THE NORTH, BUHARI AND ALMAJIRI CHALLENGE

The prosperity of every society does not lie in the size of its population or the number of billionaires it produces. It lies in the quality of its human capital and the special privileges accorded to its children – its future stock of human capital.

Lately, I have come across some flawed defence of the current Almajiri system by self-appointed custodians of Arewa tradition and custom, and I am deeply disappointed.

The North will never get it right politically and developmentally until it stops seeing the Almajiri system as a  tradition and starts seeing it as the menace that it has become. This is because the Almajiri system, as presently constituted, is an affront to our religion, culture and civilisation. No community will prosper by condemning its future generations to begging and all sorts of societal indignities.

It is true that the traditional Almajiri system, which began in the 11th century after Kanem-Bornu Islamic tradition, was primarily conceived in humility through austerity and borne out of intellectual necessity.

But it has since ceased being so. What we have today are parents abandoning their parental responsibilities by disposing their children off to distant lands for economic reprieve but ostensibly for scholarship, and small children fending for themselves and the luxuries of their selfish Mallams.

This is neither Islamic nor northern. This is pure exploitation bordering on sheer parental irresponsibility and dereliction of duty. What we have today is more economic and less academic, with the lads spending more time looking for what to eat than they spend looking for what to learn.

Call me a maverick, call this controversial, but let us not shy away from assessing this problem on its own merits and demerits. What are its supposed virtues, as well as its flagrant flaws?

The Almajiri system may have served its purposes in the past, but it is incompatible with our present realities and future aspirations. It  is time we began a debate on how best to confront it either through radical reform or total abolition.

I wonder how our consciences fare when we see promising young lads reduced to begging at every motor park, every mosque entrance, at every filling station and at every public gathering. I wonder how we expect strangers and foreigners to  respect us when the first experience they have of us in “our land” is mostly that of a swarm of beggars humming “Babiya Allah” at every turn. Even in northern states with non-Muslim majority, street begging is entirely Islamic in character.

Show me a typical Almajiri beggar today and I will show you a person wearing all the rags of human misery, ignorant and despairing, with  neither religious education  nor modern enlightenment, whose present is being raped and future being stolen, hopelessly standing between religious condemnation imposed by dogma and material condemnation imposed by modernity.

Yet, we scorn at every criticism of the Almajiri system with the contempt reserved for apostasy, just because our own judgments are clouded by blind sentiments of ethnic chauvinism and misguided pride that lend legitimacy to archaic customs and perverted traditions.

Today, about 10 million Almajiris roam our streets, scavenging for rags and food. Those lads are a tremendous human capital resource that if properly harnessed can propel our society onto the path of enviable progress and unlimited prosperity.

Yet, by failing to do so, we prevent their education and enlightenment. We also prevent them from reaching their potential and achieving great things in life, and thereby making them susceptible to all forms of exploitation as they retrogress from a human capital potential to a potentially explosive cocktail of socio-economic discontents.

Abolishing the Almajiri system in its  entirety will deal a huge blow to northern Nigerian preeminence in global Koranic scholarship, strengthen suspicions of cultural imperialism and is therefore counterproductive.

But the society can introduce reforms that abolish child begging and protect our children from all forms of exploitation.

In northern states, policymakers can consider either integrating Koranic education with the western Universal Basic Education curriculum or erecting a parallel Islamic-based UBE system side by side the western one, so that each alternative affords the northern child the opportunity to fulfil their potential and realise their dreams and contribute positively to the development of the society.

It is true that deterioration in socio – economic conditions mostly accounts for the present Almajiri conundrum and that policies towards reforming the Almajiri system must look at the socio-economic roots of the problem. But it is also true that cultural and religious factors give a veneer  of legitimacy to an overtly exploitative practice. Therefore, socio-economic reforms must go hand-in-hand with  genuine cultural reforms.

This Muhammadu Buhari Presidency offers us that opportunity, partly because Buhari  has a huge political capital in the north that is beyond blackmail, and partly because the lessons of Boko Haram and the Goodluck Jonathan years ought to have taught us that in order for us to secure the prosperity of our future generations, we must divest from the politics of numbers to the politics of human capital development.

If we allow the Buhari four years pass on without addressing our Almajiri challenge, we will be missing a big opportunity, and posterity will hold us culpable. All of us!

Written by Husaini,from Ahmadu Bello  University.