Taliban survivor Malala blasts China over death of fellow peace laureate
NIGERIA: Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai has condemned China’s treatment of her fellow peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo following his death from liver cancer in custody last week.
Liu, 61, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for ‘‘inciting subversion of state power’’ after he helped to write a petition known as Charter 08, calling for sweeping political reforms in China.
‘‘I condemn any government who denies people’s freedom,’’ Yousafzai, 20, a Pakistani education activist who came to prominence when a Taliban gunman shot her in the head in 2012, said during a visit to a school in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri yesterday.
‘‘I’m hoping that people will learn from what [Liu] did and join together and fight for freedom, fight for people’s rights and fight for equality.’’
Yousafzai’s trip to Nigeria was aimed at raising awareness of education problems in Africa’s most populous country, where over 10.5 million children are out of school, more than anywhere else in the world.
The issue is felt more severely in the mainly Muslim north. The south has over the decades seen greater investment and a system of schools started by Christian pastors affiliated with British colonists.
Nigeria needed to increase spending on education, ’’and they need to make it public, the rate of spending planned and how much they’re spending’’, said Yousafzai. Since her first trip to Nigeria three years ago, the proportion of the budget allocated to education had dropped from above 10 per cent to around 6 per cent, she said.
The eight-year Islamist insurgency of Boko Haram, whose name roughly means ‘‘Western education is forbidden’’, has compounded problems with education in Nigeria’s north. The militants have destroyed hundreds of schools and uprooted millions of people, forcing them into refugee camps which often lack the most basic necessities, let alone decent schooling. – Reuters