NIGERIA'S out-of-school children debacle has been an intractable phenomenon, threatening the country's socioeconomic landscape for decades. It is interlinked with the lingering insecurity, crushing unemployment, grinding poverty, emerging child soldier syndrome, drug abuse, national image deficit and a bleak future.
Every child out of school is a threat to all the children sent abroad for educational attainment.
And, a country that neglects the education of its youth compromises its future and sits dangerously on a powder keg.
UNESCO and UNICEF list Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Ethiopia and DR Congo as recording the highest number of out-of-school children globally.
Tragically, Nigeria leads this sordid tally.
Successive Nigerian governments have neglected the crisis. Some governments that appeared to pay some attention to it were strong on rhetoric but short on implementation.
For more than two decades, the profile of out-of-school children has remained grim. AI search results suggest that Nigeria's out-of-school-children figure was approximately 7 million in 1999. In 2013, the number had risen to 10.5 million, accounting for 47 per cent of the global out-of-school population, the highest increase since 1999, per UNICEF.
As of early 2024, UNICEF said Nigeria had 18.3 out-of-school children and the highest in the world - 10.2 million at the primary school level and 8.1 million at the junior secondary level.
Unsurprisingly, 66 per cent reside in the North-West and North-East. The figure keeps increasing in tandem with the high poverty rate and worsening insecurity.
Many schools across the country struggle with dilapidation. In some states, teachers have not been hired in the past 10 years. There is a massive death of technical schools to impart skills.
Even in the South, where education is taken more seriously, the governors have stopped building new primary and secondary schools. This is a tragic omission. That enterprise has been abandoned to private proprietors.
Kano State presents a grim metaphor for the poor state of primary schools across the country. In June 2024, the governor, Abba Yusuf, disclosed that more than 4.7 million pupils sit on bare floors to learn. Yet, little has been done to correct such anomalies.
The same year, the NUT lamented that 17 states did not recruit teachers from 2018 to 2022.
The Universal Basic Education Commission said only 915,913 teachers are available for 31,771,916 pupils in private and public primary schools nationwide.
This is a teacher-pupil ratio of 35:1, which contradicts the UNESCO recommendation of 25:1 for Lower and Middle Basics.
Even as states grapple with teacher deficits, the Executive Secretary of UBEC, Hamid Bobboyi, lamented in 2024 that some states declined to use 10 per cent of the 2.0 per cent of the Consolidated Revenue Fund for UBEC allocated by the Federal Government for teachers' professional development.
By refusing to provide counterpart funding, states abandoned N1.4 billion in 2020; N2.8 billion in 2021; N14.4 billion in 2022, and N36.1 billion in 2023 in federal grants. This is illogical.
However, the Federal Government has been making fresh efforts to undertake reforms to stem the crisis. The most recent being the announcement by the Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, that Nigeria needs to spend $345 million annually to reintegrate and provide essential skills for about 15 million out-of-school children across the country.
Alausa stated this recently during the inaugural Federal Ministry of Education Private Sector Breakfast in Lagos, noting that 25 per cent of Nigerian children aged 5-14 were out of school, with the figure rising to 41 per cent in the North-East and North-West.
Sound as the proposed reforms may seem, they are founded on quicksand as the statistics, strategy, budgetary allocation, body language and other factors are at variance with the newfound resolve.
Alausa had told participants at the 2025 Ministerial Briefing in March 2025 that "50 million people are out of school, and 50 per cent of them have never been enrolled. Five per cent of them are dropouts."
A government is judged by its budgetary allocation for that sector. The education budget under President Bola Tinubu is not different from that of his predecessors. It hovers around 5-8 per cent, a far cry from UNESCO's recommendation of 15-20 per cent.
The Western Region allocated between 26 and 40 per cent of its budget to education under the premiership of Obafemi Awolowo, while the Eastern Region followed the Western Region closely in the First Republic.
When the Olusegun Obasanjo administration established the UBEC, it prescribed prosecution and jail sentencing for parents of out-of-school children. Unfortunately, this was never implemented.
A huge percentage of the out-of-school children is concentrated in the North, a vulnerable recruitment pool for bandits, Islamic insurgents and other criminals.
The Chairman of the Northern Elders' Forum, Ango Abdullahi, said, "We have 20 million out-of-school children in Nigeria -- 80 per cent of them are from Northern Nigeria. If just half of the N15 trillion national budget were allocated to education, we would have no child out of school."
In the 19 states of the North where the almajiri system is prevalent, rather than devise a coordinated policy, governors are squandering money on hajj sponsorship and other fripperies.
The northern governors, the emirs and the political elite must confront out-of-school children and the almajiri crisis as a basic step toward poverty reduction and ending pervasive insecurity.
The Northern leaders must learn from Colombia and Brazil, where child soldiers became a big problem.
The Federal Government should realise that addressing the out-of-school syndrome will require two distinct strategies for the North and South.
Indeed, abolishing the almajiri system will require more than pecuniary solutions. Rehabilitating out-of-school children will require a lot of time, money, resources, strategy and a high dose of political will.
Any government that is serious about skills provision will not convert polytechnics to universities. Indeed, it will establish more. By their mandate, universities produce managers and thinkers, while polytechnics produce skilled and middle-level manpower.
An emerging economy like Nigeria needs more polytechnics and technical colleges, as well as universities. The country must design policies that pay skilled workers handsomely to retain them, rather than encourage a disparity between polytechnic and university graduates.