Where Do the Children Go Now? – By Olusegun Adeniyi

The Ambassador of Sweden to Nigeria, Her Excellency Anna Westerholm, was the special guest of honour at the graduation ceremony (Kindergarten 2 and Primary 5 pupils) of my wife’s Not Forgotten Initiative (NFI) School last Thursday in Abuja. “When I visited this school (last December), what stayed with me was not just the privilege of reading a book together with you. What stayed with me was the curiosity I saw in your eyes,” she told the pupils to whom she had shared the story of the fictional Swedish girl Pippi Longstocking in Nigerian Pidgin just a few months ago. “I remember your laughter, your confidence, and how eager you were to participate, ask questions, and share your thoughts…I want to encourage you to hold on to those qualities.” History

Sadly, holding on to those qualities is what is now at threat. Not because the children do not want to continue learning but because there is now a challenge beyond them. And here is the brief: Some years ago, as the NFI School began to outgrow its modest structures my wife approached a neighbour whose husband owned the adjoining plot, asking whether she could use part of it. A few days later, apparently having obtained the consent of her husband, the woman gave the permission. No paperwork or conditions. Just one mother looking at other people’s children and deciding they deserved more room than they had. We accepted the gesture with gratitude and built two classrooms, a library, computer room, ‘cinema room’, kitchen and store. Always conscious that we were beneficiaries of another family’s generosity.

Three years ago, her husband passed away. Out of respect for a family that has been generous, I will not put the name down in this column. But then, death has a way of rearranging property, understanding and, sometimes, old acts of kindness. The people that are now responsible for the man’s estate have asked that we return the portion of land onto which the NFI School expanded back to them today, 30th July 2026. I want to be fair to this family, because fairness is owed. Nothing in this column should be read as a grievance against people exercising their right to a property that belongs to them. And I will not in any way question the considerations behind their request. But the reality is simply that, after years of serving dozens of vulnerable children, those classrooms will now come down.

Currently, we have 128 pupils in NFI primary school, 14 students in Federal Government Girls Colleges (FGGC) Bwari, 12 students in Federal Technical College (FTC) Orozo and seven in some Abuja private secondary schools through a partnership arrangement. All these children are on free education. The NFI School also has 14 teachers and five support staff. As my wife said last Thursday at the graduation ceremony, the stories of these children have been rewritten because some people believe in them. “Many of our children first arrived unable to read or write in English. Some spoke only Hausa. Many had never experienced structured learning,” my wife reminded the audience last Thursday. “Today they read confidently. They communicate effectively. They think critically. They dream boldly. Most importantly, they now have the confidence to compete successfully with other children anywhere in Nigeria.” Education

Incidentally, this is not the first time the NFI School’s hold on its own ground has felt uncertain. Five years ago, in this same column, I wrote about the very first classrooms my wife built on an empty plot. That plot, oddly, has never given us a moment’s trouble. The wider story of how we got here is one I have told before, https://www.thisdaylive.com/2021/04/01/amatala-and-other-unforgotten-children/ and earlier in the year, that story was amplified by my colleague, Simon Kolawole in his column, https://www.thisdaylive.com/2026/02/08/left-behind-but-not-forgotten/ But for the benefit of readers meeting NFI for the first time, let me summarise the story.

In December 2018, my wife turned a plea from a struggling mother who wanted her son in school and had nowhere left to turn, into two classrooms on an empty land nobody appeared to be using. Fourteen children came. Then more arrived, the way need tends to multiply once word travels through a community that someone is finally listening. A second classroom followed, then a third, eventually seven, staffed by teachers we hired one at a time as the numbers made it unavoidable. What began as an act of neighbourliness became, almost without our noticing, an institution: free lessons, one-meal-a-day, free uniforms, and scholarships. With the total commitment of my wife, the education the children are given is also structured, rigorous and transformational. That is why they keep passing Common Entrance examinations to secure admissions into highly competitive secondary schools. Education

Yet these are children whose parents live at the margins of society. Some of them were, years ago, children nobody expected to ever sit before a blackboard. Children who, along with their siblings and parents, fought a daily war against hunger. The NFI School has taught these children to imagine a life larger than the one they were born into. Take that away, even partially, and picture what moves in to fill the space.

Over the years, these children have had more than classroom education. They have been exposed to the kind of opportunities some of us never even had while their age. They undertake regular excursions to important places in Abuja. Through Ms Ibilola (Otegbade) Essien, some of them attended UNICEF programmes and twice met and took photographs with former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. To fire their imaginations, they have also received several prominent people in their classrooms. From Seyi Adekunle (VODI) to Hollywood filmmaker, Ose Oyamendan to Senators (Bello Mandiya, Tolu Odebiyi et al) to Ambassador Lot Egopija to chartered accountant, Gbenga Badejo to former Sports Minister and current ADC National Publicity Secretary, Malam Bolaji Abdullahi, to (now retired) federal permanent secretary, Dr Yakubu Kofarmata to the former Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA) acting Executive Secretary, Hajiya Zaliha’u Ahmed and many others. Former Education Minister, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili celebrated her 60th birthday with them. MacArthur Foundation Director, Dr Kole Shettima regularly buys for them (and their parents) clothes. And my wife’s biggest supporter, Ms Koyinsola Olukoya makes it a point of duty to take food and all kinds of goodies to those that are now in FGGC and FTC on their visiting days! Sadly, three people who have been with us on this journey right from the beginning are now of blessed memory: Mr Ferdinand Agu, Pastor Theo Martins and my cousin, Dr Olawale Banmore. Education

We allow prominent people into the classrooms to share their stories to encourage them that where they are coming from is not what matters but the future that is before them with education. At the ceremony last Thursday, we were joined by some of the people who frequent the school: the Executive Director, Pro-health International, Dr Iko Ibanga, publisher of Abuja Enquirer, Mr Dan Akpovwa, Baze University Vice Chancellor, Professor Biodun Adeniyi, Executive Commissioner (Operations), Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), Mr Louis Odion, former ADC to the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Brigadier General Mustapha Onoyiveta (rtd) and wife, Hassana. Dr Ngozi Azodoh, Dr Kole Shettima, Mrs Dupe Ogundimu, Mr Yinka Medupin, Patrick and Amaka Uzoma and several others also joined us.

Where do we go from here? I will not pretend to have an answer. For now, I don’t. But years of watching my wife run this project have taught me that Nigeria’s most vulnerable children are rarely failed by a shortage of good intentions. They are failed by the absence of infrastructure behind those intentions. While I may not know where these children go from here, I know where they came from and that too many of them had already known more abandonment than any child should. After everything we have watched them become, we cannot accept that this should be where their story turns back on itself. So, for the first  time, I am not ashamed to ask for help on how to secure a structure that properly accommodates those children in a school they can call their own. I have for years been reluctant to go this route. And I probably wouldn’t, had the idea of quietly helping a few children not turned into what is now a rather huge project. History

However, I am certain that the education of the NFI School children will not be stopped as a result of this temporary setback. My confidence stems from the fact that we have too many hand-lifters for that to happen. Every Thursday without fail, the children are treated to delicacies from Metro Bakery and Restaurant courtesy of Mrs Sandra Adio. They have had executive (volunteer) teachers, among them Mrs Funke Abegunde who retired recently from American International School. And childhood education specialists, Mrs Stella Uzu and Mrs Tosin Afolayan. The promoters and encouragers include former AIT Managing Director, Dr (Mrs) Oluwatosin Dokpesi, the Exective Director, Funtaj International School, Mrs Funke Ibrahim, Chairman of Phase3 Telecoms, Mr Stanley Jegede and wife, Mosunmola, the COO of the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre, Mr Babatunde Ahmadu, my big sister, Mrs Maryam Uwais and my social media ‘English teacher’, Mrs Hadiza El-Rufai, as well as the FCCPC Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr Tunji Bello. Gving.ng, Abuja Runs Club, Father George Ehusani, Mrs Fatima Wali-Abdurrahman, Mrs Fatima Modupe, Mr Tunde Adetoba, Mr Bolaji Adebiyi, Ms Chinelo Anohu, Mr Afolabi Ajimoti, Mrs Yoyinsola Makanjuola, Mr Edo Ukpong, Mrs Naomi Emmanuel, Ms Ify Malo, Pastors Dayo Kayode and Lanre Oduola and their wives are among other numerous NFI School supporters. Indeed, the list of the people who have helped us, one way or another, on this journey is long. I highlighted a few in the 2021 column earlier referenced, including the role my friend Folorunsho (Foli) Coker played on the feeding idea. Our three children have also played tremendous roles while I cannot count the number of shipments of instructional materials from my US-based brother-in-law, Segun Salami. Education

But I must make this quick point here. I am well aware that there are countless versions of the NFI schools scattered across Nigeria, sustained by people with far fewer resources than my wife and I have had. I suspect that many of them are only one notice away from finding themselves exactly where we are today. That something as essential as a school for vulnerable children should depend on chance rather than on any coherent framework says a lot about a country that has yet to decide whether educating its poorest children is a shared public obligation or a private act of charity. But if there is one thing eight years of watching my wife run this school has taught me, it is that Nigeria’s out-of-school children crisis has never really been a problem of resources.

With little more than an empty plot and an obstinate refusal to accept that these children were beyond saving, my wife has taken boys and girls who should have been hawking on the streets and put them behind school desks instead. She did not wait for a government programme or a donor intervention. Yes, my wife does all the purchases, including of foodstuff and runs the kitchen that feeds the children, to save cost. But if one woman, working with modest means, could prove that this is possible, then I find it difficult to accept that governments, with their budgets, institutions and constitutional responsibilities, cannot do the same on a far greater scale.

My wife’s experience has also convinced me that we have fundamentally misunderstood where Nigeria’s education crisis began. We have become obsessed with the roof while neglecting the foundation. Our debates revolve around universities, ASUU strikes, graduate unemployment and global rankings, as though the deficiencies we see at the tertiary level somehow originate there. They do not. They begin in the primary school classroom, where too many children spend their formative years without qualified teachers, textbooks, classrooms or even the assurance that learning matters. By the time they reach our universities, for those who make it that far, the damage has already been done. History

We lament graduates who cannot communicate clearly, analyse problems or think critically, yet these are not failures of higher education alone. They are the accumulated consequences of years of neglect at the most important stage of learning. The Bible poses the question with characteristic economy: “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3). That, to my mind, is the question before us. We can continue repairing the roof of our education system, introducing one reform after another at the tertiary level, but until we return to the foundation, we should not be surprised that the house refuses to stand.

When Doctors Become Content Creators

On Tuesday in Abuja, at the invitation of the Registrar and Chief Executive of the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN), Prof Fatima Kyari, I was the guest speaker at the induction ceremony for foreign-trained medical (238) and dental (12) graduates who were successful at the MDCN assessment, conducted at the University College Hospital (UCH) Ibadan last month. Asked to speak on the ‘Use and Abuse of Social Media in Medical and Dental Practice’, below is my presentation. History

Let me begin by congratulating every man and woman before me today who has earned the right to be inducted into the register of medical and dental practitioners in Nigeria. For me, this is a big deal. You trained far from home, in systems and cultures that are not your own. And you have returned to answer a call that many people your age is running away from. In a season when the standing conversation in every Nigerian household with a young doctor or dentist is about which direction the next flight out is headed, your presence here, seeking to be counted among practitioners licensed to serve Nigeria, deserves a national gratitude.

Having been asked to speak on the use and abuse of social media in medical and dental practice, I want to begin by stating the obvious: social media is neither a friend nor an enemy of the medical/dental profession or of any profession for that matter. It is an instrument, and like every instrument in the history of medicine, from the scalpel to the syringe, its value depends entirely on the hand that holds it and the discipline that guides that hand. Used well, it is a stethoscope that extends beyond your consulting room. Used carelessly, it is a scalpel that cuts the wrong way.

You have come home at a very critical period. The workforce crisis in our health sector is not a secret to anyone in this hall. The doctor-to-patient ratio hovers close to one physician for every five thousand people, against a World Health Organization (WHO) benchmark of one to six hundred. I am sure that every one of you being inducted today has already lived some version of that gap, whether as the overworked houseman or through the experience of a relative who could not reach a specialist in time. But here is the positive: Social media, and the digital platforms built on it are already narrowing some of that gap in small but real ways. For instance, a well-run public health page can do more for antenatal care-seeking in a single well-crafted post than a decade of poorly funded jingles. A dentist deploying Pidgin, Hausa, Igbo or Yoruba on Tik Tok, to explain why a decaying tooth needs a clinic and not a chisel from the roadside, can save more smiles than a thousand posters in health centres that nobody visits. But every gift of this kind arrives with its own shadow. Health

In a December 2013 journal article on the United States Library of Medicine website titled ‘Dangers and opportunities for social media in medicine’, three medical practitioners, Daniel George, Liza Rovniak and Jennifer Kraschnewski made it clear that in the age that we are in, medical and dental practitioners cannot avoid the social media. “…a growing majority of modern patients – particularly those with chronic conditions – are seeking out SM and other online sources to acquire health information, connect with others affected by similar conditions, and play a more active role in their healthcare decisions,” they wrote 13 years ago. One can only imagine the situation today. But they also added that these same tools “have introduced profound questions about confidentiality, informed consent, public/private boundaries, professionalism, and other issues of ethical import for health professionals.”

This then leads me to the few tips I want to leave with you this morning on what you should avoid in your usage of social media, because induction day is exactly the moment to hear them, before habits harden into instinct. The first and gravest is the casual surrender of patient confidentiality. A striking wound, rare deformity, dramatic delivery, and successful surgery. All these can make compelling content, and the temptation to share them, even with faces blurred or for ‘education,’ is real. But somewhere in the oath you are about to take is a promise about confidentiality that predates Hippocrates himself. Social media has not repealed that promise; it has only multiplied the ways of breaking it, and the speed at which a breach now travels. So, always bear this in mind: That patient’s body and story belong first to the patient, not to your followers on social media platforms.

The second abuse is the collapse of the boundary between the consulting room and the comment section of an online publication. Diagnosing and prescribing from a WhatsApp group chat or X thread, arguing a clinical case in the replies of a viral post etc. are ordinarily ‘harmless’. But no matter the temptation, you must always bear this in mind: Each of these actions blurs a line that exists to protect the patient as much as the medical practitioner, and each becomes considerably harder to defend the day something goes wrong.

The third is what I might call reputational contagion. Medicine and dentistry, unlike many other professions, are trusted as a collective. A single practitioner’s poor judgement online can cause a huge reputational damage not only for them but also for the entire profession. A callous joke about a patient’s condition, a video that trades a patient’s dignity for views, or a public feud with a colleague conducted for an audience. All these rarely stay contained to that one account. They become, unfairly but predictably, evidence in the case some members of the public are always building against the entire medical and dental professions.

For dentists in particular, I would add a caution about a trend I have watched grow globally: cosmetic procedures; veneers, instant whitening, dramatic ‘smile makeovers’ and many of those in-vogue procedures that are marketed with more attention to camera angles and background music than to clinical efficacy. Yes, aesthetic dentistry is a legitimate and growing field. But aesthetic dentistry practised as influencer marketing, ahead of proper assessment, is not.

None of what I have said thus far is theoretical. Around the world, regulators have had to strike practitioners off their registers over judgement exercised on social media. And there are many examples to cite: a surgeon who kept sharing patients’ procedures for engagement despite repeated warnings, until his licence and reputation both gave way under a dozen lawsuits; an online personality who built a following of hundreds of thousands by posing as a licensed doctor dispensing advice on cancer and fertility, only to be convicted of impersonation. These, of course, are extreme cases, and I do not for a moment suggest that anyone in this hall is destined for such a tragic professional fate. But then, every extreme case begins with a smaller, more forgivable-seeming decision. Currently circulating online is a Tik Tok video of a young female doctor taking camera around the wards of a private hospital that employed her and behaving like the star of a reality show before posting the content after resignation. That’s how they all begin. The extreme cases are what happens when nobody says no to these small ones. Yes, I am aware that it is more financially rewarding to chase clout than to save lives but the latter is what you have chosen and it is more ennobling. Please stay on your lane.

You are fortunate in one respect. You arrive this job at a time your regulator has already prescribed the rules of engagement, regarding the use of social media. In October last year, the MDCN issued a formal guidance on social media and responsible online conduct. I recommend it to every one of you as required reading, alongside the Code of Medical Ethics itself. Its logic is simple, and to my mind unimpeachable: the standards of honesty, accuracy, confidentiality and accountability that govern you in a ward or a surgery do not switch off when you switch on your phone. The Council also left practitioners with one warning worth committing to memory: Your responsibility for what you post online does not expire when you delete it. A private post can turn public. A deleted post can resurface as a screenshot years later. The internet, unlike memory, rarely forgets on command.

Let me leave you, then, with a number of habits I would urge you to carry from this hall into your practice. First, if you consider it of public interest to post anything about a patient, ask for their consent. If the answer is no, the story stays untold. Second, not every provocation or viral claim you disagree with deserves a response, especially if they do not directly concern you or the institution you represent. Third, build a name, not only a following, which as we all know can be bought, gamed, or lost overnight to an algorithm’s whim. What endures is the reputation that makes a stranger say, “ask that dentist, I hear he or she is thorough and honest.” That kind of reputation is built offline, and it is the only currency that lasts. Fourth, extend to your colleagues online the same courtesy you would extend across a hospital corridor. Disagree, if you must, with the science or the judgement of another practitioner. But do not attempt anything that would take away their dignity. Lastly, use whatever reach you build for something larger than yourself.

Before I take my seat, it is perhaps important to also look at another side of this malaise. Increasingly, medical practitioners are also becoming targets. No fewer than 30 resident doctors were assaulted across Nigeria within the last year, according to the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) which has cited 21 assault cases. Only five of the cases have made it to court and only one assailant has been convicted. I am almost certain that most of these cases can be traced to a pattern of public harassment and trial-by-hashtag that some of your colleagues have faced online, often before facts are established, and sometimes long after they have been settled in the practitioner’s favour. A profession that polices itself honestly, through its proper disciplinary channels, should not also have to submit to this sort of barbarism. History

That is perhaps why I must make this final point. You are entering this profession at a moment when public trust in our national institutions is thin and hard-won. And you have spent years, far from home, earning the letters that will now follow your names. Carry the white coat’s obligations into every space you occupy, including the small, bright one in your pocket that never quite switches off. But please do not let a single careless post undo, in a moment, what years of discipline have helped you to build.

Once again, congratulations to every inductee gathered here today. Use social media platforms wisely, and welcome home. Nigeria needed you before you left, and needs you even more now that you have returned.