Desmond Mgboh,Kano
The Vice President Yemi Osinbajo was in Kano last Tuesday to open the two-day stakeholders summit on Free and Compulsory Basic Education, at the Government House. He appreciated the efforts of the state government towards the repositioning of the education sector.
He said that the successful implementation of the free and basic education programme in Kano State, given its population, was capable of triggering up a position revolution in the education sector of the region and in the entire country. He, however, regretted that Nigeria has a disturbing figure of out of children, noting that the administration was deeply uncomfortable with the statistics of children who are not in school:
“We know already that one in five of every out of school children comes from Nigeria, 61 per cent of six-11-year-old regularly attends primary school and only 75.6 per cent of children aged between 36 and 39 months receives early childhood education. For a country with our aspiration, this is unacceptable.
“Since the inception of this administration on May 2015, our guiding national principle has been the recognition that our greatest national resource is neither crude oil nor other mineral resources. It is our people. Nigerians are Nigeria greatest asset. Our ability to compete in the global economic sphere depends on our human capital.”
He stressed that it was on the basis of this that from the onset, they have invested massively in improving the quality of the nation’s human capital, depending on education as a means to achieving this goal.
The state government abolished payment of school fees in all government primary and senior secondary schools from September 1, 2019. Governor Abdullahi Ganduje also disclosed that government would provide all the necessary to boost education.
He explained that a committee has been set to take census of the all almajiri children: “Their preliminary findings showed that some of them were from other states in the North while some were from neighbouring countries.” He appealed for concerted efforts among Northern state governors so as to come up with a common approach to addressing the problem in the region.
But before he left Kano, he expressed great bitterness over the attacks of Nigerians by their host in South Africa: “The strange culture contravenes the ideals of many great leaders of that country.”
He decried the fact that again, the lives and the means of livelihoods of many Nigerians resident in South Africa were being destroyed with uncommon carelessness by South Africans: “Again, I think that it is unfortunate given that Nigeria as a country has invested greatly in the destruction and going down of the apartheid regime in that country.”
He said President Muhammadu Buhari assured Nigerians that the Federal Government was in contact with the authorities of South Africa with a view to ensuring that these tragic incidents did not happen again.