By Reuters
The first thing 15-year-old Burhani saw when he arrived at an Islamic reformatory school in October was rows of youths and young men sitting on a courtyard floor, naked, bleeding and in chains.
His father had sent him to the school, famous across northern Nigeria for correcting bad behaviour, because he had been getting into fights and stealing, he said.
Thirteen days later, police descended on the school in the northwestern town of Daura. It was one of at least eight raids on Islamic schools in the region over the past six weeks that local authorities say have uncovered horrific abuse. Nearly 1,500 children and young adults like Burhani were freed in those raids including 259 on Monday in the southwestern city of Ibadan.
The teenager, whose surname is being withheld because he is a minor, doesn’t want to go back to the Daura school, nor would his father send him, both told Reuters. But they said they retain deep respect for the mallam – or Islamic scholar – in charge. The scholar, Bello Abdullahi, who was arrested and faces charges including cruelty to children, “is a good person and isn’t aware of the ill treatment” by his teaching staff, said Burhani’s father, Yahaya.
Abdullahi could not be reached for comment, and authorities would not say whether he has an attorney.
As shocking as the revelations about these schools were to people in Nigeria and around the world, they have not shaken the underlying devotion of some northerners to the religious leaders who ran the raided centers, nor to the centuries-old Islamic education system from which they emerged, according to Reuters’ interviews with 17 current and former students, parents and community leaders.
Many of those interviewed blame the government of Africa’s most populous nation for failing to provide the formal education and services young people need in this impoverished region. And like Burhani and his father, they tend to attribute troubles in the raided schools to lower-level teachers, rather than to the revered mallams.
State institutions cannot meet the educational or social welfare needs of the booming, mostly Muslim population in the north, experts and child advocates say, largely because of limited and poorly distributed resources. Fewer than half the children in the region attend government primary schools, according to the latest official figures, from 2015.
Islamic schools, known locally as almajiri schools, help fill the void, enrolling an estimated 10 million students.
“If today we decide to close all of the almajiri schools … there would be an educational crisis, said Mohammed Sabo Keana of the Abuja-based nonprofit group Almajiri Child Rights Initiative, which advocates for better conditions in the centres.
The office of the presidency repeatedly declined to comment on Reuters’ findings. Officials at individual ministries responsible for overseeing the schools declined to comment or referred Reuters to other ministries that did not respond.