa and even farther away sought out our institutions, and we welcomed them in droves. That time is no more,” he said.
