₦airaland Forum

Nigeria: Almajirai And The North's Future

16 October 2011
editorial
Zamfara State governor Abdulazeez Yari recently stated that over 1.2 million child beggars, popularly called almajirai, were roaming the streets of the state. This figure is realistic but frightening. Apparently, it agrees with the figure quoted two years ago by the then minister of state for education, Aishatu Jibrin Dukku.

She had said there were at least 10 million child beggars in northern Nigeria. Other authorities have put the number of the North's children who are unschooled, unemployed, unemployable and hopeless at 15-20 million.

In its original meaning, almajirai is not synonymous with child beggars. It is recognised in Islam. But, in northern Nigeria, the phenomenon has symbolised all that is associated with neglect and destitution. Governor Yari must have felt disturbed that so many people are so disadvantaged in the state he governs. Every northern governor should be equally worried, for it is an indictment on northern leaders.

How would the future of the North be? What meaningful progress is possible when more than 30 per cent of the population is destitute? The North is obviously sitting on a time bomb. If the problem is not solved today, dangers lie ahead in the future. Who would be the leaders of tomorrow? The abandoned children of today will certainly be the criminal adults of tomorrow.

Education is the best weapon against the odious almajirai syndrome in the North. At present, there is talk of building almajirai schools all over the North. However, what will matter most is the skills the children will acquire that will enable them to be useful to themselves and the society.

It is possible to eliminate the almajirai problem within 10 years, if only parents would start taking care of the children they bring into the world. A situation whereby parents pay no attention to the welfare of their children and despatch them to the streets to fend for themselves at an early age is not acceptable in the modern world.

Perhaps the illiterate parents of these children also need to be educated. Non-formal and adult education would make them understand the value of education and parental care. They should be taught to discourage early marriage and have fewer children. Parents who refuse to send their children, male or female, to school should be penalised.

Child begging is already an emergency situation. State and local governments should therefore look for urgent solutions. Good governance entails caring for the citizenry. Politicians should stop using destitute children to cause mayhem, especially at election times.

The North's leaders could borrow a leaf from Lagos State, for instance, which has almost completely rehabilitated street urchins called "area boys". Many former "area boys" now work as bricklayers, environmental workers and painters. Every human being has the potential to be useful, if given the right climate in which to thrive. Creating such environment should be the preoccupation of our leaders now.

http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/201110160010.html

Okada (in other words, employment) decreases poverty

Interesting

Lmao.

Hilarious thread

Always entertaining watching various NLers ridicule our resident court jester Fstranger.

otokx:
post utme has come to stay, all those JAMB cheaters loose out.

+1

It is kind of obvious why it needs to stay.

i dey laff o

^-- cool!

Lmao at this name:

Relax101:
Following a motion  titled,  “Illegal Subjection of Candidates to Examinations by Universities after the Test by the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB)”, moved by Senator Heineken Lokpobiri (Bayelsa West Senatorial District), the Senate took time to examine the pros and cons of the exercise.

Anyway, at topic, no reason they shouldn't be able to administer post-UTME. Helps to weed out cheats.

lakal:
Go and hug transformer, were alaso ni e.

Hehe

Cosign on that. Like I said earlier, best to ignore the dude. Trolls enjoy attention.

Right. Nobody is saying that no such word/phrase exists in any language. But his comment was not about languages in general, but about Yoruba specifically. So I don't see the point of this dude's comments.

[quote author=Kilode?! link=topic=781645.msg9342179#msg9342179 date=1318641163]It's ok. Right, don't focus on Esu, but give him his place. I don't think the OP listed them in order of importance though.

It's fine, I just don't want us to keep thinking we need to hide Esu because Europeans misunderstood his role in the Yoruba pantheon of Gods

Esu is not Satan, Satan is an EUROPEAN god. Esu is not the devil, he's just a trickster, a little cynical but not evil.

Western christians and their converts just diluted the role and essence of an existing God to suit their own Beliefs.[/quote]+100

This dude is trying to derail the thread by force. Imo, best to ignore him

Pretty sure that "kp" is not correct in Yoruba. It is just a "p."

"p" in Yoruba is pronounced like "kp" in English.

"p" in English is pronounced like "pee."

That artwork is gorgeous.

Nice article.

But I don't believe in the viability of solar. Just isn't competitive price-wise.

Interesting article by El-Rufai. Thanks for the highlights Mai-Suya.

I didn't know oil and gas is only 16% of gdp? Where did he get this # from? That # makes me happy.

na wa o

I don't get it either.

What will happen next, will someone kidnap a governor for ransom?

Or kidnap the president?

You never hear of these type of strange tales happening in civilized lands

I wonder if Alao-Akala likes this particular (now classic) song:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXDoxxlgNG0

Didn't we just have a similar incident recently with the Japanese, Mitsubishi?

I wonder why all these. . . incidents, let's call them, keep happening.

So who is lying? The Indonesians, or the Nigerian gov't?

Both cannot be telling the truth.

And if it is the Indonesians making up stories, then where did they get this idea from?

Heh

By Our Reporter 1 hour ago

Naira fell for the first day in three against the dollar on speculation the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) can’t meet demand for the greenback from importers after returning the naira to its target band at an auction yesterday.
The naira according to Reuters news retreated as much as 2.2 per cent in the interbank market to N159.475 per dollar, before trading 2 per cent weaker at N159.15 by 12:34 p.m. in Lagos. The apex bank met demand in full for the first time in 26 auctions yesterday, selling $591.67 million and bringing the currency back into its target band of 3 percentage points below or above N150 per dollar. The naira was the world’s second-worst performer yesterday against the dollar after Gambia’s dalasi.
CBN Governor Lamido Sanusi increased the key lending rate by 2.75 percentage points and reiterated the naira target range at an extraordinary meeting October 10. The bank raised the cash-reserve ratio to 8 per cent from 4 per cent. The naira had its biggest one-day rally in almost eight years after the decision.
There’s been “large demand for foreign currency from importers, which has pushed the likes of the naira weaker,” Dina Ahmad, a London-based emerging-markets strategist at BNP Paribas SA, wrote yesterday in e-mailed comments. “The central bank has stepped up its foreign-exchange auction, but I don’t think that they are comfortable with maintaining the size at these levels - I think that’s partly the reason why they resorted to a sharp rate hike.”

http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/business/22821-naira-falls-on-speculation-cbn-can%E2%80%99t-meet-dollar-demand.html

^-- was it an intro programming class?

pc guru:
i love any programming language that has lambda functions(anonymous functions) they are fun and also love the new PHP 5.3 because the callback of functions call user array, you can dynamically make calls and detect the number of parameters just like JavaScript Callback. codng because lots easier and saner that way.

Yep, anonymous functions are really cool. I don't know what a callback is, guess I'll wikipedia it.

GEJ again 

Somebody with photoshop skills, get to work with this:

https://www.onesourcetalent.com/blog/images/clueless-2-alicia-silverstone.jpg

http://www.latex-project.org/ftp.html

Latex is awesome.

Texlive (http://www.tug.org/texlive/) is the distribution of Latex I use. Download it and install.

Read through this for a tutorial if you need to learn how to use it: http://happymutant.com/latex/

Really nice way to produce high-quality documents/PDFs. If you are a mathematician, it is what (almost) everyone in your field uses to write up their work. So very much worth learning.

^-- PDP is like cancer.

You don't fight cancer halfway, otherwise it will kill you.

And if your otherwise functional healthy and function kidney (Mimiko) is corrupted by cancer, then probably a good idea to consider your options.

If he stays away from PDP and stays in LP, no wahala

^-- I'll hopefully post some more this weekend. Just need to find good ones.

Whenever I read articles like this, I can only think of the opportunities that Nigeria is missing

Imagine if we had good electricity supply and more business-friendly labor laws?

Couldn't we steal away this factory from India? Couldn't Nigeria be the location businesses want to open up their industries?

Alas. . .