Governor Umar Ganduje of Kano State is unarguably one of the most schooled of the current set of governors. With such academic laurels as a National Certificate of Education, NCE, a bachelors degree, two Masters degrees and a doctorate obtained from universities in Zaria, Kano and Ibadan; it is not surprising that he has taken education as one of the priorities of his administration.
He was also schooled in the art of political steadfastness with having understudied his predecessor, Senator Rabiu Kwankwanso for close to sixteen years as deputy governor and as his poitical adviser when the latter served as minister of defence. Ganduje had vied with Kwankwanso for the governorship ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP in 1998. Kwankwanso who won, however, picked Ganduje to balance the ticket and thus commenced their political collaboration that culminated in his 8 year stint as deputy governor of Kano State.
On the sidelines of activities and celebration of the successes achieved by the administration in the education sector, the governor spoke in an interview on his alleged beef with Kwankwanso, President Muhammadu Buhari’s health status and on his administration’s inclination to education.
Excerpts: Ganduje Some APC stakeholders have expressed concern over the political differences between you and your predecessor and that they are interested in reconciling the two of you. Would you make yourself available for peace talk?
Yes, because I cannot have any other political associate for the rest of my life like him. Similarly, he too cannot have another political associate like me, for the rest of his life.
President Muhammadu Buhari’s medical vacation has attracted diverse interests and reactions from several quarters, even including claims that the governors recently took a position on the issue of the presidency. Sir, in all honesty what is the situation of things and have you spoken to the president since he travelled?
What position could the governors have taken (on President Buhari) because I was not there when that issue was discussed. I was not there, so I don’t know the position. I don’t know because I wasn’t there and I have not heard about it. The northern governors met in Kaduna and that was solely on security issues pertaining to the region. But we pray for the president to be back home safely. His sickness was not an agenda and could not also be an agenda . You see, the issue is, I know Nigeria is a big country with multi-religious, multi ethnic, multi everything you can think about, so it is easy to politicise issues that are not supposed to be politicised.
What we believe is that everybody can get sick. So you want us to start calling him while he is sick? He needs some rest. So what is the essence? If he is to talk with every governor, so why is he there to get treatment and rest? So that is that, because people seize the opportunity to talk rubbish and some is just wishful thinking. Some are not wishing him well, so they are not expressing their mind that he is sick, but saying that he is this, he is that. And he wrote formally to the Senate that he would go for a vacation and medical treatment and the vacation was extended, so what kind of information are we looking for again more than that?
Why are you celebrating? Let me start with the challenge first. First of all as I have been saying, if you have a large population, then you have problems both in education and health, even with the provision of infrastructural facilities. But education is the first victim when the population is large because you have to provide for every child, and it has to be sustained.
So, in basic education, what we observed is that government cannot do it alone, therefore, there is one segment that is being neglected, that is community participation in education. If you look within the highest number of government schools. This is because apart from the population, not many people are interested in investing in education, that is why we have the value like that. Education is so voluminous. Sometimes you become confused on where to start.
But I think if you want to start building, you have to start with a foundation, that is why we are putting emphasis on basic education, to ensure that we get it right, to have as many pupils as possible in schools to reduce the ones outside the school, and to also invite married people, some organisations that could undertake corporate social responsibility to ensure that this concept is embraced by the members of the public and I think we are succeeding.
We have the Education Trust Fund which we want to launch and we want people to get to embrace it. So that is what we are devoting a whole week to basic education, to discuss with stakeholders. Even though the people are many, but as I told you, we will pick the teachers because they are the nucleus of progress as far as education is concerned. If their minds are not at rest, they will be teaching absent-mindedly, you know what I mean.
We will start with them to make sure that they are professionally educated and can deliver according to the ethics of the profession. Time has gone where everybody that is looking for a job would say ‘if I can get even a teaching job I wouldn’t mind,’ but we mind.
We are not looking for everybody to teach, we are looking for those that are qualified to teach. If majority of what we have are unqualified, we have no reason not to allow those that are also unqualified to come and join them. But if gradually we sanitise the system where majority of the teachers are qualified, those who are knocking at the door would be discouraged, because they would know that is not their place.
So that is why we are giving them the opportunity to do on-the-job training and we give them their salaries as a motivation to go on, and they would be upgraded accordingly.
In this concept, talking about the commissioning of class rooms as we have seen today, what is their number? Well, they are in thousands, I don’t know their exact number but I think they are up to 2,000. They are two types; some are completely new classrooms.
We introduced a new design with two upstairs because of the population and lack of space. We introduced two during the last administration, the ground floor and the first floor, but this time around we had to go higher. And some were provided by some private concerns through the education promotion committee. They built new classrooms too.
Some were renovated by government while some others were renovated by private concerns. So, we have continued irrespective of challenges like congestion of classrooms. For example, we have paid N1 billion as counterpart funding to the Federal government. So we are expecting the FG to give its own 1 billion, that will make it N2 billion. And then when we get this N2 billion we shall see how we can tackle the problem of congestion.
We shall decongest the classrooms and provide furniture.
Source – Vanguardng