shoe shinning as a child

Mainstream media may turn a blind eye to the reality of our nation, the millions who don’t or can’t afford to go to schools, Or, those who do, the facilities are ill-equipped to cater to the minimum requirement to qualify for schools. The magnitude of Nigeria’s educational and curricular collapse is staggering, yet this has been ignored by successive governments.

Every election cycle, politicians will pay a once-every-four-year tour of these abandoned communities to sell another Utopia. The degree of destitution and homelessness has doubled since the current administration took over, the cry of the poor has waned and lost in the distant savanna that straddles these communities.

When children, in the 21st century, must hawk for kilometres and yet still not meet the basic needs, they become inheritors of their parents’ lives of penury, a recipe for a failed society. Children should be in school; it’s that simple. Strikes in schools have become part of the Nigerian schools’ curriculum; they occur even at primary schools. “Give a kid a book, and you change the world.” Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. “las las school na scam.”