Nigeria: Basic Education - The 10 Million Left Behind

analysis

By Kayode Komolafe

Amidst the stories of Boko Haram, 2015 and sundry political ephemerals came the grim news about the state of primary education a few weeks ago. It is another tragedy of its own that this story is almost buried in the heaps of other issues in the public sphere. The report entitled 2012 Education For All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report was released by UNESCO. The kernel of the story is that 10.5 million children are out of school in Nigeria. Now, it is estimated that about 61 million children have no access to basic education in the world. So approximately one out of six children without access to basic education on earth is in Nigeria, a major oil exporting country.

That is the soul-depressing statistic that is not getting attention as the stories about 2015. The Nigerian share of this global shame is glaringly disproportionate. It is indeed a national shame to be talking of a child lacking access to basic education in 2013! Such a child is being denied a socio-economic right in contravention of Chapter II of the Constitution.

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