By Shu’aibu Usman Leman
In the sun-scorched streets of most state capitals in the North, young boys weave through traffic, balancing trays of wares on their heads or in their hands. Their faces glisten with sweat beneath an unforgiving sky.
Young girls haul water for the tenth time that day, their school uniforms neatly folded in polythene bags—a wistful symbol of a dream they may never realise.
Elsewhere, roofless classrooms await teachers who, more often than not, will not come.
These are not mere snapshots of misfortune. They represent a harrowing reality that defines the lives of millions of children across Northern Nigeria—young souls failed by a system that promised education but delivered only silence, neglect, and abandonment.
According to data from UNICEF, Nigeria is now home to over 18.3 million out-of-school children, with some even claiming a higher figure. This is the highest number in the world, and an overwhelming 80 per cent of these children reside in the North. While this figure alone is staggering, it fails to capture the full scale of the crisis.
Behind every statistic is a child with a name, a voice, a heart full of dreams, and a destiny that is quietly slipping through their fingers.
These are children who should be learning to read and write, asking questions, and exploring the world. Instead, they are forced into early marriages, pushed into child labour, left to beg on the streets, or, more tragically, drawn into the clutches of extremist ideologies that thrive on despair.
Even for those who do make it to school, education remains little more than a mirage. What hope exists in classrooms with crumbling walls, leaking roofs, broken desks, and barely a textbook in sight? Teachers—where present—are too often underpaid, undertrained, and overwhelmed. In many rural areas, a single teacher is left to handle classes of over 100 pupils with no access to even the most basic learning materials. In such conditions, how can education flourish?
It is a national disgrace that only one in four Nigerian children aged 7 to 14 can read a simple sentence or solve a basic arithmetic problem.
A child can spend six years in school and yet be unable to confidently write their own name. This is not merely an educational failure; it is a betrayal of our children and a damning indictment of our national priorities.
Let us not pretend this crisis appeared overnight.
It is the bitter fruit of decades of systemic neglect, poor governance, entrenched inequality, and widespread political apathy—compounded by a deep-rooted cultural resistance to formal education, particularly for girls. In many parts of the North, a girl is more likely to be married at a tender age than to complete primary school.
To make matters worse, insecurity has devastated what little hope remained. Extremist groups such as Boko Haram have made schools deliberate targets, bombing classrooms, abducting pupils, and killing teachers.
Entire communities have been paralysed by fear. Yet, even in states untouched by insurgency, children continue to abandon education in their thousands. Why? Because schooling, as it stands today, is neither free nor safe nor meaningful.
When families must choose between feeding their children and sending them to school, survival wins. When teachers are owed salaries for months, classrooms go silent.
When education offers no real chance at a better life, people lose faith in it—and when a society loses faith in education, it begins to unravel at its very core.
This brings us to the Northern States Governors Forum (NSGF), an assembly that, in theory, exists to address the region’s most pressing challenges. In reality, it has become a symbol of political impotence and collective failure. These are the men who claim to lead Northern Nigeria yet preside over its slow and deliberate collapse.
When they gather, what takes precedence? Is it the future of the 10-year-old hawking oranges in the streets, or the girl forced into early marriage? Or is it the next election cycle, the next political alliance, the next opportunity to secure personal power?
What urgent action have they taken in the face of this education catastrophe? Where is the outrage in their voices, the resolve in their policies, the humanity in their decisions? In a region with the highest number of out-of-school children on Earth, their inaction is not just negligence—it is complicity.
Instead of bold leadership, we see cosmetic meetings, flowery communiqués, and photo ops staged to project a false image of concern.
Meanwhile, the real work—the hard, necessary, transformative work—is left undone. Children rot in classrooms with no roofs if they are lucky to be in classrooms at all. Teachers go unpaid, and girls disappear into a life of servitude before they ever learn to write their names.
If education truly mattered to these governors, their state budgets would prove it. Their policies would reflect urgency, not delay. But there is no urgency. There is no innovation. There is no shame.
What we have instead is a region ruled by leaders’ content with mediocrity.
Leaders who have normalised failure. Leaders who watch a generation wither and still sleep soundly at night. They have betrayed not only the children they swore to serve but the very idea of public service itself.
History will not be kind to them. It will remember the governors who fiddled while their states burned with ignorance.
It will remember the men who had power in their hands and chose indifference. And when the consequences of their neglect return in the form of unrest, poverty, extremism, and irreversible social collapse—let no one say we were not warned.
Yet, hope has not been extinguished—at least, not yet. There remains a narrow window of opportunity, but time is not on our side. If we stay on this course, we will not only fail this generation—we will doom our collective future. We risk raising a population that knows only survival, not success; only hardship, not hope.
What is needed now is a radical awakening—an unflinching political will. The Northern Governors must not merely meet; they must lead. They must declare a state of emergency in the education sector and act with the urgency this crisis demands. Budgets must reflect the gravity of the problem. Every child must be accounted for, supported, and kept in school.
Teachers must be trained, fairly compensated, and respected for the vital work they do. Communities must be educated, mobilised, and empowered to demand better. Education for girls must move beyond slogans and symbolic gestures—it must become a legally protected, fully funded, and actively implemented policy.
More than that, we must reframe education—not as a luxury or a favour, but as our most powerful tool for national security, economic growth, peace, and human dignity. A literate society is a resilient society. An educated population is our best line of defence against violence, extremism, poverty, and inequality.
Let us remind ourselves: the children of Northern Nigeria are not invisible. They are not numbers on a spreadsheet. They are our sons and daughters, our neighbours and friends. They are the doctors, teachers, builders, and leaders of tomorrow. They are full of promise, but they lack opportunity. And that is on us.
The question is no longer whether these children can be saved. The question is: do we care enough to try?
These children are not statistics. They are not abstract problems to be debated in the comfort of air-conditioned conference halls. They are living, breathing human beings who laugh, cry, feel hunger, pain, joy, and dream, even amidst the darkest of realities. They are boys who want to become doctors and engineers, scientists, and leaders.
They are girls who dare to imagine classrooms they will one day lead, businesses they will build, and change they will inspire.
But how can they chase those dreams when the very foundation of their future—education—has been stripped away?
Every day we delay, we steal a child’s chance to become who they were meant to be. Every moment of inaction is another day. A girl is forced into marriage before her childhood ends. Every day of silence is another day a boy is pushed into the streets—or worse, into the hands of those who would use his desperation for destruction.
We are not just losing potential; we are losing lives, futures, families, and something far more fragile: our collective humanity.
When these children ask—perhaps years from now—why no one came for them, what will we say? When they ask why they were born into a country that turned its back, what justification will we offer? When they ask why the wealthiest nation in Africa could not provide them with a teacher, a textbook, a safe place to learn, will we look them in the eye? Will we tell them it was too difficult? Too far from Abuja? Too political to care?
If we allow millions of children to grow up without access to education, we are not simply denying them a future; we are building a society that is unstable, unequal, violent, and impossible to sustain. This is not just a social failure. It is a moral one, and it is a ticking time bomb.
No amount of foreign aid, infrastructure projects, or political strategy can repair a nation that abandons its children. It is not enough to build roads and bridges when the minds that might one day maintain them are left to rot in ignorance and poverty.
Leman is a former National Secretary of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ)
email: shuaibuusmanleman@yahoo.com
