If there were a global masterclass on how to sabotage youth education while smiling piously, Northern Nigeria would qualify as a case study complete with spreadsheets, press statements, and a choir of officials insisting everything is “people-centred”. The tragedy is not hidden. The numbers scream. But the budgets respond with incense, drums, and ceremonial silence.
Nigeria now wears an international badge of shame: 18.3 million children out of school, the highest number anywhere on earth. One in every five out-of-school children globally is Nigerian. And if you want to know where most of them live, don’t search too far south. About 73 per cent are in the North, with 45 per cent in the North-West and 28 per cent in the North-East. In Yobe, 43 per cent of children never attend school. Zamfara follows at 41 per cent, Sokoto at 37 per cent. These are not projections; they are present realities.
Logic would suggest panic. Budgets would tilt toward classrooms, teachers, desks, books, and school security. Instead, the region has perfected a different curriculum, pilgrimage studies, mass wedding administration, and advanced security vote extraction.
Kebbi State offers a near-perfect illustration of misplaced devotion. Faced with unfilled pilgrimage slots for the 2026 Hajj, the state government released N1bn of public money—not to schools, not to clinics, not to water projects—but to ensure that 1,300 pilgrimage seats were not “wasted”.
Each seat cost roughly N7.6m. For context, Kebbi’s internally generated revenue for nine months stood at about N14bn. In one stroke, over 70 per cent of that revenue was spiritually uplifted and airlifted out of the state.
Meanwhile, the same government budgeted N86m for capital projects in water resources. Borehole construction? N2m. With the Hajj allocation, Kebbi could have drilled 5,000 boreholes, built 500 primary healthcare centres, or furnished over 1,300 schools. Instead, it chose ihram over infrastructure.
Officials praised the governor’s “foresight”. Indeed, few leaders can see so clearly into heaven while remaining blind to collapsing classrooms.
Kano State, not to be outdone, has decided that the path to social development runs through the wedding hall. Its 2025 budget set aside N2.5bn for quarterly mass weddings across all 44 local governments. Thousands of couples, many of them teenagers and economically vulnerable women, are married under official banners of moral reform.
In the same budget, N955m was allocated to count out-of-school children. Apparently, it costs almost three times more to marry citizens than to understand why their children aren’t in classrooms.
Add to this N1bn for Ramadan feeding, hundreds of millions for religious calendars, Da’wah activities, and welfare packages for converts. Education, meanwhile, waits politely in a corner, unfunded, overcrowded, understaffed.
The irony writes itself: a government that can afford to marry off thousands cannot afford to teach their future children.
Katsina State has elevated religious spending into a fine art. Its 2025 budget shows N4.79bn for religious administration, including N4.58bn for pilgrimage management alone. Add funds ofor religious enforcement agencies and zakat boards, and you have a spiritual bureaucracy that could rival a small ministry of education—if education mattered.
The same state approved N2.3bn for Ramadan food distribution. Public money. Annual budgets. Fully legislated.
Across the region, similar allocations appear: billions for fasting, feasting, ceremonies, and palaces. In Zamfara, N1bn was approved for constructing an emir’s palace, alongside hundreds of millions for “special celebrations.” Schools, meanwhile, operate under trees, if they operate at all.
Then comes the black hole of governance: security votes. In just nine months, governors in 14 northern states withdrew N56bn in security votes—cash payments with no receipts, no audits, no public explanation.
0 Comments