When life is brutish and dreams fade away
HALIMA MUSA sieves the arguments on ending the almajiri problem, one of the worst forms of child destitution in Nigeria.
If
Hassan Usman (not real names) has his way, he would become a medical
doctor or an administrator in government service. He has always
admired medical doctors and dreamt of using his medical training to
cure people of their ailments.
Being an administrator would make him fulfill his aspiration to make
people ‘educated and wealthy.’ He believes lack of education and
material wealth is responsible for his condition and those of his
peers with whom he sleeps on the cold floor every night in Zaria,
northern Nigeria. Zaria is home to the over five decades old Ahmadu
Bello University.
Mohammed is an Almajiri. He is part of the estimated nine million
Nigerian children who make up the Almajiri Koranic school system, a
network of Islamic schools common in northern Nigeria and other
parts of the continent spreading from central to the extreme part of
West Africa including Chad, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Niger. The
Almajiri system is designed in the form of an Islamic boarding
school usually led by a Koranic teacher, mallam. The mallam assumes
authority over his wards sent by their parents from as young as four
or five to learn to memorise and recite the Koran.
But over time, the Almajiri system has become synonymous with child
destitution in Northern Nigeria; a complex form of social menace
that has provoked widespread concern and a mix of equally complex
remedies. While some state governments in northern Nigeria had
severally tried to address the issue by offering financial supports
to some of the Koranic schools within their jurisdictions, it had
failed to address the core challenges of begging and destitution.
Some critics say efforts to enlighten the mallams and make the
‘almajiranci’ look like a modern boarding house where the children
can learn in a more conducive environment have never gone beyond
official statements.
But Sokoto State appears to be an exception. It has had a long
history of edicts aimed at addressing the almajiri problem. In 1980
it enacted ' the Control of Juveniles Accompanying Mallams Adoptive
Rules.' The law was designed to put restrictions on the movement of
almajiri. In 1986, the state established a committee on 'Control of
Migrant Quranic Teacher, and Children' which facilitated the enacted
of laws restricting the movement of the ‘Migrant Quranic teachers
and the school children.’ About 13 years later in 1997, the state
tried to address the same menace in realization that it had defied
previous solutions. The state set up a new committee to 'look into
the issues of almajiranci in Sokoto.'
But fighting what has become an accepted way of life would need more
than laws as the Sokoto example has shown. The enactment of
laws spanning over two decades has failed to solve the
problem. According to Islamic tradition, the concept of Almajiri
started as a result of Prophet Mohammed entreatment to the
faithful to seek for knowledge no matter how far it will take
them, even if it is as far as China. But the entreatment of the
prophet appeared to have suffered both cultural abuses and feudal
subjugation for more than a century in areas of northern Nigeria and
surrounding countries.
For the likes of Usman and his likes life cannot be tougher than
squeezing water from stones. Often put in the care of Islamic
guardians entrusted to put them in the way of knowledge, they
are left to beg for a living to keep their guardians going and
themselves alive for just another day. All over northern
Nigeria, the almajiri has become synonymous with child destitution.
Usman considers himself lucky inside the campus of Ahmadu Bello
University where he does different menial jobs moving from one
student hall to another. He has gained popularity for his
skill at fixing the soles of shoes as a cobbler to performing
laundry services. Even for this labour, Usman doesn’t earn
much. Those for whom he labours consider themselves generous
for the stipends they pay to the almajiri who shares his dream of
acquiring western education with them. The almajiri has one of two
forced options: to beg for livelihood or become a source of cheap
labour.
On less tiresome days, Usman manages to attend the local primary
school where western education is taught. His Koranic teacher,
the mallam, does not know. If he knows, he risks being
chastised. Many Koranic teachers abhor western education for all its
‘negative’ influence. Every evening, Usman returns a good
percentage of what he earns to his mallam and keeps the meager
balance to secretly offset small bills at the primary school. If his
good fortune does not go to sleep, Usman hopes his secret dream of
wearing the white laboratory overcoat he sees on the medical
students inside the university will become true one day. But
it is just a dream. The stark reality is that life has forgotten
Usman and millions of Nigerian children. They are the hungry, dirty
faces left to wander on the streets of major cities everyday in
search food and meaning for their lives.
Abba Gana Shettima, senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology,
University of Maidugur, writes in www.amanaonline.com, that
“the Almajiri are innocent children who have become
unfortunate victims of societal neglect, let loose to drip and get
drown in the unfathomable sea of corruption, ignorance and poverty;
and thus often hypnotized, hoodwinked, coerced or simply hijacked to
play active roles in many of the northern conflicts.”
After the Usman Danfodio jihad in Nigeria, Islam took firm root in
some parts of the north particularly Sokoto, Kano and Zaria
and with it came a greater craving for Islamic knowledge in
those established centres. Many parents sought to plant Islamic
teachings in their children by ensuring they go to those centres of
learning no matter the distance.
But with modernity and the attendant struggle for economic survival,
the tradition to acquire Islamic teachings from distance
places under the tutelage of a mallam has suffered greatly
particularly among poor parents. To them, the almajiri system
provides a painful opportunity to escape the heavy responsibility
for catering for their children due to abject poverty.
Oil rich Nigeria is considered one of the poorest countries in the
world with more than 80% of its 150 million people living
below the poverty line. According to the UN, more than 83% of
the population lives on less than a dollar a day. In the north,
regarded as having the highest concentration of illiterates in
the world by a UN 2008 literacy index, poverty is extremely
rampant and helps breed the almajiri institution much more rapidly
than in other parts of the country where child destitution is
equally common. The almajiri system is today synonymous with extreme
poverty and child neglect.
In the few last decades, the almajiri has been a constant social
sore seen on the streets, inside the hospitals, schools,
markets and other public places begging for a living. The
luckier ones that survive end up as cobblers nail cutters, or street
side orange sellers. Uneducated and bereft of any sense of
direction, the almajiri has become a willing tool in Nigeria’s
most recent bloody political and religious conflicts in the north.
With politics and the conflict for control of national
resource becoming violent, the almajiri has often ended up as
the pawn in the class conflict as argued by late Bala Usman,
resolute scholar from Kano State and late Mallam Aminu Kano, one of
Nigeria’s most respected politicians touted as the defender of the
poor.
“The issue of "Almajiri" in Nigeria is less of an Islamic thing but
more of a class issue. Those who are benefiting from it don't
want it abolished. The Nigerian progressives especially those
of our comrades resident in the North should be all out to see to it
that the practice is abolished,” said labour activist Comrade
Ephraim Adinlofu. He wants education and poverty eradication
initiatives that are specifically targeted at the almajiri to be
implemented.
Adinlofu in a published article, about six months ago, on ‘The
Almajiri, Talakawa and Dan-Arewa Ideology,’ declares that the
almajiri systems subsist on oppressive consciousness as
propounded by Prof. Paulo Freire. The late Brazilian scholar argued
that ‘oppressive consciousness,’ is a cleverly conditioned
state of mind and thought system of a person who sufficiently
holds that there is no alternative to his state of destitution. The
individual knows he is being exploited, oppressed and demeaned
by a system but is unwilling or disinclined to social action
to free or liberate himself.” The oppressed in Nigeria,
particularly northern Nigeria have come to accept their condition as
their fate, said Adinlofu in an emailed response to Baobab magazine.
But Kabiru Inuwa, a social commentator, thinks the problem is all
engaging and demands the involvement of government, people and
institutions. According to him, “there is no way we can tackle
the menace without incorporating all stakeholders, the ulama, the
intelligentsia, business communities, and government at
various levels -which must including those of neigbouring
states including Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon
and Ghana. It may interest you, to know that most of the
almajiris roaming the streets in Nigeria are from these other
countries, though many people don’t want here that.”
Parents too need to be enlightened on the evil of sending their
children away to acquire knowledge in excruciating
circumstances that defeats the original purpose of the intention,
said Hajia Aisha Adamu, a grandmother in Kano. For her, “no level of
poverty should make parents take their children to far places for
almajiri.”
Adinlofu calls for an end to almajiri through intervention of
progressive elements. His words: there is a need for the
progressive intellectuals in the North to really sit up and
begin to re-educate and conscientized the Talakawas and the
Almajiris in their midst. I am yet to really come to grasps
with what the contemporary progressives in the North are doing
to woo the above two categories, who are system-dispossessed and
economically disadvantaged, to their own side in the struggle to
emancipate the Northern region, and perhaps by extension, Nigeria.
Shettima is more confident that a less radical approach will
ultimately address the almajiri scourge. Social response will
happen because it becomes inevitable not to resolve the
problem. He writes: “Fortunately, there is also presently a high
level of consensus among the cream of Northern Nigerian
Muslims that the Almajiri system of education needs to be thoroughly
reformed. Many states are gradually but surely going to reform the
system. They have no other choice.”
For Hassan Usman in Zaria, all these arguments mean nothing:
‘oppressive consciousness, consensus among the cream of
Northern Nigerian, and edicts by governments will not translate
to putting him in the lecture halls of Ahmadu Bello University as a
student. His most coveted dream. How to live beyond a day and
bring his dream of becoming a medical doctor alive appear to be an
unnecessary indulgence in plum wishes. But even an almajiri is
entitled to making a wish. It’s just that wishes don’t make a horse,
particularly for a child destitute in 2009 Nigeria where most people
live on less than a dollar a day.
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