Education and northern elite

Education is described as the greatest legacy a society can bequeath to its citizens. Human civilisation would not have attained such dizzying heights today without the benefits of education. For example, education does not only liberate individuals from shackles of ignorance and superstition, it empowers them to challenge long held orthodoxies with a view of giving reign to freedom of thought and action.
There is no gainsaying that the gap existing between the developed and developing countries is a function of qualitative education. While the developed countries have succeeded in making education an inalienable right of the citizens, in the Third World people still see it as privilege of a few. Even within societies, educational gaps still exist. Unfortunately, such situation is responsible for the lopsided nature of developments and the deleterious consequences for the polity.  Sadly, Nigeria remains one of the most educationally unequal societies in the world. This sad situation is being accentuated by the increasing gap between the North and South.
Recent statistics by the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) shows that Nigeria has more than 10 million out-of –school children. According to the agency, more than 65 percent of these live in the Muslim north. For long, western education in that, part of the country has been viewed with suspicion and even utter disdain. Rather, a culture that encourages the Almajiri syndrome has been allowed to flourish over the decades. These children are a common sight in many northern states.  In the end, the bulk of them are left to fester at the margins of society throughout their lives for no fault of theirs. Most of the children   recruited by Boko Haram insurgents   are known to belong to this group.
Matters are not helped by the fact that tertiary education in the South has been expanding at an exponential rate because of private sector intervention. Gone are the days when governments had the monopoly of establishing universities and polytechnics.  Today, many private universities are springing up in the South to avail those qualified the chances of gaining admission and pursuing their educational careers. The consequence is that few states in the South have been producing far more university graduates than the entire geopolitical North put together. This does not bode well for the country. For the country to develop and be accorded its pride of place among comity of nations, the authorities must place high emphasis on education among all strata and sections of the society in order to liberate most of the citizens from the warped notion of getting privileged positions because of ethnicity or religion, rather than what positive contributions you make to society.