Majority of the elites in Nigeria don't want all girls to go to school, so that they can continue to have their regular supply of housemaids and nannies from poor families who cannot afford the school fees, books and uniforms in Nigerian schools. They say if all girls go to school, where will they get their housemaids and nannies from. Many of them have millions of underprivileged female children of school age they are still using as housemaids and nannies they deprive of education while their own privileged "Aje Butter" children are going to favoured public or expensive private schools in Nigeria.
Read my article and the reactions on "Are You Sending Your Housemaids To School?" http://www.nairaland.com/1500848/sending-housemaids-school
If we are really serious about our campaigns for girl child education and to rescue the over 6 million girls out of school in Nigeria, we must stop this modern child slavery by the Nigerian elites who deliberately deprive millions of underprivileged girls from going to school in Nigeria. They include the same big men and big women in government who misappropriate revenue allocations for the public schools and neglect them to make them underdeveloped and unattractive and have invested more money in their private schools for the education of their own children so that they will keep the poor masses uneducated in perpetual ignorance and disabled socioeconomically in the social hierarchy of the society controlled by the ruling class.
All public schools from the primary to the university are neglected with dilapidated buildings, broken furniture and horrible hostels with terrible toilets without regular power supply and water. Students in government colleges and universities have to use buckets and polythene bags to stool in their rooms, because they can no longer use the abandoned horrible toilets in their hostels on campus.
Why? The same elites of the ruling class have been misappropriating the revenue allocations for the government colleges and universities where they cannot send their own children, but they spend millions of dollars on the private schools, private colleges and private universities for their own children they are preparing to take over the ruling class after them and continue the socioeconomic dominance of the Nigerian society ad infinitum.
As a national program consultant for the UNICEF in the late 1980s and gospel preacher in Nigeria and also distributing children's magazine to schools in Lagos, I have been an eye-witness to the systematic socioeconomic oppression and suppression of the poor masses by the evil and greedy ruling class and in fact one of them who was once the madam of the late military head of state of Nigeria, Gen. Sanni Abacha, said: "Michael, If all the children of the poor go to school, where are we going to get our houseboys and housemaids, messengers and drivers from?".
Then one of the children from a rich family screamed at one of their housemaids: "Kai! Stop sleeping while I am awake! Are you here to sleep?". But the poor housemaid must have worked till midnight and deprived of enough sleep, because of endless chores she must do before going to bed. And I was forbidden to sit and talk to the housemaids, because we were not in the same social class. So, to keep the socioeconomic status quo of the ruling class secure for the future, the more children of the poor are deprived of education, the more supply for their domestic staff and low income workers who are among the most underpaid in the world, because Nigerian employers love cheap labor and child labor is the cheapest labor.
From the elites' homes, to their factories and shops, you will see mostly underprivileged girls working as maids, factory hands and shop attendants often humiliated and maltreated like dogs and kept in inhuman conditions of unprintable indignities. And these same evil and wicked elites are leading members of the numerous popular churches and mosques in Africa's most populous nation.
They have also engaged agents of child traffickers to get them housemaids and nannies from the neighboring poor counties of Benin Republic and Togo.
See the horrifying experience of a child housemaid in Lagos in report by The Punch newspaper on March 8, 2014 by Kunle Falayi.
"He beat me with wire until I couldn’t sit anymore –Eight-year-old housemaid"
You see the Christian elites sending their own children to Ivy League schools, but keeping underage housemaids and nannies from poor families they never send to school. The perpetuation of their horrible and terrible acts of injustice against the poor masses are why millions of Nigerian girls are out of school and now worsened by the insurgency of the Boko Haram terrorists on rampage in the northern states and Middle Belt of Nigeria with the attacks and kidnappings of hundreds of school girls, including the missing Chibok school girls abducted by the Boko Haram insurgents on April 14, 2014.
If we must rescue the millions of girls out of school in Nigeria, we have to stop the child labor in the domestic staff of housemaids and nannies and help their poor parents to send them to school and it must start by giving them compulsory free education from the primary to secondary school levels and provide scholarships for their college education to the university to guaranty the end to their poverty and save them from slavery at the mercy of the elites of the Nigerian ruling class.
~ By Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima, Publisher/Editor, Nigerians Report Online and Founder, Girls United Together for Success (GUTS) campaign.
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