Children sit on the ground, learn under trees in Benue IDP camps

According to findings, over 80 per cent of the displaced children were at various levels of schooling in their respective communities when they were sacked from their ancestral homes by marauding herdsmen.

The implication is that aside from being chased out of their homes, these children were forced out of school after fleeing with their parents and guardians from the communities and taking refuge in IDP camps and host communities.

Consequently, from January of 2018 till date, the majority of these children have had to live in IDP camps, idling away without any form of schooling after their education was truncated by the invaders.

Though the state government, with the support of its partners, has had to provide temporary learning arrangements for the displaced children in some of the camps including that of Abagena in the outskirts of Makurdi and the Shelter Camp in Daudu, Guma Local Government Area, LGA.

That intervention, though laudable, has not been able to tackle the gaps that have been created in the lives of these children.

And today Benue is warehousing an army of helpless out-of-school-children in IDP camps.

Findings indicated that outside Abagena and Shelter camps, the children that are taking refuge in most of the camps learn under trees in a makeshift learning environment set up through self-help in a bid to give the children some sense of attending school.

The improvised learning arrangement in the camps, which were put in place by the inmates themselves, though intended to avail the children some sense of learning will eventually serve no useful purpose if a well laid out and structured learning environment run by qualified personnel is not put in place to get the children to reconnect to proper learning and teaching environment.

A picture of the situation in these camps was painted by the Camp Manager of Tse Uikpam IDP camp in Guma LGA, Mr. Matthew Asaaga, who told Sunday Vanguard that parents, on their own, mobilize and gather their children daily under the shade of one of the big trees in the camp to be taught by volunteers.

“Somebody who is a retired teacher volunteered to be the headmaster of the under tree school”, Asaaga said.

“The arrangement they have put in place is to have individuals in the camp including educated persons to assist in teaching the children.

“We give them materials and people also volunteer teaching materials and any day they exhaust the materials they have the children would not be taught.

“It is not a properly structured teaching arrangement but it gives the children that sense of being in school while sitting on the ground.

“The truth is that this arrangement is quite challenging because all the children, irrespective of their ages and classes, gather under the big tree and receive lessons when the proper thing to do is to segregate them according to their ages and classes, and teach them accordingly.

“But in this case, how can you do that when you do not have the materials in a classroom arrangement and the trained teachers to impact knowledge on the children.

“So we are just doing this for the fun of it because it is just an ad-hoc arrangement to give the children some sense of being in school pending when a school is put in place for them or they return to their communities.”

On his part, the headmaster of the school, and father of eight children, who is also an IDP, Mr. James Nyitar, said he volunteered to coordinate the teaching of the children as a retired teacher “to help keep the children focused and on track ahead of when they would eventually return to a proper school or a school is set up in the camp.

“It has not been an easy task I must confess because the children gather in the morning and sit on the floor. Also, we only get materials when anybody donates them to us.

“Moreover whenever it rains we will not hold lessons that day because it is under a tree that we gather and that is only meant to protect us from the sun and not rain.

“But on the whole what we are doing is more like wetting the appetite of the children ahead of having them return to a formal school but it is quite challenging because people volunteer to teach them and what that means is that you might not have that commitment from them and given that the arrangement is an in house thing more or less”.

This situation accounted for the recent outcry by the Benue State government following the alarm raised by the Special Adviser to Benue State Governor on SDGs and NEPAD and Chairman Technical Committee on Benue State Humanitarian Response Plan, BSHRP, Prof. Magdalene Dura, when her team presented a plan out to Governor Samuel Ortom for onward presentation to the public.

Dura had raised concern that the state was producing a generation of illiterate children as a result of the activities of armed herdsmen in the state and the consequent displacement of families and resultant humanitarian crisis.

She stated that in the last five years, most of Benue’s children had been out of school and living in IDP camps.

Her words: “From 2011 to the end of 2021, 21 of the 23 Local Government Areas of the state came under attacks by armed herdsmen, leading to the displacement of over 1.5 million people.

“Aside from the herdsmen induced humanitarian crisis, Benue State is also besieged by nature-induced humanitarian disasters like flooding.

“Indeed, the most worrisome is that Benue is producing a generation of illiterates as most of our children, in the last five years, are out of school and are in the camps”.

And bothered by the situation of children in Benue IDP camp and the urgent need to address the rising figure of out-of-school-children in the state, the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, promised to commence the construction of Temporary Learning Centers, TLCs, in IDP camps in the state to provide enabling learning environment for displaced children in the camps.

This was disclosed by the outgoing UNICEF Chief of Enugu Field Office, Dr Ibrahim Conteh when he paid a farewell visit to the Tse Uikpam IDP camp.

He explained that the TLCs to be set up at the Uikpam camp would be a temporary school structure that would accommodate about 500 to 600 pupils and furnished with chairs and desks to ensure comfort for the children.

Conteh said: “We already have the budget and we are doing the contracting process now.

“Maybe in the next two weeks, they will start erecting the Temporary Learning Centers.

“It is not really a permanent school, it is a semi-permanent school to give opportunity to children not to sit under the trees to learn but to sit in a proper classroom.

“We will also be providing desks and chairs to ensure that these children have a proper learning environment.

“For now, we only have funding for this (Uikpam) camp and we are planning to put two big units so that we can have between 500 and 600 children in there. But we are also still looking for more funding.

“As we get more funding we will continue to do more. So, this is not the end. This is just the start.

“At least, they can have a place to go to school and we will continue to address their needs as we have the resources”.