THE AFRICAN continent has recorded 21 coup attempts by the military to overthrow incumbent governments in eight years.

According to data sourced from the Global Instances of Coups, 38 per cent of such attempts have been successful since 2015.

Most of the coups in Africa have taken place in the west and central parts of the continent.

Recently, there were coup attempts in Mali, Sudan and Guinea-Bissau.

Less than two months into 2022, there have already been two attempts to overthrow the incumbent governments in Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso.

The Guinea-Bissau attempt was foiled but Burkina Faso was successful and the coup leader Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba has been appointed interim president.

Coup attempts in Africa since 2015

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In 2015 and 2016, there were five coup attempts in Africa, but none of them was successful.

In 2017, there were two coup attempts in Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe. While the former failed, the latter was successful.

There was no coup in 2018, but in 2019, there were three coup attempts but only one succeeded.

From 2020, Africa recorded a sharp increase in coup attempts and successes with 11 attempts and six successes. There were two attempts in 2020, seven in 2021 and two in 2022.

Since 1950 till date, there have been a total of 494 coup attempts in the world, 222 of which took place in Africa.

Why coups are increasing in Africa

A former Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission Chidi Odinkalu had blamed the recent rise in coups in African countries on the lack of credibility in elections on the continent.

Odinkalu said this during a Twitter Space hosted by The Punch on Monday to discuss the reasons behind the resurgence of coups in Africa.

“Increasingly, elections are becoming laughable processes by which authoritarian regimes and dictators procure their own continuance in power.

“Many of the outcomes of elections don’t reflect the will of the people and when they happen, the AU, ECOWAS and other bodies all sign off on them as okay. People have become scandalised as a result,” he said.

He noted that the situation was partly fuelled by the failure of the Economic Community of the West African States and the African Union to condemn recurrent corrupt elections on the continent.

“Because the regional economic communities have failed to condemn the bastardisation of elections, the people have made their own choices, saying if you are not going to condemn elections, then don’t disturb us if and when we get rid of these people by any means necessary,” he noted.

The AU and ECOWAS have both condemned the recent coups in the region and continent, while the former has called for an emergency meeting with some African nations leaders.

Also, the Commander of the United States of America African Command Stephen Townsend suggested that the increasing number of coups in some African countries resulted from a lack of good governance and corruption.

IT was a bright Tuesday morning when The ICIR met Omogbolahon Ganiu at the Ojodu Berger park.

He had just begun the day’s job and was running a routine check on his car. A tired bus conductor was sleeping on one of the four seats on his 16-seater long bus. An expression of surprise marked his face when The ICIR asked him if he had paid the new daily N800 levy the Lagos State government imposed on transporters in the state.

Collection of the levy was supposed to take off on February 1, 2022, but Ganiu had not even heard of the development.

Looking rather distraught at the news, Ganiu prayed the government to reconsider its stance.

He said, “Vehicle parts and oils are very expensive. A small keg of engine oil used to be N500, now it’s N1,000. The somewhat bigger one is N2000. If we want to do some servicing, that oil is N6,500. All these things don’t make Nigeria liveable.”

His prayer is not likely to be answered. The ICIR learnt that the levy collection, which did not start on February 1 as announced, is likely to commence next Monday.

The Lagos State government had, on Tuesday, January 18, 2022, introduced a daily ₦800 Consolidated Informal Transport Levy for transporters in the state. This levy is apart from the dues the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) and the Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria (RTEAN) forcefully collect daily from commercial vehicle drivers.

The government levy is expected to harmonise dues it collects from the drivers at parks and garages across the state. It is also expected to reduce multiple taxation.

The Lagos State Commissioner for Finance Rabiu Olowo was quoted as explaining that the levy, pegged at a flat rate of N800, covered money for not just the local government levy alone, but also that of clearing waste from motor parks, which was being paid to the Ministry of Transportation, Lagos State Waste Management Authority and Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency. Olowo added that once a transporter paid the ₦800 at a point, they would not expected to pay at any other park or bus stop throughout the day.

The new levy is real bad news for commercial vehicle drivers. The ICIR conducted an investigation between January 31 and February 1, 2022 in parks at Ojodu Berger, Ogba, Agege and Ikeja, speaking to transporters on what they feared would be the effects of this levy on their business.

Another driver in the same park where Ganiu operates, Lukman Owoyemi, computed his daily earnings against the many dues he said he was compelled to pay.

“The union here collects N1,500. We carry 13 passengers, which translates to N7,800. The government wants to take N800. After buying petrol for the vehicle, how much is left? We buy fuel on a daily basis. We make N3,000 on a trip. So let’s add the whole thing: union dues, N1500; petrol, N2000; state levy, N800. That’s N4,300 as expenses.

“At Oshodi, there is always traffic jam. Some union guys are usually at Oshodi waiting for us. Then the vehicle can have any problem. It can break down; I was in such a dilemma yesterday. If I returned the passengers’ money, how much would be left? Sometimes, we have to settle the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA) and other officers. We could spend up to N15,000 on such illegal settlements. The state government needs to rethink this,” Owoyemi said.

Fares to increase

At Ogba, commercial tricycle (keke Marwa) riders posited that fares were likely to go up if the new levy stayed. An ICIR check around the axis revealed that NURTW enforcers, known in local parlance as ‘agbero,’ would collect the sum of N1,600 from each commercial tricycle operator.

An operator, Uche Odor, said, “That money is too much. When you pay agbero N1,600 and pay the government N800, how much do we take home? It is passengers who will suffer.”

Residents of Lajolo community in Ilorin East Local Government Area of Kwara State have accused the Police of extrajudicial killing of two teenagers while carrying out an operation in the community on Saturday, January 29, 2022.

The victims, Jamiu Fatai and Shaobana Abdulrasheed, both 18 year old, were natives of Lajolo community, a student-populated area, which is close to Kwara State Polytechnic.

The Mogaji ( community head) Isa Alao, while speaking to our reporter, said the activities of security operatives were becoming worrisome, saying that different security outfits in the guise of fighting crimes and criminalities often visited the community at intervals to make arrests.

They would release the suspects mostly students, after allegedly collecting money.

According to him, “The activities of the security agencies in this area have become worrisome in recent times. They have turned crime fighting into a weekly business venture, where people are arrested at random and released after collecting huge sums as bail,” he said.

Talking about Saturday incidents, the Mogaji said the community started hearing sporadic gunshots at about 6:00am, causing pandemonium.

He said he was later informed that it was the men of the Nigeria Police that stormed the community in an 18-seater Hummer bus gestapo style, breaking down doors of students and arresting seven of them.

He said Jamiu was recording the melee with his mobile phone in front of his house before he was shot in the shoulder and as he turned to run for his life, he was shot at the back.

Jamiu, a J SS 3 student who is also a carpenter apprentice, later died at the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital where he was rushed to, but another person Shaobana Abdulrasheed was taken away after being shot by the operatives.

The Mogaji wondered why the security agencies found it difficult to inform the community head when such operations would be carried out, knowing full well that traditional and community heads knew the details of virtually every residents of their various communities.

“If any kind of operations is to be carried out, we believe the Police should inform the community heads, who actually know the area and can be of immense help to security agencies in fighting crime,”.

“The only reason I can say that made them not inform the community of the operation is because it is illegal job,” he concluded.

In his own account, a distraught family member of the victim Rasheed Imam, who claimed to be the elder brother of Jamiu, told our reporter that security operatives were in the community last week to arrest some students for crimes that were not known.

“They always come here every weekend to make arrests, but after two days, the students will resurface in the community, claiming to have paid huge sums of money to secure their release,” he said.

He also revealed that a student of the Kwara Polytechnic was shot in the arm and he was in the hospital receiving treatment.

Imam called on the government to fish out the killer security operatives and ensure that they were made to face the full wrath of the law.

The situation led to a chaotic situation at the entrance gate of the polytechnic, as students reportedly blocked the road in protest of the reported killings of the victim of the incident by the Police.

NIGERIAN President Muhammadu Buhari has a sixth opportunity to implement electoral reforms in the country after the National Assembly transmitted the amended Electoral Act Amendment Bill to him for assent into law.

The National Assembly transmitted the bill to Buhari on January 31, according to a statement signed by Senior Special Adviser to the President on National Assembly Matters Babajide Omoworare.

Transmission of the bill to the president by the National Assembly was in line with provisions of Section 58 (3) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended) and the Acts Authentication Act Cap. A2 LFN 2004.

From the date of transmission, Buhari has 30 days to sign the bill into law, and in the event that he again refuses to do so, he will write the National Assembly to explain his reasons for withholding assent.

If Buhari again refuses to assent to the bill, the National Assembly can decide to override the presidential veto and pass the bill into law with two-thirds majority vote in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

The lawmakers failed to heed calls from Nigerians to override the president when Buhari refused to sign the electoral bill in December 2021.

Buhari said a clause which mandated political parties to adopt the direct primary model for election of candidates for elective positions was the reason he refused to sign the bill into law.

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Forcing political parties to adopt direct primaries “violates the spirit of democracy,” Buhari said.

According to him, direct primaries would hike the cost of elections and place huge financial burden on political parties and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

He also argued that compulsory adoption of direct primaries violated the rights of the political parties to decide the model through which they wish to elect their flagbearers especially as many parties already have constitutions which provide for different methods of primary elections.

Buhari also pointed to security implications of holding direct primaries in parts of the country as one of the factors that informed his refusal to assent to the bill.

To address Buhari’s concerns, the National Assembly upon resumption after its Yuletide recess moved quickly to amend the bill.

On January 25, the National Assembly passed the amended electoral bill which provided political parties with three models of primary elections – direct, indirect and consensus.

In October 2019, a section of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) building located in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), was gutted by fire.

The news spread like wildfire on social media such that the former spokesperson Wahab Gbadamosi confirmed the incident with the assurance of providing details of losses incurred due to the inferno.

The fire outbreak was later subdued by officials of the fire service.

Similarly, in January 2021, the FCT witnessed another fire incident at the Kugbo Furniture and Timber Market. About 100 shops were engulfed by fire while goods worth N3billion were lost to the inferno.

It was not the first time the furniture market would experience such a disaster.

Around the same month in 2020, a similar incident had occurred where traders lost goods and huge sum of money .

By July 2021, the FCT recorded another fire incident in the Karmo market. According to one Toluwani Ajayi, who was an eyewitness, a generator explosion had caused the inferno.

It gradually spread, covering a larger part of the stalls. Goods worth millions were lost to the unfortunate incident.

But that was not all. About four months after, on November 5, 2021, another fire incident broke out in Kubwa, a different suburb area of FCT. It happened precisely at the Kubwa ultra-modern market, claiming five lives.

The Police later confirmed the incident.

The latest in the series of fire incidents in FCT was Abuja’s Next Cash & Carry inferno. It drew so much attention and public concern that the authorities promised to investigate the cause.

It is uncertain if any official outcome from the supposed probe has been made public.

The series of incidents simply implies that the FCT Administration must be proactive in addressing the recurring fire disasters.

Hence, it developed an online portal (www.myfctagov.ng) where members of the public could easily contact the FCT Fire Service should there be an urgent need.

The platform boldly has on it three phone numbers with large font sizes: 0814643440, 092006118, 092914089. That is, with a glance, the public could easily grab the numbers and put a call to the service.

The initiative, according to the FCT Administration, is the "Federal Capital Territory Residents Engagement Platform designed to connect the residents of FCT with the FCT Administration for interactions, communication, and collaboration between the government and the residents."

Emergency numbers of FCT Fire Service on the official portal of FCTA residents interactive platform. Source: Myfctagov.ng

Deteriorating insecurity in Niger and Kaduna states is taking a significant toll on education in the two states. Parents now withdraw their children from schools in the states to safer parts of the nation. The action, which places more burden on the parents’ finances, further shows the low capacity of the states to protect school children and education facilities. The ICIR’s Senior Investigative Reporter, Marcus Fatunmole, reports.

SENSING danger the kidnapping of schoolchildren by bandits portends for his child, Governor Nasir Ahmad el-Rufai secretly withdrew his six-year-old son, Abubakar Al-Siddique, months after he enrolled him at the Kaduna Capital School in September 2019.

During the campaign for his election as governor, el-Rufai had promised to enrol the boy in a public school in the state to set an example for his counterparts in other states, and other public office holders who send their children to schools abroad or private schools in the country.

Siddique’s enrolment coincided with when bandits preyed on the state capital and other communities in the state – killing, abducting school children and other residents.

The bandits often demand that ransome be paid, or the victim is slaughtered in the forest.

The Government Science Secondary School, Kagara, Rafi Local Government Area of the state is one of the facilities where the bandits have launched an attack.

Since they attacked the institution on February 17, 2021, and abducted 27 students, the school has remained a ghost of itself.

Only soldiers use the premises. Its teachers have not been deployed to other schools to work, according to The ICIR’s findings.

A number of the schoolchildren have moved to different communities in the state and other parts of the country.

Similarly, it took the Greenfield University in the state some time to relocate and resume teaching after gunmen attacked the school and whisked away 20 students and three staff on April 20 2021.

The kidnappers killed five of the students before releasing the others after collecting ransom.

Between January 2020 and the time the reports on the withdrawal of el-Rufai’s son from the school emerged, deaths from insecurity in the state were already three times higher than the North-East, enmeshed in decade-long terrorism conflict, recorded within the period.

According to the state quarterly security report, from January to September 2021, 888 people died while kidnappers held on to 2,353 persons in the state.

Chapter Two, sub-section 2b of the Nigerian constitution (1999 as amended), states that the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.

With worsening security misfortunes in the state, parents like Governor el-Rufai are pulling their children out of schools to save them from terrorists, who operate under different guises, namely bandits, kidnappers and gunmen.

But the action comes with varying consequences.

How parents withdraw their children from schools in Kaduna State

Olola Akioye Seun is a journalist based in Abuja. In 2020, he pulled out his 11-year-old son from the Command Secondary School in the state capital and enrolled him in Abuja.

He said it was challenging for him to keep going with the child from Abuja to Kaduna and be checking on him because of insecurity.

Going to Kaduna by road from Abuja was risky, while using the train cost him more because many a time, he got the train tickets through the black market.

“When the issue of kidnapping in schools started happening, I didn’t have peace of mind. I kept thinking about where next the kidnapping would occur in the state. Every call from that school to me caused me fear.

IN Kano state, religious police known as Hisbah are violating the freedom of many Nigerians in the name of religion. The Hisbah operations have also been surrounded by hypocrisy and preference to persecute the low and middle-class residents of the state. The ICIR’s Lukman ABOLADE reports.

At around 11 p.m. one Sunday evening in June 2021, a student of Bayero University, Kano Racheal James* and her three other roommates, were having dinner in their sitting room when they began to hear loud knocks on the door and voices shouting ‘open this door’ in the Hausa language.

“They were banging the door like they wanted to break in, telling us to open the door. When they came in, I was scared because they held long machetes and big long sticks called (Gora). I felt they were going to kill me,” Racheal said.

She told The ICIR that it took a few minutes for her to recognise that the men who came into their house were the Hisbah religious police officers.

The Hisbah in Kano is religious police established by the State government to enforce Sharia laws among Muslims.

Racheal said one of the Hisbah officers pulled her by her hair when she refused to follow them into their patrol van.

“I did not want to follow them; one of them just pulled me by my hair and dragged me into their Peugeot van that midnight,” she narrated.

Racheal and her roommates inquired what offence they had committed; the Hisbah officers said she was cohabiting with male students.

A day in Hisbah cell

After their arrests, the Hisbah officers went to other houses in the community to enforce more arrests that night.

“When we eventually got to their office, they kept us in a room that night and took the guys elsewhere and early in the morning, they took us to another place where they kept other arrested persons,” Racheal said.

She told The ICIR that there were many young female children of about eight, ten and fifteen years old that the Hisbah Police arrested.

Racheal said a pregnant child of about 15 years was locked up with chains and padlock inside the cell.

They said she escaped from her husband’s house, so they beat her up tied her legs with heavy chains and padlock; even though she was pregnant, they still beat her up, and she was bleeding. It was terrible,” she said.

She noted that most of the children in the female custody of the Hisbah had spent about one month in their custody.

On Thursday evening, Racheal was asked to sign an undertaking that she would not stay with men anymore or be charged to court.

“They wrote it themselves and told me to sign under it, I was later released on Thursday evening around 8:30 p.m., and I already missed my test.

JUBRIL Sadi Mato (Ramadan), an 11-year-old Pre-Junior Student of Elkenemy College of Islamic Theology Maiduguri, woke up in the wee hours of Jan. 16, 2022, had his ablution and observed his prayers with the hope of a brighter day ahead. He went about the activities of the day, full of life. But by nightfall, when most students had begun to retire to bed, Ramadan had his life almost snuffed out of him by a senior colleague.

It was gathered that the senior student from the SS2 class had sent Ramadan on an errand, but he didn’t go. That fateful night, he came to pick him up, took him to a quiet place and used a razor blade to severely cut his neck, injuring most of his arteries, nerves and trachea.

The offender, whose name has been concealed by the school management, left the victim for dead with his body soaked in blood. After some minutes, Jubril struggled and took himself to the principal’s office before collapsing and becoming unconscious.

Jubril was rushed to the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH) as he laid critical at the Intensive Care Unit(ICU); the perpetrator, reportedly high on psychotropic substances, was subsequently arrested and handed over to police station for further investigations.

The victim was the son of Late Justice Sadi Mato of Federal High Court Kano State. His Mother, Hajiya Aisha, later married a Director with Yobe State Government ( name withheld).

However, to the chagrin of the victim’s family members, Aisha’s new husband (Jubril’s stepfather), who was called by the school management shortly after the incident, has been discouraging the victim and his mother from reporting the attack.

A family member who chose to be anonymous said that the husband has collaborated with the Principal of the school as well as the Director of the College, the Commissioner for Basic and Secondary Education, Dr. Muhammad Sani Idris to conceal the report from going out, even as such cases had been reoccurring in the college.

He said the school director was said to be a very influential man, so he promised to do everything possible to ensure that the case was dead.

“Honestly, the case of Jubril has effectively been decriminalised as a result of a collapse in prosecutions that has allowed many offenders to escape justice and to go on to offend in the knowledge that they are unlikely to be held to account.

“The fact that their acts of violence are normalised, accepted or excused gives a feeling of power and impunity to these individuals and encourages such recurrent shameful predatory behaviour. This support system must be eradicated at all costs and in no uncertain terms.

“This is not the first case of armed violence in the college, there are several other cases relating to sexual abuse and armed violence, but the school management had swept it under the carpet. This is likely to mean we are creating more victims due to our failure to act.

NIGERIA’S 2022 budget is tainted with a huge deficit and loans whose repayment will, again, cost Africa’s most populous nation a fortune.

These, analysts say, puts the Nigerian economy under fiscal pressure.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s government has relied heavily on borrowing to sustain its budget cycle, with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) serving as lenders of last resort to the Federal Government.

The 2022 budget is projected at N17.13 trillion, which is 18 percent higher than the 2021 budget.

Also, recurrent (non-debt) spending, which is estimated at N6. 91 trillion, is 40 per cent of total expenditure and 20 per cent higher than the 2021 budget.

At N3. 8 trillion, debt service is 22 per cent of total expenditure and 34 per cent of total revenue.

The 2022 budget has a deficit of about N6.25tn, approximately 3.39 percent of the country’s GDP.

The budget also set aside N59 billion for counterpart funding for railway projects including: Lagos-Calabar, Calabar-Lagos, Ajaokuta-Itakpe, Port Harcourt-Maiduguri, Kano-Katsina, Jibiya-Maradi in Nigeria Republic, and Abuja Itakpe and Aladja(Warri) – Port and Refinery/Warri New harbour.

Budget deficit is to be financed mainly by borrowings, with targets from domestic sources – N2. 57 trillion; foreign sources-N2. 57 trillion; multi-lateral/bi-lateral loan draw-down N1. 16tn; and privatisation proceeds, N90. 7 billion.

“We’re borrowing and have high level of budget deficits. When you jack up the budget from N16. 39 trillion to N17.127 trillion and you are borrowing with high level of deficit, it calls for concern,” Professor of Financial Economics and Director of Centre for Economic Analysis and Research at the University of Lagos Ndubuisi Nwokoma said in a monitored programme on Arise Television on Friday.

“Also, we are looking at N3. 8 trillion for debt servicing, which is close to N3. 16 trillion projected oil revenue. Remember, we still have the subsidy concerns to deal with. It shows the budget is ‘highly leveraged.’ This is not just for this year, this has been happening for sometime now.”

The economist noted that the projected revenue of N10.1 trillion from oil and non oil sector, which was often not met, left Nigeria with excessive borrowing.

“How do we finance the deficit? Fiscally, we have to borrow about N5.01 trillion, alongside other project-tied loans, in addition to proceeds from the sale of government assets.”

Following these concerns, those knowledgeable about the economy also expressed worry that the government was still paying lip service to cutting down cost of governance.

They noted that the government had a spending problem, not revenue issue.

THE photos of Tunde Omotoye, Fola Aina and Dipo Awojide are widely circulated on Twitter and LinkedIn as they were offered a one-year sponsorship deal with the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) as brand ambassadors.

Their selection ticks off all the boxes for a model intellectual with a Gen Z fan base: Nigerian professionals in the diaspora with thousands of Twitter followers.

Awojide, a Senior Lecturer in Strategy at Nottingham Trent University, has over 900,000 followers on Twitter, while Aina is a Development Policy expert with over 113,000 followers.

And Omotoye, the co-founder of Humansquad, a Canada-based immigration tech startup, has over 327,000 followers on Twitter.

Brands and advertisers are attracted to influencers with high follower counts, especially on Twitter, because the more people influencers reach, the more money they make.

While Awojide and Omotoye had their contracts renewed from last year, Aina is a new entrant into the image-making enterprise of IELTS in Nigeria.

Their job description is simply to convince Nigerians seeking admission into universities or visa for jobs in European countries to take the IELTS tests and proffer strategies that project the brand in Nigeria.

While the brand ambassadors are paid to look at the positives of the IELTS, young Nigerians bear the brunt of its exorbitant charges.

The average cost of taking the IELTS test in Nigeria ranges from N83,000($200.5) for academic and general tests to N89,500 ($216.2) for UK Visas and Immigration tests.

This amount is twice the minimum wage of a worker in Nigeria, who earns N30,000 monthly.

Also, the shelflife of the IELTS test is two years.

IELTS is an English language proficiency test for non-native English speakers jointly managed by the British Council, IDP, IELTS Australia, and Cambridge Assessment English.

The tests are conducted multiple times a year and approved by United Kingdom Visas and Immigration(UKVI) for visa customers applying outside and inside the UK.

A Twitter user Olabayo Emmanuel who wrote the IELTS test in 2018, said he failed to gain admission into any of the schools as the validity of the test expired in 2020.

“I will never write that English language test again. I wrote in January 2018, and it expired (after two years) without having the opportunity to use it.

“English is our official language. I was taught in English right from primary school to university. These guys are cheats!!!” he said.

His reaction sums up the frustration of Nigerians who have made repeated calls faulting the IELTS test as being “exploitative” and “unfairly burdensome” for Nigerians.

TUCKED behind the National Military Cemetery along Airport Road is Karon Majigi, a suburb in Nigeria’s capital city, where many low-income people in Abuja are residents.

In Karon Majigi, a colony for Persons with Disabilities (PWDs) was established by former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Nasir El-Rufai to rid Abuja of beggars on the streets.

According to the Emir of the PWDs Suleiman Mohammed Katsina, about 520 PWDs live in the colonies with their families.

Most of the houses are built with zinc roofing sheets and wood. The streets are marked by rivulets of dirty water and accumulated debris.

The PWDs living in this colony face several difficulties, because they lack the financial capacity to cater to their daily needs.

They rely on charities from well-meaning individuals or organisations and the gift of able-bodied members of their families for survival.

Children bear the brunt

Children make up a large number of able-bodied occupants of the colony, and the basic amenities are luxury.

Many are out of school, since most families cannot afford tuition fees. In most cases, the children hawk food items around the community to augment the family income.

Seven-year-old Khadija Umar lives in the colony with her father, a PWD. She dropped out of school due to accumulated fees that her parents could not pay.

“They said I should stop coming to school because there is no money to pay my school fees,” she said.

She now sells ‘wara,’ a local chese consumed in northern Nigeria.

Mariya is a trader who lives in the colony with her husband, a PWD, and three children.

She told The ICIR that she could not afford to enrol any of her children in school, as feeding was already a daily struggle.

“We cannot even afford to eat or take care of ourselves. How can we afford an education if we cannot take care of feeding?” she asked.

The difficult conditions under which the PWDs live have pushed many of them into begging. Since they cannot afford education for their children, some families use them as guides when they go into the city to beg.

A seven-year-old who identified himself as Kabir was spotted leading an old blind man while begging for alms at Life Camp.

Kabir told The ICIR that he has never been in school but spends his days begging with his blind grandfather.

“I have never been to school. I come here with baba every morning to beg, and we go back to Karon Magiji in the evening,” he said.

Some children, especially the PWDs in the colony, are sent to beg for alms by their parents rather than go to school.

Hadiza Ismail is a sixteen-year-old PWD and the third of four children who live with their parents at the colony.