By Abdullahi Yusuf
Kano State Commissioner of Education,Alhaji Ali Haruna Makoda, says abject poverty is adversely affecting the contribution of parents to the educational development of the state.
Because of the ravaging poverty among the parents, Makoda said, the parents find it difficult to contribute meaningfully to the government’s efforts to develop education in the state.
Such expected contributions, he said, include donation of instructional materials to the schools to enhance the education of their children.
He made the remark while interacting with Journalists in his office on Tuesday.
The commissioner said the situation is so bad that some parents in one of the local government areas of the state were caught selling the uniforms of their children provided by the State government.
“Can you imagine parents selling the uniform of their children provided by the State Government, in order to eat, ” the commissioner said.
He said the uniforms were part of the more than 800,000 uniforms distributed to primary schools in the state, under the state government’s State of Emergency declared on the education sector.
He said although the country’s economy is not in good shape, it had not reached level that the parents should be selling some materials meant for the education of their children.
Makoda also lamented that many of the parents had withdrawn their children from school and drafted them to the farm.
This, he said, had significantly contributed to the high number of out-of-school children roaming the streets of the state capital.
He, however,said that the government had stepped up its efforts to address the “deep-rooted” decay in the state’s education sector.
Makoda said the Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf administration inherited a “failed and decayed education system,” prompting it to take tangible steps to improve infrastructure, personnel quality and access to education.
Such steps,he said, include a significant increase in the budgetary allocation to the education sector from 29.75 percent in the 2024 financial year to 31.5 percent in 2025 fiscal year.
He said this testified to the administration’s renewed commitment to revitalizing primary and secondary education across the state.