A National Alarm About Sokoto & Zamfara
A few days ago, Guardian Nigeria reported that students of public secondary schools in Sokoto and Zamfara will not be taking part in this year’s May/June WASSCE.
Premium Times also carried the news that the examination body refused to accept candidates from Zamfara over accumulated debt.
For Sokoto, its public school kids will not be taking the exam in 2022 for the second year in a row. The pupils also did not show up for the 2021 edition.
Guiwa Bello, the state’s commissioner of education, would not specify why WAEC was dropped but emphasized that “it is not essential for pupils to take WASSCE conducted by WAEC.”
It is a travesty that state governments, on whose shoulders the duty for secondary education falls fully, have denied their students the opportunity to continue to the tertiary level for the past two years owing to circumstances within their control.
Zamfara state, where accumulated debt is considered one of the factors responsible for the lack of enrolment of pupils, is the same state where 260 luxury cars, which include several 2019 Cadillac models, were distributed to traditional rulers.
This attitude reflects the state government’s skewed priorities that cash can be found for such frills while education that would benefit the future languishes.
The entire country should be worried because, in a few years, these kids whose education is not being attended to are likely to attend to vices that would harm us.
As I said previously, the population of the core North could be as much as 70% of the entire country by 2070, according to research. I don’t need to leave to your imagination what it means for the bulk of that population to be made up of uneducated, and likely unskillful, people.
