Key Points
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Out-of-school children feed Boko Haram recruitment, says Obasanjo.
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Nigeria has 20 million children currently out of school.
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Urgent education funding reforms needed to secure the nation.
Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president of Nigeria, has said that the rising number of children who are not in school is making the country less safe and making it easier for Boko Haram to recruit new members.
At an education summit in Abuja on Monday, Obasanjo said that Nigeria’s failure to make sure that everyone can go to school could hurt the country’s security and long-term growth. He called the situation “a ticking time bomb” that could make the insurgency worse in the northeast and spread instability to other areas.
Boko Haram recruits children who are not in school
“Criminal groups can recruit uneducated children,” Obasanjo said. “Extremist groups like Boko Haram do well in places where people are poor and don’t know much.” Terrorists can use every child we don’t teach as a weapon.
UNICEF says that more than 20 million Nigerian kids are not in school right now. This is the most in the world. A lot of them live in the north, where Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have been fighting for more than ten years.
Rise in insecurity linked to education crisis
Obasanjo told the federal and state governments to make funding for education a top priority. He used the United Nations’ standard that countries should spend at least 20% of their budgets on education as an example. Nigeria now spends less than 10%.
He also stressed the importance of vocational training and community-based programs, saying that formal classrooms alone can’t handle the huge number of kids who are falling behind. “We have to give these kids hope and skills; if we don’t, they’ll be used as soldiers in terror,” he said.
Calls for a quick national response
According to a report by the Punch news, Oby Ezekwesili, a former education minister, and Cristian Munduate, UNICEF Nigeria’s representative, were among the other people at the summit who agreed with Obasanjo’s worries. Ezekwesili called the lack of education in Nigeria the country’s “single biggest national emergency,” and Munduate said that Nigeria won’t reach the Sustainable Development Goal on education by 2030 unless something is done right away.
In the end, Obasanjo told President Bola Tinubu’s government to make universal education a key part of its “Renewed Hope” plan. He said, “The future of Nigeria is the future of our children.” “If we don’t help them, we hurt ourselves.”
