Student activism was birthed in me to protest the deplorable learning and living conditions of study. While engagements like SIFE and Rotaract clubs were spaces that built the social and ethical aspects among other qualities necessary for formal world interactions.
These are as much a part of education as the formal content received in the lecture rooms of the institution.
These opportunities emboldened my access to information and interaction. The tertiary institution, being the first environment I explored after a well guided secondary education in a missionary school; I was greeted with a treasure world of possibilities that only education can afford one.
I took the biggest bites while understanding the need to leave a better system behind hence never relenting in campus student activism.
My heart would almost explode at the availability of information: reading which I had come to love in my early formative years, gave me access to a library of books other than academic options and this was a 'privilege' I would come to know many never had and some, younger than I was already 'knew - believed' education was not something they can afford.
A campus of societies and organisations, vibrant minds ready and willing to learn. This would be my first time appreciating education after twelve years of primary and secondary education.
I had enjoyed in many ways, and come to appreciate education and wish more people have some.
This wish would shape the many activities and causes I will undertake moving forward. From radio programs designed to raise interest in education through stories told on air.
Book chats and book discussions to establish conversations on the beauty/benefit of reading; and encouraging writers to create stories that will further engender the ideas of creative writing and reading and non formal education through literary critique and open mic sessions.
Better some education than none.
I would, by 2013 start and register an organisation with a vision to become a global voice using art and creativity; through education and enlightenment liberate society.
This organisation with a mission to transform society through creative expression while propagating ideas towards development, now undertook many projects: all not-for-profit and ran programs for about nine years pro bono in three radio stations for this reason.
Friends, I and anyone who would join us donated books to rural schools, orphanage homes and inmates in correctional facilities. While also supporting other organisations in their work in the area of education with internally displaced persons (IDPs).
This to me, to us; is reaching those most disadvantaged or most limited in accessing proper education.
However, there are a lot more people than these disadvantaged groups; living in circumstances that can be helped much easier, yet without education nor the hope for it.
In the light of this reality glares the data published by Bëtá Nigeria of one in five of the world's out of school children being Nigerian and the government's budget being less than eight percent below the minimum requirement for a country like Nigeria.
For this story, we can tell how it ends; like a poorly written movie script. And if with hindsight we compare the former investments to education (that we still find ourselves eight place from the bottom among developing countries with poor investment in education now) when Nigeria's population was way below the over 200 million people estimated now
With an over ten million boys and girls currently out of school; as the Bëtá Nigeria information leaflet well covers.
It is a disastrous future, looking from these figures, even as the disasters of terror against education continue in parts of Nigeria where school children are kidnapped in hundreds.
A nightmare unimaginable.
As the country's budget deflects from prioritising investment in the education sector, to ensure access for all; Bëtá Nigeria's call to this campaign remains a welcome one for Nigeria as a country and it's people.
Data available via the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Federal Government shows only once did Nigeria go as high as ten point six percent being 2014, and has stayed below six percent from 2021 to 2023.
A happy future will be difficult an image to paint, for a country that has a population like Nigeria, and has experienced challenges we can only attribute to the lack of, and poor nature of education in the country.
The Tiv proverb: it is by sitting together that a craft is perfected; holds fast for these stakeholders and groups championing the education agenda at the Bëtá Nigeria roundtable discussions.
This may be the answer to a prioritising of education for a nation with an education budget five times below in percentage, to the UNESCO stipulation of twenty six percent minimum investment of a nation's budget in education just last year 2023.
Any human being is better with an education in them, my practical experience of this would be the projects I did with inmates, who had education and those without.
Over time on this project our recorded observation showed that there's the higher likelihood of recidivism among uneducated inmates than educated ones.
And of course the ability to communicate and absorb useful information is higher among educated inmates.
Having reading and numeracy skills at the least, generally enlivens an individual's ability to navigate a world of information and ideas and opportunities and privileges if any; and every country should afford it's citizens the chance to a better life through proper education, even as the constitution of Nigeria rightly captures it as a fundamental human right.
To a mind that is educated, it is unimaginable to see yourself without that education, and though minds without education may not say how much better their life could be, we have seen instances when such minds uneducated as may be; plagued and still plague the society in ways we could only imagine years back.
We do know that they, like we; their lives would have served better, this society and country; if they were enlightened through proper education.
In the event we take no action on the current state of education: going by global and national data; we should know then that this is a sentence over ourselves and the future of millions through the ignorant judgement of neglect.
The journey to a better Nigeria starts at the door of education and Bëtá Nigeria just opened that door, with the roundtable talks having civil society organisations, literacy and literary organisations, media organisations and organisations for the physically challenged among others and various stakeholders in the education sector walking through the Bëtá Nigeria door in this new wave campaign for education.
This campaign requires that everyone be on board.
It is strange to imagine anyone to not want a better Nigeria, but Bëtá Nigeria has begun; and only figures and futures will tell the rest.
When that telling occurs, may it be told by minds that have not just been educated; but educated properly, telling it to even better educated minds!
Ngutsav Anselm Sesugh writes from Kaduna, Nigeria.
