Sultan To Northern Governors: No Education, No Development


The newly installed chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III yesterday charged the northern states’ governors to wake up to the responsibility of improving the education sector in the region, saying that no country can ever develop without heavy investment in education.

In a speech shortly after his investiture as the chancellor of ABU, the Sultan who specifically picked on the 19 northern governors said; “Our state governments, especially here in the north, must begin to realize the enormity of the challenges facing the education sector and take the urgent and necessary steps to arrest these challenges.”

He added, “We must as a people acknowledge the basic fact that the reform of the tertiary education sector cannot be effective and complete without putting in place the progressive developments required in the basic and senior secondary education sectors.

“It is our believe that with the required political will, planning and determination, we can and will succeed. There is no better investment than building the human capital of our societies and developing the capacity of our people. No country can ever develop without a heavy investment in education.”

The Sultan further stated that there is the need to raise the imperative of character building and leadership development in the institutions of higher learning, “Our institutions of higher learning must integrate into their curricula the issue of character building and leadership development.” He said. “We take our pristine values of honesty, hard work, accountability, contentment, equity, tolerance and accommodation very seriously and the higher education sector must ensure that it provides the enabling environment for our future leaders to imbibe these values and live by them.

“Our tertiary institution graduates are indeed the greatest assets. We develop them to manage our diplomacy and international relations and expect to hand over to them the full control of our affairs and the destiny of our society”

According to him, there is the imperative of addressing adequately and urgently the challenges of quality of tuition and research in our university system, even as he lamented that many laboratories and equipment have been neglected for so long that many have become obsolete.

In this circumstance, he said “teachers of science will inadvertently end up in teaching only the history of science. How could we produce the next generation of scientists, engineers and other professional cadres when we don’t provide adequate facilities to train them?”

“We cannot provide viable solutions to emerging problems within our society without generational knowledge that could help them address it, the royal further said.

“We cannot therefore, by any stretch of imagination, remain indifference to how this vital component of our human capital is prepared to take over the reigns of leadership of the nation.

“And it is for this very reason that we can ill-afford our institutions of higher learning becoming a hostile moral environment for the proper development of the younger generation.

http://leadership.ng/nga/articles/8874/2011/11/24/sultan_northern_governors_no_education_no_development.html

Boko harams are listening ooh !

hope some BH will not come and detonate a bomb in your palace ooh

North central isn't do that much worse than the south, to be quite honest. At least from the data I've seen.

So not sure it makes sense to lump all 19 northern states together.

^^^

That is because Kano has been the commercial capital of the North for centuries.