Segun Awofadeji in Gombe
Governor Muhammadu Inuwa Yahaya has been commended for initiating policies, programmes and projects geared towards the development of education in the state.
This followed the governor’s resolve to take education to all nooks and crannies of Gombe.
The commendation was made by the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar weekend during the inauguration of the Goni Sani Integrated Model Tsangaya School constructed by Yahaya.
The sultan said it would reduce the number of out-of-school children, not only in the state but the whole of northern Nigeria.
He said he came to Gombe in solidarity with and support of what Yahaya is doing for the advancement of Qur’anic education, “which is part of our religion and history that we could not afford to abandon.”
The sultan urged the people to make good use of the education centre by taking full ownership of the edifice, adding that it is a rare opportunity to have such a centre of education and civilisation in one’s domain.
According to the governor, since Islam’s advent, Gombe has been a city with a long history of qur’anic education; where students from within and outside Nigeria troop to acquire Qur’anic and Islamic education, the process that produced hundreds of thousands of qur’anic and Islamic scholars.
To redeem and uphold this good history and modernize the whole system, he said his administration deemed it fit to intervene in tsangaya schools to provide a more befitting environment for the tsangaya students and scholars.
He said when he came to power in May 2019, UNICEF statistics showed that Gombe had about 550,000 out-of-school children.
He said his government cooperated with National Board for Arabic and Islamic Education, NBAIS, to train qur’anic teachers and facilitate proper certification for the tsangaya students.
The Commissioner for Education, Dr Aishatu Umar Maigari, said the mega tsangaya school is part of the governor’s education policy to provide education for all indigenes of Gombe.
She said the government mapped and profiled 1,500 tsangaya schools and girl-child centres across the state.
“We provided intervention in 676 centres which include 385 tsangayas and 291 girl child centres. We moped up 230,740 out-of-school children, out of which about 76,000 are tsangaya pupils, with 33,203 of them, girls. 1,460 NCE teachers and 89 monitoring officers were also engaged,” she disclosed.
The BESDA coordinator commended the governor for supporting the BESDA programme.
The head of the Tsangaya school thanked the governor for transforming the historic tsangaya into a modern centre.
During a town hall meeting at the Government House, the representative of the Universal Basic Education Board and BESDA national implementation adviser, Dr Danjuma Adamu Dabo, described achievements recorded in Gombe in education as exemplary, calling on other states to emulate the good policies and programmes of Inuwa-led administration.
He said that considering the effort put into building the tsangaya school in Gombe State, UBEC pledged to provide computers, solar power facilities, skill acquisition facilities and other e-learning infrastructures to the centre to complement the state government’s efforts in sustaining the centre.
Prof Muhd Shafi’u Abdullahi, Registrar of the National Board for Arabic and Islamic Education (NBAIS), said the board would dedicate 20 trained personnel for the new tsangaya school to train teachers and other related services in the state.
