No one needs to tell me I am venturing into dangerous territory as the title above may already suggest. Indeed I am veering slightly away from sports and discussing what sport has revealed to me about Boko Haram (which in Hausa means 'western education, forbidden').

Sport is no respecter of persons, race, colour, size, status, tribe, creed or religion. It is the ultimate leveller and one of the most potent unifying instruments in the world. It has succeeded in bringing even political enemies to compete against one another in a neutral theatre, and for the period of competition made them put aside their differences. Sport has no language. On the field of play athletes communicate on the basis of convenience and nothing more. No language is superior to the other. This fact is a humbling realisation. It brings a thought to my mind that I must put across, even as I hope that in doing so I shall not be offending any sensibilities. It has to do with education and the youths of some parts of Northern Nigeria.

In the course of my recent work in the Nigeria Academicals Sports Committee, NASCOM, I visited the United Nations office in Abuja where I learnt some very important but frightening statistics. According to the last national Census, 65% (sixty-five percent) of Nigeria's population is made up of persons less than 25 years of age! What does this tell us? Anyone above the age of 40 in the country today must count themselves lucky to be alive. Nigeria ranks amongst the countries in the world with the shortest life expectancy - about 45 years. We rank with countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on, countries devastated by war, pestilence and internecine crisis without end. The difference is that whilst theirs is the product of poverty and war, our's is a product of poor governance, treasury looting and mismanagement of the abundant resources that could have transformed the country into one of the healthiest, richest and greatest nations on earth. What this means also is that should things continue the way they are, with the government either unable or unwilling to meaningfully engage this mammoth population in a country that is bulging at mid-riff with unemployable, jobless, unskilled, poorly educated and idle youths, the country stands on a precipice threatened by an explosion of anger, frustration, restiveness and social unrest. The most affected areas in the country are some of the States in the North of Nigeria. These States harbour the largest number of out-of-school and illiterate youths. I am therefore not surprised at how this has fuelled the recent crisis of the Boko Haram. Personally, because I grew up in the North of Nigeria I have often wondered why the youths never took advantage of the concessions and incentives provided by successive governments to embrace education and break away from the stranglehold of poverty. For a long time I could not understand it until, perhaps, now.

Let me first of all admit that I may be completely wrong. I am not writing with any empirical authority, just a gut feeling following my personal experiences. In the past 14 years I have been working with student footballers from all over the country including the northern States in question. I have interacted at very close quarters with them and had useful conversations. From the quarter-final stages of the All Nigeria Secondary Schools Football Championship for the NNPC/Shell Cup, I get to meet closely with players from all the geo-political zones of the country and share some time and thoughts. I see now that the English language may have been the greatest impediment to the advancement of education in the north of Nigeria! How? To the average Muslim uninformed person the English language is synonymous with Christianity, after all it is the English man that brought western education and his religion to Nigeria. Western Education has always, therefore, been seen as a tool to indoctrinate and to spread the practice of Christianity.

Hence, to the simple Islamist, western education and its fancy language are Haram (to be avoided and forbidden)! The suspicion and the threat of western education are so real that they have sustained through decades and, little wonder, with rising unemployment and illiteracy amongst the youths, it became very easy for the sinister-minded to exploit the situation, equate education with the English language, recruit an army of the poor, hungry, illiterate and idle youths and create the Boko Haram islamist movement. There is a serious suspicion of western education and its motives. The vast majority of the muslim populace reject it instead of looking beyond the 'messengers' and concentrating on the emancipating message that western education essentially brings in the present world system. I see that the average northern Nigerian student football player is not intellectually 'dumb'.