‘My dream is to play like Jay Jay’. That is the dream of millions of young boys (and girls) all over Nigeria – to become rich, famous and successful riding on the back of football. It is a fantasy fed by the media that glamourises the life of footballers. Thus children are willing to do just about anything to live this fantasy including abandoning that which represents their most certain ‘passport’ to success in life – education! There are more of these children than we realise these days, aided by their economically impoverished parents, willing and ready to abandon the ‘hard’ and expensive life of school in pursuit of an ‘easier’ and shorter cut to a good life. Many parents these days bribe officials, scouts, managers, coaches, anyone that can make it possible, to give their children an opportunity to join an academy, professional club, or any of the junior national teams, in order to play football, particularly abroad. Today, of all African countries, Nigeria has the highest number of footballers playing outside their country. They are found in all corners of the globe, including India, Bangladesh, and such ridiculous destinations. Put this side by side with the following damning statistic!

For various reasons, all of them unacceptable, in Nigeria today there are officially over 8.5 million children that should be in school but are not! This very conservative figure represents the largest number of out-of-school children in any one country in the whole world! In other words Nigeria may be home to the highest number of illiterate children in the world! It is alarming!

Universally, the matter of education-for-all has become so critical that a global effort was instituted in the year 2000 by the United Nations and has been driven since then through the Millennium Development Goal Project to ensure that all boys and girls in every country in the world complete primary school and join in the global objective to eradicate illiteracy by the year 2015.

Nigeria is one of a few countries that, as shocking as the statistics are, does not appear to have a serious national consciousness about the situation and so does not address it with the seriousness it deserves. Beyond the occasional political rhetoric, education does not seem to be on the front burner of political discourse or even agenda of the different federal and State governments. It also, therefore, does not secure the required attention and patronage to make the eradication of illiteracy an achievable target by 2015. Unlike the HIV/AIDs campaign, for example, that has attracted unprecedented national patronage and attention, the issue of compulsory quality education for all Nigerian children, has not engaged the mind of Nigerians enough to make fighting the illiteracy-scourge a priority even as the consequences of this neglect are all around us to see – the growing army of unemployed, restless, idle, militant youth, the high rate of juvenile delinquency, the growing number of young persons involved in drugs, robbery, thuggery, fraud, prostitution, and so on. Unless the situation is arrested Nigeria, without question, is sitting on a social time bomb!

This past few weeks, particularly the past few days, have added to my education on the subject.

To start with, I recall again my experiences filming a documentary with Jay Jay Okocha last week on the state of out-of-school children in Nigeria, using our experiences in two small villages around Abuja as a case study. Many of the children we met there are not in school because their parents can not afford to pay schools fees; some children are prevented from going to school for religious reasons; some parents are just completely ignorant of the values of education; some parents regard western education as a weapon of a kind of indoctrination or the other, and, so, do not embrace it; some parents see western education as a corrupting influence and a cultural pollutant and as a result marry off their daughters early and engage their boys in petty trading or farming. That these things are happening in twenty-first Century-Nigeria is unbelievable but a reality.

Then come Jay Jay and my humble self to the environment. The people troop out in their hundreds – traditional rulers, men, women, boys and girls to encounter the soccer magician and Mr. Mathematical. All the children want to be like Jay Jay, and are wiling to do just about anything to achieve that including going to school! That is the irony and the catch for me. If getting an education in a formal school becomes an incentive for playing football and having the opportunity to be like Jay Jay and to achieve his kind of success, all the parents are willing to disregard all their biases and reasons for not sending their children to school and now do so! That’s how powerful the desire to be like Jay Jay is in the minds of parents and even the youths. The impact of a Jay Jay associating with a cause such as combining football with education is tremendous. Football can become a powerful and irresistible incentive for the education of those that ordinarily may choose not to go to school!