By Yaki Samson
A Human Rights Activist, Harun Elbinawi, has described Nigeria’s 2021 budgetary allocation to education as the worst Education Budget in the history of the country.
Elbinawi said it is unfortunate that, Nigeria, with more than 13 million Out-of-school children, the highest in the world, the present government is aggravating the tragic situation with the continues reduction in the yearly budget allocation to Education, lamenting that the situation is more critical in Northern Nigeria where more than 10 million children are out of school.
He said the UNESCO benchmark for developing countries is 26% but when president Buhari came to power in 2015 the yearly budget for Education was 10.7% and 2016, it was reduced to 7.9% with the trend continuing to the budget of next year (2021) to a meager 5.6%.
According to him, “With such a catastrophic figure of millions of children that are Out-of-school, dilapidated public schools, acute shortage of Teachers and massive corruption in government cycle, what effect will the meager 5.6 have on the deteriorating Educational sector?”.
The right activist is of the opinion that the Education sector suffers acute low budgetary allocation due to the President’s ignorance of the importance of Education to a modern society, as such; he said the president does not know the consequences of depriving the growing Nigerian youthful population education.
“Tomorrow belongs to those who plan for it today. Education is the foundation of the progress and development of any nation. Providing sound and quality education to a nation is the concrete assertion for a better tomorrow. Nigerian University Lecturers (ASUU) are on strike for more than 8 months now and the regime is just beating around the bush on the issue”, he lamented.
He therefore urged Communities, especially in Northern Nigeria, to rise up to this challenge and organize community-based developmental projects that will target the neglected educational sector; saying that the world is progressing while Nigeria is not even stationary but regressing backwards.