Gov. Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State says his administration is providing quality education to prepare better future for the young generation and also tackle insecurity in the state.
Tambuwal, who was speaking with newsmen with a team on inspection of “Legacy projects’’, in Sokoto said on assumption of office his government identified education, agriculture and health as key sector that needed priority.
He said that his administration deliberately set up a committee to change the Sokoto State narratives in education, which was considered to be one of the backward states in Western education.
Tambuwal said that as governor, he was not only interested in providing many schools, but quality education, to prepare better future for the children in the state.
“For example, the bandits that we have in North West, the insurgents in the North East, when you check it out, these are young people who are not educated either in the Western education sense or even a religious sense.
“So, education is key to addressing all of those challenges of insecurity or poverty and raising the standard of living of the people, educate them and let them go and find something to do.’’
Tambuwal said that through some interventions including payment of N5, 000 conditional cash transfer to a mother that allowed daughter to enroll in school, his administration had improved girl child education in Sokoto.
“We have also been very deliberate by creating an agency mandated to take charge of girl child education.
“This is in addition to the law we passed for compulsory education, of which we are the first of its kind in Nigeria.
“We decided to be deliberate in seeing how best we can now change the narrative positively and reduce the number of out of school children,’’ he said.
Tambuwal said that while some state governors in the north were banning Almajiri due to misconception about the system, Sokoto state under his watch reformed it to promote education in the state.
He said Almajiri was not the children roaming the street but a system of education itself, and not the way it had been implemented.
“We said there are countries that are largely Islamic in terms of population and practices. One of them is Indonesia not even Saudi Arabia.
“I personally led a delegation to Indonesia, we understudied their system of Islamic education and that is what we are using now to reposition the Almajiri system of education.
“Almajiri is not something that you just throw away because it’s being practiced for hundreds of years.
“You cannot just say one day, you are now going to disruptively cancel it or ban it without providing an alternative and that is what we are doing in Sokoto.’’
In the health, Tambuwal said his administration had not only reformed the sector, but turning the state into a health tourism centre.
He said that under his watch all the local governments in the state now had functional general hospitals, while free drugs were being provided for mothers and children.
“We provide free malaria drugs in the state and we set up a Malaria Agency, the first of its kind mandated to take care of issues about malaria campaigns and all of that, and even supplying drugs free to our students.’’
Tambuwal said that his administration was also upgrading primary health centre facilities to general hospitals in four big settlements that were not local government headquarters but with large population.
On tertiary medical institutions, Tambuwal said that his administration came up with the idea of establishing premier hospital, slightly higher than general hospital, but not up to a teaching hospital.
“We said, let us have three of them, one in each of the senatorial districts, with 150 bed capacities and the apex should be the State University Teaching Hospital.’’
Tambuwal said his administration also came up with the concept of telemedicine, where the three premier hospitals were connected with the state teaching hospital.
He said that the telemedicine had help doctors in the teaching hospital to quickly attend to patients on referrer from any of the premier hospitals to the state hospitals, irrespective of his or her medical condition.
Tambuwal said that the aim was to address the gaps in facilities and shortages in human capital development in terms of medical personnel in the state.
“So, if you have your own teaching hospital, you have schools of nursing, health technology; they will all be training and retraining your medical workers and medical force.
“The third one is to address the issue of medical tourism and that’s why we partly also came up with the idea of Sokoto State Advanced Diagnostics Centre, which is second to none around in the whole of North Western States.
He described the centre which is now in use as one-stop-shop centre where every test is being carried out in one place.
“The whole idea is that we can attract medical tourism. Nigeria is losing billions of dollars to the outside world because of medical tourism.’’(NAN)
