“Degeneration and advance are not fixed processes but recur in cycles in the history of every nation.” — John Buchan
A most disconcerting phenomenon confronting Northern Nigeria today is the failure to educate its children properly. A drive around Abuja and adjoining parts of Nasarawa State makes the point painfully vivid. Children of school age, boys and girls, many apparently from the North-West, can be seen in disturbing numbers living, begging and wandering on the streets when they should be in classrooms. What future awaits children growing up without education, skills or protection should trouble every responsible Northern leader.
Unless something changes radically, their prospects and those of the North are bleak indeed. The problem of education, or more accurately, the lack of it, has become too acute and too large to be treated through ordinary administrative routines. Northern Nigeria has reached a point where the educational deficit warrants an extraordinary response. As Nigeria approaches the 2027 general elections, education in the North should no longer be treated as merely one item among several campaign promises. It should be placed at the centre of political discussion because, perhaps more than any other question, it will determine the future respectability, stability, security and prosperity of the region.
For decades, education has largely been approached as the responsibility of individual states. Kano worries about Kano schools, Borno about Borno schools, Sokoto about Sokoto schools, Niger about Niger schools, Kwara about Kwara schools, Kogi about Kogi schools, and so forth. This is constitutionally understandable. But the scale and interconnected character of the crisis raise a fundamental question: can nineteen Northern states confronting essentially the same educational emergency continue trying to solve it nineteen different ways?
Perhaps history offers useful guidance. When the former Northern Region was divided into six states in 1967, it became apparent that certain institutions, assets and services developed under the regional order could not conveniently or economically be divided among the successor states. The then Federal Military Government consequently established the Interim Common Services Agency, ICSA, in 1968 to administer designated common services. Alhaji Adamu Fika, later Wazirin Fika, served as Chairman, while Brigadier Musa Usman, then a Major, served as Secretary.
The significance of ICSA lay not merely in its administrative machinery but in the principle underlying it: political boundaries did not automatically eliminate common interests. Education was one area in which this principle became particularly visible. Institutions such as the Advanced Teachers’ Colleges at Kano and Zaria served the Northern states collectively. The predecessor of today’s Federal University of Education, Zaria, was similarly administered through the common-services arrangement before Ahmadu Bello University subsequently assumed responsibility for it. That history should apply powerfully to our condition today. Northern Nigeria has changed enormously since the 1960s. Six states have become nineteen. The population has multiplied, cities have expanded, and universities, polytechnics and colleges of education have proliferated. But an alarming paradox remains. Despite the multiplication of educational institutions, the North continues to carry a disproportionate burden of Nigeria’s educational deprivation.
Millions of Nigerian children remain outside school, with the problem particularly severe across Northern Nigeria. Girls’ attendance remains especially troubling in parts of the North-East and North-West. Insecurity has compounded the crisis. Banditry, insurgency, abductions and displacement have disrupted schooling, closed schools and denied countless children access to regular education. A seven-year-old child in 2026 will enter adulthood during the 2030s. If that child receives no functional education, acquires no useful skill and sees no pathway into productive citizenship, the consequences will not remain confined to education statistics. They will reappear as unemployment, poverty, street begging, migration, dependency, crime, extremism and social instability. Education is therefore no longer merely a sectoral matter. It has become an issue of regional survival and national security.
The North must ask whether it can continue regarding millions of poorly educated or completely uneducated children as an unfortunate social condition rather than as a strategic emergency. Population can be a source of tremendous strength, but only when people are educated, healthy, skilled and productive. Large numbers without corresponding investment in human capital can become precisely the opposite. Northern Nigeria must therefore make the historic transition from celebrating demographic numbers to developing human beings. The 2027 elections provide an opportunity to place this matter squarely before politicians and the public. Presidential candidates should certainly be asked what they intend to do, but Northern governors and those seeking governorships must be questioned with equal seriousness. Education cannot conveniently be treated as somebody else’s responsibility in Abuja.
Every candidate seeking to govern a Northern state should answer elementary but consequential questions. How many children are outside school? How many teachers are required? How many schools lack adequate classrooms, sanitation, electricity and learning materials? What proportion of pupils complete primary education functionally literate and numerate? How many girls entering primary school eventually complete secondary education? What arrangements will ensure that children in Qur’anic schools acquire literacy, numeracy, science and vocational skills alongside religious instruction? These should become electoral questions for every party and candidate seeking our votes in 2027. There is, however, an even more fundamental question: what educational problems can the Northern states solve better together than separately? That question returns us to the ICSA principle. No reasonable person is proposing the resurrection of the old Northern Regional Government, nor should the nineteen states surrender responsibilities constitutionally assigned to them.
What should be revived is not the old political structure but the philosophy of functional cooperation. Teacher development is an obvious example. If Northern states face shortages of competent mathematics, science, technical and special-needs teachers, why must every state construct an entirely separate solution?
The post Education as a common Northern responsibility: Revisiting the ICSA principle on the road to 2027 (1), by Usman Sarki appeared first on Vanguard News.