Parents’ inability to pay N6,000 school fee gave rise to idea, says proprietor
Indigent kids: It has helped us to keep our dreams alive, stay away from crime
Many indigent children and potential recruits into deadly gangs in Ajegunle part of Lagos State notorious for criminal activities are finding meaning in life working as agents of environmental change. They are working against improper disposal of plastic bottles which is said to be affecting human populations, the ecosystems and invariably worsening global environmental crisis. The kids, aided by their parents, gather plastic bottles and hand them over to their school’s authorities which accept them as part or full payment for their school fees. The idea was mooted by the proprietor to give them access to education, INNOCENT DURU reports.
FIFTEEN-year-old Musbau was excited with his enrolment in a public school in Ajegunle area of Lagos. His excitement derived from the realisation that his enrollment would automatically remove him from the army of out-of-school children loitering around the community and serving as tools for criminal elements.
But the excitement fizzled out in a space of time as he was scared by some ugly experiences he had with some of his school mates. “I was not happy with the public school that I was attending because there were many bad boys there,” he said as he began the disturbing story of how he later quit the school untimely.
“They (students) used to join bad gangs. They always fought, and while going home, they would be stealing from traders. I was in that school for two years before I lost interest in it.”
Rather than open up to his father about his predicament, Musbau kept his pains to his chest and was dying in silence. In the circumstance, truancy became inevitable.
He said: “I would always dress up as if I was going to school but I would not go. Instead, I would roam the streets until closing time and go back home because I had lost interest in the school on account of the activities of the bad boys.”
With time, Musbau completely jettisoned his education, joining the league of young boys aimlessly roaming the streets of crime-infested Ajegunle.
“Our neighbourhood is notorious for all manner of vices. Very often, you would see young boys snatching bags from passersby and extorting money from traders. They beat and stab anyone who resists them,” the dark- complexioned man said.
But even as he wandered around, his longing for formal education remained undying. Fortunately, luck smiled on him during one of his aimless movements.
He said: “I was passing in front of Morit International School one day when I saw a man who happened to be the proprietor. I told him that I needed help.
“I told him that I wanted to go to school and that he should help me. I had no money for school fees. My father also didn’t have money to pay.
“The proprietor asked if I would be coming for lessons but I said no; that I wanted full time education.
“After listening to me, the proprietor agreed to give me admission. He discussed my plight with his friends who bought books and uniforms for me.”
Musbau’s new school is populated by children from indigent homes.
The school fees, according to the proprietor, Patrick Mbamarah, range between N6,000 and N7,000 per term (less than $10 in three months). But meagre as they seem, many parents in the neighbourhood cannot pay, causing many children to be out of school.
Bothered by the need to repeatedly send the pupils home for not paying their fees, Patrick, the proprietor, dug into his wealth of experience in recycling and decided to make the pupils to gather used plastic bottles and bring them to school to settle their school fees instead of watching them roll into gutters and drainages and consequently blocking free flow of waste water and flood.
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Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, in a recent post on his twitter handle said an equivalent of over 2,000 garbage trucks full of plastic are dumped every day into oceans, rivers and lakes.
A report on https://www.trvst.world/ identified recycling as one of the ways of addressing the challenge raised by the UN scribe. “When we recycle plastic bottles we also prevent them from contributing to pollution, where they leach harmful chemicals into the environment.”
Patrick’s idea of ridding the environment of plastics, recycling them and using the proceeds to settle pupils’ school fees has not only helped the environment, it has also helped to sustain Musbua’s education and that of numerous others in the school.
He said: “I keyed into the school’s programme of ridding the environment of plastic bottles because it prevents those rubbish from entering and blocking our gutters.
“Although I am on scholarship, I still gather plastic bottles to support others who need them to pay school fees and reciprocate the kind gesture of the school.
“I also do it for the good of the environment and also to prevent other children from taking to the street and experiencing what I went through.”
Asked how his colleagues in his former school reacted seeing him in the new school, Musbau said: “When my colleagues in the public school heard about my admission here, they started laughing at me.
“They said I was a fool, wondering why I would leave a public school for a private school. They also mocked me for picking plastics.
“But I know what I am doing. Apart from coming to school, I am also an apprentice in a furniture making workshop.”
Ten-year-old Rodiat is another pupil whose educational dreams have been helped to come alive with using plastic wastes to settle school fees.
“My parents pay part of my school fees and the school authorities use the plastic bottles that they bring to school to settle the other part,” she said.
From picking plastic bottles from her immediate environment with the help of her parents to settling her school bills, Rodiat has grown into an activist, advising people against indiscriminate dumping of bottle water plastics on the road or water ways.
She said: “People drop plastic bottles indiscriminately on the road after using them. I pick them up whenever I see such.
“People mock me whene they see me picking the plastic bottles. They think I am selling them because we have no money to eat.
“Some of those mocking me are out of school and they have never deemed it necessary to do what I am doing to have access to education.
“There are many of my peers in my community who are out of school. They help their mothers to hawk various items.”
Rattled by her brilliance, Rodiat said, many of her out of school friends come to her on Fridays to tap from her knowledge.
Said she: “We have a space at the back of our house. Every Friday, these out of school friends gather at that open space in our house for me to teach them. I teach them using the knowledge I acquire in school.
“One of the parents during last Christmas period gave my mother some money to buy things for me in appreciation of what I am doing for the daughter.
“There are many homeless kids in our neighborhood. Some of the girls have been impregnated and are now loitering around the streets.
“It is an eyesore for me. I have promised my mother that I will not be like those girls.”
The practice of using plastics to settle school fees appears to have engendered the spirit of kindness among the pupils. Rodiat’s classmate, Ramota, for example, does not have any reason to gather plastics to pay her school fees as her parents settle her bills as and when due. Yet she goes out of her way to pick plastic bottles to help the less privileged among her school mates. Her words: “My parents pay my school fees in full but I also join in ridding the environment of plastic bottles, which I bring to school to support my colleagues whose parents cannot pay their fees.
Lagos schools where plastic
Lagos school
“I feel bad whenever I see plastic bottles littering the roads or drainages. So I always advise people, including adults, not to drop plastic bottles anyhow on the road because they always find their ways into drainages, and by doing so, cause flooding because water will not be able to pass freely.”
Ramota noted with regret that happenings in the neighbourhood expose many young ones to crime and the situation could have been worse if the opportunity provided by her school was not in place.
She said: “I have seen people fighting in our neighbourhood. They don’t only fight, they also stab one another using different kinds of weapon. Many of them are out of school and I don’t want to be like them or like the girls walking about aimlessly.”
Basit, a 10-year-old primary four pupil, said but for the arrangement put in place by the school, he would have been at home by now helping his mother to wash clothes and selling in the shop.
The young boy and his siblings are among the crop of children in the area that picking plastic bottles has helped to access education.
“My siblings and I are schooling here,” he said in response to our correspondent’s enquiry.
“Our parents pay a part of our fees and the school uses the proceeds from the plastic bottles we bring to clear the balance.
“This has helped us to have access to education and we are happy about it. In our neighborhood, young ones like me often join the adults when they are engaging in bloody fights.
“At times, the young ones break objects like electric bulbs to stab their opponents. Many within 15 years of age smoke Indian hemp and other substances. I cover my nose whenever I see them.”
Why I initiated picking up plastic bottles to settle school fees – Proprietor
The Proprietor of Moriet International School, Patrick Mbamara, in a chat with our correspondent, said he established the school as a profit making venture but the poverty level in the community and the pains he felt sending indigent pupils home for owing school fees compelled him to jettison his primary aim for establishing it.
The school, he said, was established in 2010 but because they were owing, “I shut down the school. By 2013, I started again and since then we have been in operation.
“I came up with the idea of using plastics to pay for school fees as far back as 2014, but I didn’t know how to figure my way around the project until 2018 when I partnered with one ACI.
“We started the project properly in 2019 and since then I have not stopped.”
Speaking on how his recycling background fertilised the idea, Patrick said: “I know about polymers, plastics and other related materials. How you can make oil or diesel from even the plastic bottles. I know about these things. “I have done recycling on sachet water before. I thought at one point that all these plastics we have around are actually money, and if I could get the parents of these pupils to start picking them for school fees, it would be a great idea.”
To actualise the dream, Patrick called a Parent-Teachers Association (PTA) meeting and almost all the parents bought into the idea.
“I told the parents who did not subscribe to the idea because they can pay their children’s bills that they could still bring the plastic bottles from their market places so we could use the proceeds to settle other pupils’ school fees and that it would also be environmentally good for the society. At the end of the day, I got all the parents into the project.”
On how the idea works, he said: “They are the pickers and I am the middleman. When they bring the plastic bottles, I gather them from the parents and call the recyclers to come and pick them.
“Whatever number (of plastics) they bring, I weigh and record the value against their names as school fees. Whatever is the balance, they would have to decide whether they want to pay it with recyclables or with cash. I accept any of that to help them continue with their education.”
Asked if the school offers quality education with the amount being paid as school fees, Patrick said: “Our fees are affordable and that does not mean that we are not offering standard education to the pupils.
“We do offer them standard and quality education. We try to test our quality by attending quiz and debate competitions to see how well our pupils are doing compared with pupils from other schools.
“My children attend this school too. I have a boy and three girls and they are all in this school.
“If I am offering substandard education to the pupils, my children will be part of it. If I am feeding other people’s children with poison, my own children will be taking it too.
“For my children to be attending the school shows that our standard of education is not poor, because I will not want my children to get poor education.
“For the records, we use the Nigerian British Curriculum blended.”
Recently, he said: “We were invited for a programme at American Corner, Ikeja. If we are not doing well, we would not be invited to a place like that.
“By God’s grace, we will be participating in their debate coming up in September. We have made private education affordable and accessible in our local environment.”
We address six SDGs aside from tackling environmental issues
Aside from using his idea to tackle environmental problems, the proprietor said it also covers six other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) like good health and wellbeing, quality education and gender equality because admission is not restricted to male candidates. He said: “We respect and accommodate both genders inasmuch as plastics don’t select genders.
“Our concept also addresses clean water and sanitation, sustainable city and community, life below water and life on land.
“We also address peace and strong institutions. We do just more than riding the community of plastics.
“We would like to be supported by kind hearted Nigerians to accommodate more indigent children who are out of school.
“The school fees are between N6,000 and N7,000 a term. Pre-school is N6,000 while primary school is N7, 000. We have made education affordable and accessible to our immediate community, and with the support of kind hearted Nigerians we can pull out more children from the street and save them and the society for crime and criminality.”
Robbery suspect tells Ajegunle crime story Akire, an armed robbery suspect, painted a grim picture of how endemic crime is in Ajegunle where out of school children are easily recruited as foot soldiers when he was apprehended back in 2020.
He claimed that he came to Lagos about 15 years ago as a good boy but was unfortunate to live in Ajegunle a.k.a. AJ City, where crime was the order.
His words: “I am a criminal who has tasted all kinds of crimes. I was a petty thief before I graduated to armed robbery.
“But it was not my fault. Fate brought me to AJ City where crime is a normal way of life. It was when I came to AJ city that I came to realise that crime is a culture in the place, except you don’t want to socialise.
“I must confess to you, even parents encourage their children to commit crime.
“It was when things became difficult for me and there was nobody to assist that I joined the bandwagon.
“For instance, when I begged people for as low as N10, they would tell me to join them in their hustle.
“I noticed that almost every guy in the area belonged to one cartel or the other.
“I decided to join a cult group, but I was given a condition: procure a gun before I would be accepted.
“It was while I was looking for a gun that the Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (FSARS) arrested me. I was charged to court and remanded in prison.
“In prison, I met other criminals from AJ City. We formed a gang there. When we came out, we started with picking pockets, traffic robbery and burglary.
“Along the line, my gang members started graduating to armed robbery. I was lagging behind, because I had no gun.
“My mates were making fun of me. They used to scold me when we met at joints.
“Well, I made up my mind that I was going to grow up. So, I also acquired a gun and I was initiated into real crime. The rest is history.”
Corroborating Akire’s confession, Patrick said Ajegunle was a peaceful community “until we started having cult gangs and since then, it has not been encouraging.”
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The problem with all this, according to him, is single parenting. “I have done my own local research and have come to see that most of the targets of these cult groups don’t have their father and mother together or that their father is married to another woman or multiple women.
“Poverty is an issue in this area. Illiteracy is also a huge problem on the part of the parents.
“Another thing is poor upbringing of children. Here, you will find babies giving birth to babies. The main problems are single parenting and broken homes.”
He regrets that the life of crime, violence and promiscuity was impacting negatively on the kids.
Patrick said: “We have had cases where pupils bring sharp objects to school because of what they see outside. They think that what they are doing is normal.
“Sometimes they bring sharp sticks and even penknife to school. But because we keep eagle eyes on them, we spot them and take the objects away from them. “It is not that it happens every time; it only happens occasionally. But it is not even supposed to happen in the school environment at all.
“If I am able to pull out these children from being lured into social vices, we are invariably contributing to the peace of Ajegunle.
“One of our pupils was prone to becoming a street boy but I have succeeded in pulling him away from becoming that.”
Effects of plastics on environment, humans
There have been global concerns about the impacts of plastic bottles and other forms of plastics on humans and the environment.
A report on https://www.trvst.world/ titled ‘Plastic Water Bottles – Environmental Impacts’ says: “Since the 1950s, we have produced around 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic worldwide. And 60% of that plastic has found its way to landfills or the natural environment.
“Plastic water bottles may be useful and cheap, but they have environmental consequences. From production to disposal, bottled water production affects climate change, humans, and wildlife.
“Discarded water bottles and their caps make up the third and fourth most recovered plastic trash in Ocean Conservancy’s yearly beach clean-up.
“It is easy to pick up bits and pieces of plastic from the ocean, but it is impossible to clean the ocean of microplastics.
“Around 700 species of organisms, such as turtles, whales, seabirds, fish, and mammals, have ingested or become entangled in or with plastic debris.
“The floating microplastics also promote the spread of harmful marine bacteria and invasive organisms, disrupting the marine ecosystem’s stability.”
Examining the effects on plastics on landfills, the report said: “PET is durable, but durability is one of its significant problems. A plastic water bottle can last for at least 450 years before it completely disintegrates.
“Because of its resistance to degradation, a plastic bottle will take up valuable space in landfills for years. Landfills are not infinite and can fill up quickly if we continue to send large volumes of non-biodegradable items like plastic bottles there.
“Perhaps the worst thing about plastic pollution on land is the tendency of waste plastic to migrate to the ocean.”
On the effects on human health, it said: “When we eat fish, microplastics are swallowed and introduced into the human food chain.
“The average person is exposed to microplastics through water, air, and food throughout the entire year.
“The toxic nature of microplastics makes them carcinogenic. That places the well-being of people who consume fish at risk.
“We may find chemicals like BPA, an endocrine disruptor, in plastic. It can leach out into water bodies, sink into the soil, and contaminate the groundwater.
“It may be absorbed by plants and thereby enter into the food chain. Ingesting such a chemical can interfere with the immune, neurological and reproductive human systems.
“Plastic pollution can affect the availability of safe drinking water. Microplastics have been found in tap water in a lot of places in the world.
“Drinking clean water is essential for physical well-being, and when microplastics or plastic chemicals contaminate water, our health is in danger.”
Recycling as solution
In line with what is being done in the aforementioned Ajegunle school, the report suggested recycling of plastics as one of the ways of tackling the problems posed by plastic pollution.
It states: “Recycling is a process that turns waste into new resources, and plastic water bottles have enormous potential.
“A large percentage of plastic water bottles end up in the trash, although recycling options are available.
“Only 9% of all plastic ever made has been recycled. In many places, plastic products can be recycled through the curbside recycle bin. However, in America, only 30% of bottled water plastic ends up in the recycle bin.
“Recycling takes advantage of the durability of plastic and ensures resource conservation through material recovery.
“When waste recyclable plastic is recycled, it cuts back on the number of raw materials that go into plastic production.
“This helps to conserve resources and reduce emissions associated with plastic manufacturing.
“When we recycle plastic bottles, we also prevent them from contributing to pollution, where they leach harmful chemicals into the environment.”