EDITORIAL
Many may not understand the value to attach to education, and this may be as a result of circumstances of their upbringing and political behavior of their immediate living environment.
For us, the highest investment a politician like an elected senator can do is to provide a platform for educational reforms of his people without recourse to who and who does not belong to his political assembly.
The move by Senator Ikira Aliyu Bilbis to sponsor and facilitate a ground for the setting up of an additional Federal University in Zamfara is without recourse to any superior argument a commendable one.
Looking at the statistics of educationally disadvantaged states in Nigeria, one needs not to be told that Zamfara people required every slightest opportunity related to education.
As at the year 2020, Zamfara has an unsettled debt of over N3.5 billion naira for both WAEC and NEC and that resulted in NECO/WAEC not releasing the result of thousands of qualified Zamfara indigents who are supposed to access advance education in University and other colleges in Nigeria.
Zamfara also has the highest statistics of underqualified primary and secondary school teachers, and that under-qualification has virtually affected the expected performance of the pupils in passing both WAEC and NECO.
In 2019 for instance, only 22.22% of the students from Zamfara who wrote WAEC passed it with an average of five credits in English and Mathematics.
In 2020 also, only 44.05% has same score of five credits while in 2021 the % decreases to as low as 9.15%.
The poor performance of Zamfara in the area of education has a direct consequential effect with increased poverty status of the state since educated people always dribbled their way to get jobs and other multiplier opportunities that are capable of transforming the society while the opposite is the case.
According to data from Statista 73.98 percent of the Zamfara state’s population were considered poor while the national average was 40.1 percent.
Zamfara state had significant higher percentage of poor people than Sokoto, Taraba, Jigawa, Ebonyi and Adamawa states.
When one added the implications of banditry and other social insecurity to the development of the state, it is evidently clear that the state will eventually sink if the right steps like the one taken by Senator Ikira Bilbis are not instituted in terms of educating the people.
Banditry has resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly innocent ones even as thousands of others were displaced with little or not compensation for living.
2/3 of the schools in the rural areas are either shutdown due to constant threat by armed bandits or as a result of its reallocation for military and police to be user as their base.
This negative development caused by armed banditry has no doubt cause serious setback in terms boosting the figures of out of school children and that has sharply increases the high rate of illiteracy in Zamfara State.
The steps taken by Sen. Ikira Aliyu Bilbis is no doubt a good one even for the simple facts that appropriate shift will be achieved in terms of reducing illiteracy rates as well as reducing unemployment problems among the people of the state.
University of Health Science is most especially important because Zamfara has the lowest statistics of nearly 1/13,667 Doctor/Citizens ratio when the World Health Organization has officially recommends 1/600 Doctor/Patient ratio.
Our secondary health facilities, especially those in the rural areas on the other hand have the lowest in terms of availability of human resource and manpower compared to their population density which exceeds 2/3 of the six million population.
In fact, even with the availability of both public and private health facilities which are averagely less than 1000 inclusive of primary and secondary the state is rated lowest in terms of every health sector indicator.
As medium, we are fully supporting the idea of establishing a Federal University of Health Science in Zamfara because the state needed it most.
The state Governor Dauda Lawal shall do everything humanly possible to support the Senator in making sure that the bill has scale through the Senate and for Mr. President to assent to it.
This will be a legacy that will accompany the Senator until eternity and every life rescued through this initiative, Senator Bilbis will have the reward accompanying him even after his exit from this World
