The governor of Kano State, Alhaji Abdullahi Umar Ganduje has declared almajiri’s syndrome as a serious problem affecting the Nigeria’s North West geopolitical zone.
The governor who made the disclosure on Thursday in Kaduna during the Kaduna Investment submit said, “In Kano, we undertook a survey and we found out that we have more than three million Almajiris.”
“What we discovered from our survey is that many of these Almajiris come from Niger Republic, some from Chad, Northern Cameroon and some from other states of the North West.
“So if we can come together as governors and have a common synergy to introduce a common legislation, preventing the movement of school age children from one place to another, I think the states will find it very easy to address the problem of Almajiri syndrome.
“Another issue is that we are individually conducting our educational programmes, if we come together to see how we can have different programmes in our university curriculum, it will help us specialised and we can even build universities that will specialised in the various programmes, thereby saving energy and resources for the development of our region.
“The potentials of the north west are very obvious.The north west has the highest water density in the whole of west Africa . The amount of water is such that they can feed the whole of West Africa and this is something that needs to be tapped”, he said.
According to him, governors in northern Nigeria requires the political will to come together and be fully integrated, adding “socio economic integration beyond paper integration, integration that will bring development in terms of institutions and in terms of programmes that will improve the quality of lives of our people is what is required.”
