Nunaijastories: A FACE-LIFT TO SOCIETAL MENACE

From recent reports, over 10.5 million Nigerian school-age children are out of school, with the large number of these children coming from the North. Majority of these out-of-school children in the North are the Almajiris, commonly found on the streets and highways, begging for alms and food.

The Nigerian federal government has often come up with ways to deal with the menace and future threat to democracy and our society. Unlike other government who scrap laid down development programmes, kudos to the current government which has decided to build on what the previous government had started by increasing the momentum of the development programmes created to take away this unappealing situation.

Though, the government of former president, Goodluck Jonathan built 125 Almajiri Model Schools in 13 states of the North through the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETF) and Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) to help get these kids off the streets and deal with the menace of Almajiri phenomenon in the Northern region, the newly elected government of Buhari has made a more decisive development decision to enforce the integrate of the elements of basic education into the Quranic school system, where pupils are imparted with knowledge and skills beyond Quranic recitation via the Tsangaya Model Schools.

The new name “Tsangaya” unlike “Almajiri”, in my own opinion will bleach our thoughts of what people perceive the children to be.

According to Mr David Apeh - the Public Relations Officer of UBEC, in a recent press release, this intervention programme will enable these children to integrate effectively into the Federal Government’s Universal Basic Education programme by bridging the gap between Islamic and Western education in the region.

This is a quiet revolution, we should be proud of. It will change the perspective of the world concerning children in the North and Nigeria as a whole.