The All Progressives Congress (APC) and current Deputy governor of Kano, Dr.Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, has said that northern leaders have a challenge to work towards promoting quality education and skill acquisition amongst the youths.
He believed that rather than lamenting the socio-economic crisis brought about the current insecurity challenges and youth restiveness in the zone, the leaders should find more innovative ways to encourage its people to catch-up with other parts of the country educationally.
Ganduje who recently picked the governorship ticket of APC to contest for 2015 elections told journalists in an interview in Abuja that the key means of addressing the problems of youths is through providing quality education and employment opportunities.
“You are fully aware that the Northern part of this country is backward in terms of education compared with the other parts of the country especially the Southern part of the country and this a challenge to leaders in the Northern parts of this country and Kano state is not an exception.
“We must work very hard to ensure that we catch up with other parts of the country, since we have no moral justification, we have no legal rights to hold back other states from growing further hence our only option is to double our speed to catch up with other states of the federation especially the Southern part of the country.
The Deputy Governor explained that the current government in Kano state has already done a lot to improve the education sector and has given scholarships to students to study both at home and abroad.
He also said that the state government is working to improve hydroelectric power generation in kano, adding he will would ensure that the project as well as others are completed if elected governor.
“If I win the election by God’s power, my intention is to ensure that all those capital projects are being completed and then depending on the areas, like in education, we have taken education to be a very serious issue in Kano state because we know Kano being the most populated state in the country.
“We have some challenges in order to make our population an asset, a quality population and to avoid making our population a liability, education was to be given a very good attention.
“So far we are doing that and I assure you when I win the election by God’s power , I will work very hard to improve on the quality of education. You know that quality of education has gone down all over the country and it is my responsibility to make sure we increase in the quality of education.
“There are so many other areas, what has happened to unemployment? We look at how we can empower our youth, how we can give our youths the opportunity to go for higher education, how we can give our youths opportunity to develop their skills and empower them so that they can employ others.
“We can see how we can empower our women, we can see how we can make arrangements so that our industries that had been closed down, and those partially operating especially with the new regime in power generation,
” We will examine other sources of power so that our industries can pick up to pave way for maximum employment opportunities., same thing with rural development. Integrated rural development in terms of agriculture, in terms of social facilities in health, in terms of rural urban migration, how do you introduce a lot of economic activities in the rural areas so that our people can stay at home and still earn their living,” he said.
