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’s* Dream, Nigeria’s Future
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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 actualisation 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 neighbourhoods would be an effective way to provide reading support and literacy resources to poorer and marginalised 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”**.
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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 job 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.
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.
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 eight 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 who come to work on my house (and other houses in our neighbourhood in Ibadan). Late last year, the plumber came with four; the aluminium 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 doubt, the remarkable rise in the 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.
…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?”
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
** From an email message.
Niyi Osundare, one of Africa’s foremost poets and academics, is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English, University of New Orleans.
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