Throughout Nigeria, non-indigenous students are forced to cope with state and local government policies and practices that exclude them from many of the material benefits of Nigerian citizenship. Such discrimination reflects a widespread belief among many Nigerians that state and local governments exist not to serve the interests of all their constituents, but only those of their indigene populations. That understanding was in evidence in many of the interviews Human Rights Watch conducted with government officials in Kano, Kaduna and Plateau States. The attorney general of Kaduna state, for example, responding to complaints of marginalization voiced by non-indigene residents of the state, told Human Rights Watch:
The problem arises when they [non-indigenes] try to throw away where they come from and want to have the same status as their hosts. They do not want to be seen as people from another state, so they say “Look, I am an indigene, I want the same privileges and rights as other indigenes…” They want to enjoy scholarships from Kaduna state… But I don’t think it would be right to give these people all the same rights as indigenes.
Echoing these sentiments, a spokesperson for the governor of Plateau State stated flatly that his government’s mission was to “meet the needs of the indigene population of the state.” Such attitudes are not unique and in fact reflect political realities that are taken for granted by many Nigerians. As one member of the Nigerian National Assembly put it, “The Constitution says there should be no discrimination but we all know that when you are a non-indigene you do not have all the rights the so-called indigenes have.”
In September 2004, Nigerian newspapers reported that the northern state of Zamfara had decided to bar all non-indigene children from attending the state’s public schools. Those reports, citing Zamfara state officials and the unusually vocal protests on the part of Zamfara non-indigenes, triggered a nationwide outcry, with leading editorial pages in Lagos-based newspapers slamming what one paper called the state’s “apartheid-style” policies. Nigeria’s attorney general publicly denounced the reported ban as unconstitutional and tantamount to “treason.”
Attacked from all sides, the state government insisted that the reports were untrue but acknowledged that it had decided to introduce school fees in the state public school system that only non-indigene students would be required to pay. The Zamfara State commissioner for Information defended the discriminatory fees, asserting that “the federal allocation [of revenue] given to us is for the people of Zamfara,” meaning the indigenes of the state, and claiming that several other Nigerian states already treated their non-indigene students the same way.
The commissioner’s charges of hypocrisy were not entirely without foundation. Zamfara State’s education policies attracted critical attention because they were extreme and because they flew in the face of the federal government’s stated commitment to providing free primary education in accordance with Nigeria’s obligations under international law. They did not make Zamfara altogether unique, however. None of the states visited by Human Rights Watch impose discriminatory fees at the primary and secondary level, as Zamfara has done. But state governments throughout Nigeria make it difficult for non-indigene students to seek higher education in state-run universities by imposing discriminatory fees there, denying non-indigenes access to scholarship opportunities, and limiting the number of non-indigenes who can seek admission.
State universities throughout Nigeria have implemented policies that reserve the overwhelming majority of places in each entering class for indigene students and charge higher fees to non-indigene students. According to a professor who serves on the admissions committee of the recently-inaugurated Kaduna State Polytechnic, for example, non-indigene students are charged roughly N32,000 (or just over U.S.$240) as against N20,000 (roughly U.S.$150) for indigenes. At the same time, non-indigenes must compete for less than 20 percent of the slots available each year, with the remainder reserved for indigene applicants; the professor claimed that this policy is “unusually fair” relative to state universities elsewhere in Nigeria. A professor at the Plateau State Polytechnic told Human Rights Watch that similar policies were in place at his institution, and a spokesperson for the Kano State government confirmed that the same is true throughout Kano state. It is widely acknowledged that similar or even more restrictive policies are enforced at most if not all state universities throughout Nigeria.
Non-indigene students are also generally barred from competing for coveted state government scholarships that help defray the considerable costs of higher education. This is a real hardship for many would-be students. In Kaduna, where non-indigenes are ineligible to compete for any of the roughly 8,500 scholarships given out each year, one civil servant employed by the state scholarship board admitted that often, “when we deny them [non-indigenes] scholarships, they are lost completely.” Even non-indigenes who might be eligible for scholarships and lower fees at state-run schools in their faraway “state of origin” often find the cost of attending school far from their homes and families to be prohibitive.
Similar, though less severe, discrimination exists in federal government universities as well. Those universities, which are generally regarded as elite as compared with their state-run counterparts, do not “belong” to the indigenes of any one state. Most, however, grant preferential treatment to students who are indigenes of their “catchment areas,” which encompass the state hosting the university and one or more nearby states. Students who cannot prove that they are indigenes of a federal university’s catchment area are forced to compete for admission at a disadvantage, though one that is considerably less pronounced than those imposed on non-indigenes by state universities.
State government officials interviewed by Human Rights Watch in Kaduna, Kano and Plateau States defended these discriminatory policies, claiming that they amounted to a benign form of positive discrimination aimed at advancing the interests of state indigenes. Pointing out that Nigerians in the north of the country are generally less well-educated than natives of the southern states, for example, a spokesperson for the government of Kano State said that, “All of these are policies targeted at providing more opportunity to indigenes. You want to encourage your people to study… So it’s a kind of subsidy for the education of indigenes.”
Many non-indigenes hotly dispute this rationale, arguing that the educational needs of their children should also be relevant to the policies of the states they call home. And some contend that the idea that their children should seek their education in their “state of origin” is nothing short of absurd. The non-indigene Anglican bishop of Kaduna voiced that sentiment this way:
I have lived in Kaduna since 1963. Since then I have not spent one whole week and my children have not spent four consecutive days in that place [their “state of origin”]. This is where we belong… This is my home whether they accept it or not—I am a citizen of the state and the constitution says I have a right to live here.
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