Kano state governor, Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje, has criticised the Almajiri school policy executed by the former President Goodluck Jonathan administration, saying it was a wrong policy which was not well articulated.
Ganduje therefore, revealed plans by his administration to integrate the almajiris into normal schools system to avoid stigmatisation of Almajiri school graduates later in future.
Speaking with newsmen in an interview at the weekend in Abuja, the Kano governor said he had written letter to President Muhammadu Buhari, explaining the measures been put in place to intergrate the students.
“The last federal government introduced the Almajiri schools but the school is not well articulated, it is a wrong policy. For example in my village, we have this school with only 50 students and in Kano we have over 3 million Almajiris and the number of Almajiri is almost a problem to the number of school children so the issue is not creating a school.
“If you are creating an Almajiri school that is abnormal, who will like to be tag Almajiri? Is it that after completing your studies your certificate will be tagged Almajiri? And later in life you will be called a graduate of Almajiri school? Which means you were an Almajiri before, so it has some social problems.
“What we are adapting is integration, the Almajiri are integrated into the normal school system and from our investigation most of the Almajiris in Kano came from other parts of the North state, from Chad and Niger. So we have concluded that the Almajiri schools should be integrated into the normal school and any mallam who is coming with over 200 hundred children from another state should allow the children to be integrated in the school or he should take his children back to his state. I think that is a more sustainable idea rather than building schools, how many schools can you build? It is difficult so it is better you integrate it.
“I wrote a letter to Mr. President and I told him the statistics of the Almajiri and I told him the method we have taken but that will require a lot of money because you need more infrastructures, more teachers, more materials for teaching and so on but that is a starting point.”
Speaking on how he intend to diversify Kano economy to generate more income, Ganduje revealed that plans were on the way to establish a rice pyramid which will replace groundnut pyramid in the state.
“Efforts of diversification of Kano state I told you that in agriculture we have taken three areas that we have comparative advantage; the production of wheat, rice and tomatoes and all these we have people that are ready to part take, people that are ready to purchase and the farmers are ready and we are providing an enabling environment and what we have discovered is that agriculture shouldn’t be limited to raining season alone and therefore we are utilizing our dams, we have over 24 dams in the state and we are using them.”
