Shettima, sports, and Boko Haram, an unscripted encounter!

Segun Odegbami

I know Kashim Shettima, the vice president-elect of Nigeria, but not well enough to say much about him beyond my single physical encounter with the man, and a few telephone calls later, in the course of a story that must be told, not for any political reasons, but because it will throw a little light on the persona of the man.

In the year 2004, I attended a United Nations (UN) ‘Millennium Development Goals’ programme that led me into the project of sport as a tool for the eradication of illiteracy in the world. It was an audacious concept lodged in a new special unit in the UN. I do not know if the unit still exists, but I loved it, believed in it, and since made its object a mission in my life.

Obiageli Ezekwesili was the minister of education. She revealed a startling statistic that Nigeria was harbouring the largest concentration of illiterates and out-of-school children in the world. Her conservative figure then was above 20 million children. It could have been a lot more than that.

The regions most affected by the scourge were the North East and North West of Nigeria. In the North East, in particular, the situation was worsened by the activities of a religious extremist group that forbade Western education and enforced its non-practice. The resultant insurgency created a massive exodus of teachers, who mostly came from the southern part of Nigeria, and ‘devil’s work’ for the idling, out-of-school youths in the state. That situation crippled whatever was left of the weak educational apparatus and standards in that part of the country.

Maiduguri became a no-go town in Borno State. Only very few essential visitors dared to go there for any reason. Even those that visited needed a convoy of well-armed