He argued that the cost of having an uneducated population in any country is higher and more dangerous than what could be spent on educating the ignorant children.
The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC), Omoyele Sowore, has said that if elected the next Nigerian president in the 2023 general elections, he will make sure that about 20 million Nigerian children who are out of school are enrolled into basic education.
Sowore, who made this promise on Monday morning during an interview on Arise TV, said that it would become a criminal offence for any parent not to enroll his or her child in school and there would be free education for all.
The human rights activist and #RevolutionNow Converser argued that the cost of having an uneducated population in any country is higher and more dangerous than what could be spent on educating the ignorant children.
"So that will be how we will encourage parents to make sure that the children go to school. But it will also then become a crime if you don't send your children to school."
On how to fund Nigerian education, Sowore, who in his manifesto emphasised on adequate and sufficient funding for education, said that "Nigeria's problem is never wealth creation from time immemorial. It has always been wealth distribution.
"It is a matter of priority. It is also a matter of international policy that a certain percentage of our budget must be allocated to education."
He said that what had affected Nigeria's education system was that rather than the government to invest in education, the nation's money was siphoned by a few individuals who then used it to send their children to school abroad.
"We keep complaining that we don't have money when we know that in some countries around the world, our illicit flow of money is the reason why they are thriving.
"Nigeria's money is partially why Dubai is doing very well, even during the recession because we are just shipping money there. The ones we couldn't ship by banks, they were carried on airplanes from Lagos. Everybody knows about it, the DSS, the EFCC. They accompany bags of Dollars to Dubai," he said.
He maintained that Nigeria had enough money to spend on education but unfortunately, it was being directed to the wrong areas.