From Sola Ojo, Kaduna
Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has said the state has about 2.5 million children in government elementary and secondary schools, comprising two million pupils and 500,000 students.
The governor, who stated this when he hosted representatives of UNICEF, Save the Children International, Kaduna Social Protection Accountability Coalition (KADSPAC) and primary and secondary schoolchildren to commemorate this year’s Children’s Day, May 27, also explained why some schools across the state still don’t have furniture despite the commitment of his administration to revamp education in the state.
Some students had asked their governor to provide and supply enough furniture to public schools to aid their learning and as well encourage other children to go to school.
In his response, the governor described the scale of education and health challenges in the state as huge, following the failure of his predecessors to invest in the two sectors 16 years before his assumption of office on May 29, 2015.
“Let me give you a quick profile of our educational and health sectors. We inherited 4,256 primary schools and about 500 secondary schools in Kaduna State. Most of our primary schools had no furniture at all. Some of the secondary schools had some and, we had to start bridging the gap.
“And we have to do so under difficult circumstances. As you know, the country depends a lot on crude oil because 80 per cent of the government’s revenue comes from crude oil sales and, when the price collapses, what we get as a country goes down and what comes to the state also goes down.
“But, despite this, we are committed to education. One of the first things we did was to abolish all forms of fees or levies in our primary and junior secondary schools.
“Then (we) went to the secondary school and found that our children in boarding schools were being fed with N21 per meal. We found that inadequate. Now, we budgeted N540 per day. And then we went ahead and abolish all fees in secondary schools, starting with the girls.
“So, the scale of the problem is big. Kaduna State has 2 million pupils in government primary schools and 500,000 in government secondary schools”, El-Rufai stated.
He added “we are determined to give them free education. We are determined to increase the quality of the teachers. We took political will by sacking 22,000 teachers during my first term in office so we could improve the quality of teachers. We just added 7,600 science teachers in our secondary schools because we must keep improving on this.
“We are not ready to charge parents and the rate of our revenue is going down. So, the pace at which we can renovate schools, rehabilitate hospitals, with furniture, equipment and so on has to be slow. We want to ensure every child has 12 years of education for free no matter his or her social status and we are committed to that.
“So it will take time to provide all the furniture we need and take the schools to the level we want. But we have started. 16 years before we came into office, these were not being done,” he noted.