NEWS- SHOCKER FROM SOKOTO

It came as a great shock to learn that 102 years after the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorate to form Nigeria as by the former British colonial masters and 56 years after her independence, one of the 774 local government areas in Nigeria does not have a secondary school. This LGA is known as Gudu Local Government Area, and it is in Sokoto State, which in 1979 produced a president of Nigeria, Alhaji Shehu Shagari. Sokoto is also the home state of the leader of Muslims in Nigeria, the Sultan of Sokoto. Another unfortunate fact about the dismal level of education in this LGA is that out of 1,890 secondary school students who hail from its domain of an officially estimated population of 200,000, only one of them is a female. All of them school away from their home local government area. These facts only came out because the Governor of the state, Alhaji Waziri Tambuwal, has finally decided to site a model boarding school there, in line with his promise on this year’s Democracy Day, according to the Governor’s spokesman, Imam Imam. This kind of nationally embarrassing statistic that sometimes emanates from the North, especially with regard to the generally poor attitude of some of their leaders to the education of children of the less fortunate members of the citizenry is something that has got to stop. This local government council has collected billions of naira from the Federation Account over the years. The Federal Government also pays hefty amounts to the state based on the high population figure ascribed to this local government with a view to using the funds to uplift the people and provide them with better life. Politicians go there from one political season to the next, canvassing for votes and getting voted for. The local government has also produced a good number of educated individuals who went to school in towns outside the local government. Yet nobody found it in their hearts to ensure that the poor people of that locality were given access to a secondary educational facility within their reach. This is not just a case of extreme bad governance, failure of leadership and elite insensitivity to the needs of the grassroots; it is a clear cut case of man’s inhumanity to man. We condemn this without reservation and wonder how the elite and “big men/women” from that local government are able to weather the stigma of this shame. It is somewhat comforting that Governor Tambuwal has taken it upon himself to break this jinx and establish a “model” boarding school at Balle, the headquarters of the embattled local government, which he said, would cost one billion naira. It is better late than never. source vanguard.