A year ago today, Senator Abdulaziz Yari made an investment that would not produce a single ribbon-cutting ceremony.
There was no bridge to commission. No road to name after a politician. No gleaming airport terminal whose glass facade could dominate campaign posters.
Instead, there were 2,055 names.
Each belonged to a young person, many from poor households and some orphaned, spread across every one of North West Nigeria’s seven states. Their tuition fees had been paid.
Their registration completed. Their education secured. More than N216 million had been committed, alongside a monthly stipend of N15,000 for every beneficiary until graduation.
It was, in many ways, an unusual political investment.
Nigerian politics has long rewarded the visible. We celebrate projects that can be photographed, roads that can be driven on, buildings that can be pointed at from helicopters. Education is different. It rarely offers immediate political returns. The dividends arrive years later, quietly, in hospitals, classrooms, laboratories, courtrooms and businesses. The beneficiaries often become successful long after the politician has left office. That is precisely why it matters.
today, the North West remains home to some of Nigeria’s deepest educational challenges.
Millions of children across the region remain out of school, with insecurity, poverty and social barriers combining to keep classrooms empty. UNICEF estimates that Nigeria still has one of the world’s largest populations of out-of-school children, with the burden falling disproportionately on the North West and North East. Humanitarian assessments suggest that nearly half of Nigeria’s out-of-school children are concentrated in
