Last weekend, this video surfaced on the internet. The less than one minute video shows children and teenagers from the State Primary and Secondary School Olanada in Rivers, staging a protest. These children, ages 6-17 swarmed the roads around their school, barricading the roads beyond holding up placards protesting the abysmal standard of education in public schools in the state. The boy who is interviewed in the video laments about being taught almost exclusively by youth corp members, accusing the school authority of failing to hold practicals no provide students a decent education. He is furious, because in a few years he will be expected to write the West African Examinations Council Senior Secondary Certificate Exam (WASSCE) and pass convincingly when he has received absolutely no tools to achieve this.

The Nigerian public school system is largely underwritten thanks to several laws that enshrine a Universal Basic Education (UBE) Scheme to ensure that all Nigerians achieve at least a primary school education. The public school system accommodates the vast majority of Nigerians below the poverty line, and even then until 2015, thousands of school-age children were forced to drop out because their families couldn’t afford even the most basically auxiliary needs, like school books and stationery and uniforms and feeding. The UBE scheme was expanded to include a feeding scheme as a way to mitigate these high rates of failure for students. But as the video above shows, the system designed specifically to catch these underprivileged children and teenagers is failing them. It is important to note that Olanada is just one of the hundreds of public schools in the public school system in Rivers. The same Rivers State in the news since 2016 for the callous actions of its governor, Nyesom Wike.

In 2016, in what many insiders have called a petty move, Wike chose to discontinue the payment of tuition for indigent students sent abroad on government sponsored scholarships. The Rivers government justified the decision as a consequence of the 2016 economic recession, even though it prioritised students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) degrees over students in other disciplines. Many of these students were already pursuing degrees in Nigeria when they were chosen and asked to undertake these scholarships. In late 2017, they ambushed Wike at a government function in the UK and tried to publicly shame him into addressing their plight, and he laughed in their faces and ignored their legitimate petitions. To discover that this gross negligence cut across the entire spectrum of education says a lot about the priorities of the Rivers governor and by extension, the Nigerian government.

But this not just a problem that is unique to Nigeria. On February 15, 2018, students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, suddenly found themselves in the middle of a school mass shooting that lasted two hours and left 17 people dead and several others injured. Nikola Cruz, the gunman behind the mass shooting was a former student of the school who had consistently rebelled against constituted authority and had been expelled for abusive behaviour towards his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. With an AR-15 assault rifle Cruz bought after he was flagged by the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) of suspicious activity and not further investigated, he held an entire school to ransom and wrote himself into the history books as the perpetrator of the 18th school-related mass shooting of 2018 in the United States.

Mass shootings have become frighteningly commonplace in the United States. According to Massshootingtracker, an independent organisation recording mass shootings in the US, 90 people have already died from mass shootings in 2018 alone, with 18 of these shootings happening in school environments. While the country agrees that shootings are a scourge that needs to be stopped, it is divided on how to go about ending it. The Republican party, with its strong ties to conservatism and independence, has allowed the National Rifle Association (NRA), the country’s leading gun lobbyist group to kill campaigns to introduce stricter laws around the ownership and possession of firearms, and routinely bankroll the electoral campaigns of republican and democratic senators sympathetic to their cause. But the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas have had enough, and the survivors of the Florida shooting have banded together, led by Emma Gonzalez and are organising a nationwide school walkout to protest the government’s refusal to acknowledge that gun control is a legitimate problem and that a solution must be found immediately. Emma Gonzalez’s speech, given a few days after the shooting stirred in me the exact same feelings as the boy from Olanada; the frustration and despair, bridged by determination towards forcing a solution.

We used to believe that the millennial generation would be the one to challenge the status quo and effect true change. But by and large, we have remained complacent, content to retreat into ourselves and create safe spaces within which we exercise draconian control. Across Africa especially, our youth and youth leaders have performed abysmally, rebelling against constituted authority only as a tool to insert themselves within the system and milk it from inside. We can all learn a lesson or two from Julius Malema, the South African political activist and chair of Economic Freedom Fighters party (EFF) formed after Zuma ousted him out of the African National Congress (ANC), after 23 years rising up the party’s system. Malema had actively fought against Zuma’s corrupt practices and openly challenged his authority and formed his own political party to continue to pressure Zuma to either clean up his act and resign. After four years of religiously hounding Zuma, the former president resigned.

There is work to be done, especially now, in the wake of President Buhari’s abysmal outing at the helm of the country. It is up to us to hold our leadership accountable, force them to change and/or resign if they cannot perform. If the actions of Emma Gonzalez and the survivors of the Florida Shooting and the students of State Primary and Secondary Schools in Olanada are an augury of the times, then the children will rise up and fight for what they deserve if we refuse to do it for them.

Editor