Penultimate week, the Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu hugged media headlines when he briefly halted his convoy to interact with two underage girls on an errand for a bean cake vendor during school hours. Report said that the girls – Amarachi Chinedu, 9, and Suwebat Husseini, 12 – were forced to skip school by their parents in order to serve some domestic assistance around the Anthony Village area.
Pictures published in major newspapers showed an emotive Sanwo-Olu that could barely hide his “shock” in his interactions with the girls. “My encounter with them gave me the opportunity to hear their stories and I have taken it upon myself to ensure that these girls never suffer such fate again. I am not going to leave them alone,” he was quoted to have said.
Sanwo-Olu’s showy stunt has been widely received with condemnation and acceptance in different quarters, with many insinuating that it was a campaign strategy ahead of the 2023 electioneering.
That the pictures became a major PR material was no surprise. What’s actually surprising is that the governor seemed surprised that there are children like Amarachi and Suwebat on the streets of Lagos. Apart from basic checks at random bus-stops and slums across the state that could have afforded him the opportunity of seeing the keg of gunpowder that the nation sits on with regard to out-of-school children, perhaps a little familiarity with the right data might have erased his surprise.
Surprised Sanwo-Olu, Unsurprising datasets
Data collected by Dataphyte from the Universal Basic Education Commission from its Digest of Basic Education Statistics for the year 2018 showed that there were a total of 254,654 out-of-school children at the primary school level alone in Lagos as of 2017/2018. A breakdown of the figure showed that there were 170,279 boys and 84,375 girls.
Earlier in 2015/2016, data showed that the number of out-of-school children at the primary school level stood at 566,700, inclusive of both male and female. Although the data showed that between 2016 and 2018, there has been a reduction in the number of out-of-school children in the state, the matter is far from being resolved.
In September 2021, the Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board said 10 local government areas in the state have the highest number of out-of-school-children. Although it failed to provide detailed data to support the claim, while speaking during a sensitization programme in Lagos, LASUBEB Executive Chairman, Wahab Alawiye-King, said the board was trying to enroll more children into schools.
In addition to the primary level, Lagos has a huge army of out-of-school children in the junior and senior secondary school levels too, estimated at over two million.
Last month, Alawiye-King disclosed that an initiative of the state government to rid the streets of out-of-school children, EkoExcel programme, is helping to reduce the number.
Out-of-School Children, Out-of-shape infrastructure
A major selling point of the Lagos government in its campaign for enrolment of out-of-school children is that basic primary education is free in the state and there is adequate infrastructure.
But a report in 2017 found that public education in Lagos State is as relatively underfunded as elsewhere across Nigeria, as it accounts for approximately less than 13 percent of total budgetary appropriations. In 2018, the government pegged its allocation to education at N126.3 billion, representing 12.07 percent of its budget for the year.
According to the World Bank 2018 projection, Nigeria’s population growth was put at 2.8 percent per year. As of 2018, BudgIT said in a report that a demographic trend analysis put Lagos’ population growth rate at 8 percent which resulted in its harboring 36.8 per cent (an estimated 49.8 million) of Nigeria’s 150 million urban dwellers. Between then and now, although the figures have been quite controversial, Nigeria’s population is said to have shot up—as well as Lagos’.
Due to population density, demand for education is high in Lagos. But as population growth continues to put pressure on the available educational facilities in the state, the number of schools and adequate infrastructure haven’t grown in equal measure.
A World Bank research paper on education in Ajeromi Ifelodun area—one of Lagos’ most densely populated area —claimed that sustained population growth, high population density, and a severe undersupply of public education services in the area have led to a substantial increase in the supply of private schools there. In the local government, the population growth has created rapidly increasing demand for education services that were not met by government supply.
For instance, in 2006, data showed that there were 74 public primary schools in Ajeromi-Ifelodun among the 1,045 public primary schools in Lagos State. In that year, the population to primary school ratio was 16,797:1 in Lagos State and 19,395:1 in Ajeromi-Ifelodun. In 2011, there were 34,707 pupils in public schools in the local government area, with 94,099 students attending private schools.
The paper said at the time that based on school census information, in 1964, there were 49 private schools operating in Ajeromi-Ifelodun. But by early 2014, there were 726 total private schools providing education services.
Meanwhile, in all of those years, the government-owned schools have remained within the same number.
In essence, access and adequacy of infrastructure remain major concerns, in addition to the poor quality of education offered by the ubiquitous private schools in the absence of enough government-owned schools.
A bad situation worsened by Covid-19
Although the Lagos records appear bad, nothing speaks to the depth of Nigeria’s problem than a realization that Lagos ranks among the best performing states in its enrollment figures in Nigeria.
One in every five of the world’s out-of-school children is in Nigeria. While primary education is officially free and compulsory, over 10.5 million of the country’s children aged 5-14 years are not in school.
Data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in 2020 showed that a quarter of Nigeria’s 40.8 million school-age children were not attending primary education, just as 10 states had about 5.2 million of the country’s about 10.2 million out-of-school children.
Kano State had the most with 989,234, while Akwa-Ibom (581,800), Katsina (536,122) and Kaduna (524,670) followed closely. States like Taraba (499,923), Sokoto (436,570), Yobe (427,230), Zamfara (422,214) and Bauchi (354,373) also ranked high.
Meanwhile, an already bad situation has been made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic and its attendant disruption.
Several reports have shown that turnout of school children has been very poor since the imposition of lockdown in the heat of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many who hawked for their parents and were forced into child labour never returned to school.
In March 2021, the Nigerian government said the number of out-of-school children had climbed up to 10.1 million nationwide, an increase of more than three million from the 2020 figure.
In essence, while a photo-op session with two young girls might appeal to some as a sign of seriousness in tackling the menace of out-of-school children in Lagos, it is never enough. Beyond the sublime art of turning surprise into showmanship, Sanwo-Olu has his job cut out for him.
If he moves away from Amarachi and Suwebatu, leaving his ingenious media handlers and camera men far behind, there are bigger surprises awaiting him in the slums of Ajegunle, Mushin, Orile and Alaba-Suru. He might as well do a dive into available UBEC and LASUBEB data, too.
Luckily in both cases, the governor might not need a camera crew.