Prof. Niyi Osundare

(MAYEIN’s*   Dream,  Nigeria’s  Future)

 By Niyi   Osundare

What better way to begin this brief  address than to ask Edem Ossai, MAYEIN’s Founder herself, to take us by the hand and lead us through the dream that mothered the actualization of today’s event and its predecessors since the birthing of this tremendously valuable initiative some 14 years ago?  Here, in her own words, is a brief history of  how the MAYEIN dream was born and how  her call to action was  prompted by an irresistible  resolve:

I was troubled by the alarming number of children hawking goods on the streets of Ibadan during school hours. I believed that mobile libraries and small physical libraries in under-resourced neighborhoods would be an effective way to provide reading support and literacy resources to poorer and marginalized children who were out of normal school settings. I thought “If I can just put a book on the tray, it could change the child’s life”**.

Without any doubt, Edem was not the only one that saw these juvenal hawkers. They are all over Nigerian streets: those who hawk for their petty-trader parents or guardians, child labourers who flood roadsides in  search of jobs,  any kind of jobs from the riskiest to the flagrantly illegal; rag-wrapped, lice-covered youngsters schooled in the art of pestering and pick-pocketing ; the long lines of sanctified beggars with custom-made bowls in their hands, blackmailing passersby with the name of the merciful God who only opens  Heaven’s door  to those who open their wallets for the faithful beggar. Not far from here are  demanding  mentors and  clerics waiting for the daily takings of  this last category of  juvenal menace   ……

I too have a story  not too different from Edem’s own as told  in her quote above.

Sometime in November last year, I was at the famous Oje Market in Ibadan to savour the typical market atmosphere in this seemingly amazing world of buying and selling.  I ended up at my usual plantain depot, where my real business was usually accompanied with humorous repartee and how-is-the-family pleasantries, I discovered to my chagrin that the stall-keepers that day were two children aged about eight and ten. “Where is Mommy”, I asked almost instinctively. “She is away today and tomorrow, and she has asked us to open the shop”.  My eyes made a quick dash to my wristwatch. It was 11 o’clock in the morning.  “But you should be in school at this time of day”, I said in a tone sobered  by torturous bother  and anguished complaint. The two children answered me with helpless silence.  As I selected my bunch of six plantains, I noticed a bout of  shifting and shuffling around me. To my left were two boys and one girl; to my right a boy and a girl, all equipped with baskets, metal trays, and plastic buckets, each struggling to be the lucky porter of  my  bunch of six plantains. Again, all the five were aged between 8 and 10.  Again, I asked “why are you here at this time? Why are you not in school?”. One said he had not had a good meal in two days because he had nothing to eat. Two said their parents couldn’t afford the school levy; one said his uniform was old and torn; the last one just looked away in sober silence.

My painful testimony has not ended. In the past three years I have noticed a phenomenal rise in the number of juvenal  apprentices who accompany the artisans and ‘blue collar’ workers that come to work on my house (and other houses in our neighborhood in Ibadan). Late last year,  the plumber came with four; the aluminum worker with three; the bricklayer with three; the electrical generator repairer with two.  These were workers who used to find it very difficult to recruit apprentices and assistants some ten years ago. Without a doubt, the remarkable rise in  apprentice population is a symptom of the decline of the affordability rate of higher education among a significant sector of the Nigerian population as well as a disenchantment with its prestige, purpose, and indispensability. When I asked one of the new apprentices why he dropped out of high school, he told me he did so at the behest of his father who had observed  that in today’s Nigeria,  ise owo (technical/artisanal work) is far better than  ise iwe   (book work). The boy then repeated to me the question his father asked him in words to this effect: what is the purpose of higher education which leaves you jobless after so many years of read, read, read, and bags of money spent on school fees? In this boy’s family, he said further, there are three unemployed graduates, two from the university, one from the polytechnic.

Many of the of street hawkers and juvenile loafers  in today’s Nigeria are  trickle-down victims of the socio-economic anomies  so clearly revealed above  in the dire situations of the child  porters and juvenal apprentices. In a country where people would rather ka wo  {count money) than  ka we (count/read book); a philistine paradise that prides the opulent politician over the honest professor, the young population is not likely to aspire to the life of the book and its infinite wisdom.

And yet, as I have always thought and fervently believed, if you want to know the future of a country, go straight in to its classrooms and laboratories and libraries. Listen to the songs the children love to sing. Ask who their hero is. Ask: what is the real meaning of EDUCATION?  After reading a new book, do you have the urge to write your own?  Ask,  as my Principal used to do in our secondary school days, “How many new books did you read last month?”.

These, in essence, are some of the questions  MAYEIN has been asking  and asking us to ask, directly or indirectly, in the past 14 years. MAYEIN has been a person-building, home-building, nation-building enterprise with its foot on the Present and its eye on the Future.  In a country with a bloated, corrupt government and little governance, with  rulers who  play deaf when told in loud and clear terms that Nigeria is one of the countries with the largest number of out-of-school children in the world, the  intervention of individual initiatives such as MAYEIN assumes a laudable significance.  Edem Ossai was “troubled by the alarming number of children hawking goods on the streets”. But she didn’t stop at that.  . She progressed from alarm to dream:  ‘I thought “If I can just put a book on the tray, it could change the child’s life”’. With its book drives and mobile libraries, MAYEIN has been changing lives and making literacy a vital and indispensable achievement. Let the world rise to her aid as she strives to Put a Book in the Hand of Every Child.

* MAYEIN:  Mentoring Assistance for Youth and Entrepreneurs Initiative