Mass-Kidnappings of schoolchildren in Nigeria were unheard of just a decade ago. The scenario the average Nigerian worried about then was usually that of a stranger going to a school at closing time to act like they had been sent by the parents so they could kidnap the child and even that was something of a rarity. So the very idea of almost half a thousand children being kidnapped from one school location was not something the Nigerian imagination could bring itself to contemplate but then Nigeria is a place where negative records are constantly being broken.

Now repetition has led to a situation where there’s muted public reaction to reports of mass-kidnappings of hundreds of schoolchildren and muted relief at the news of their release. The relief is muted as well because we all feel it’s just a matter of time before another set of mass kidnappings happens in other schools and the painful thing is that these things were predictable outcomes of sustained poverty and illiteracy. Northern Nigeria planted the seeds of its devastation when it chose to deny the majority of its poor the education, freedom, and governance that they could have used to build a viable future for themselves and their society.

The Northern Elite sent its own offspring to the best schools and maliciously undermined the access of their poor people to education via misleading religious programming and poor provision of educational programs. The predictable outcome is a vicious cycle of poverty and violence that goes back to affect the availability of education and reinforces the growth of poverty and violence.

A vicious cycle is a negative series of events that build on and reinforce each other and we have a lot of them in Northern Nigeria.

The Northerners deprived of education and abandoned are now running insurgencies and demanding the closure of schools.

The laughably low standards of education up North that were encouraged by the adoption of low cutoffs for Northerners have also led to a situation where the average educated Northerner is incapable of delivering a suitably high level of performance and this affects their capacity to develop their own youth.

Another terrible vicious cycle is seen in how most of the North’s role models and key achievers are largely people who got their wealth and status by shooting their way into political power either as coup-plotting soldiers or as civilian politicians.

Generations have seen their entire regional politics and governance based on violent takeover and parasitism of regions.

A society’s youth will always copy what they have seen that offers the surest path to socioeconomic progress.

If the money the FG and Northern governors has given to “Herdsmen” had been used to incentivize Education and Entrepreneurship for Northern youth, a lot of progress would have been made. Vicious cycles are best combated by Virtuous cycles that reward actions that fight back against the vicious cycle and motivate people to make better choices.

In 2018, Zamfara had 24 students writing common entrance exams. Kebbi had 50. Taraba had 95. Lagos had over 24,000.

Andrienne Barnes is an American Literacy and Pedagogy specialist at Florida State University says 72% of early grade primary school children in the North cannot read a single word in English.

An instance where a Zamfara indigene gets just two questions correct out of like 200 questions and becomes eligible for admission into a federal school while an Anambra indigene has to score 140 for the same privilege is ridiculous.

The market principle isn’t even allowed to rectify this issue because the people who have these scores end up in the public sector after being unable to compete for access to the private sector and this gives us the worst vicious cycle of all; the creation of an immensely incompetent and poorly educated public sector that is expected to shape and execute policies for a country of more than 100 Million People.

How is this supposed to work? The Public Sector should have smarter people than the Private sector. The Public Sector should have people who can think, visualize and execute for an entire country in the long term.

If done right, this is harder than just running a business. Our vicious cycles have had a cumulative impact that has made Nigeria the Poverty Capital of the World and made it look like the country most likely to fall apart like Somalia. There’s no escaping these problems if we don’t give education, wealth-creation via proper productivity, etc the attention and respect they deserve.