Gov. Dikko Radda of Katsina State Radda has urged that an early warning system should be used to overcome instability in the country’s education sector at all levels.
Radda made the assertion during the second pre-convocation lecture of the Federal University Gusau (FUGUS) in a paper titled ” Insecurity and Educational Instability in the Country’, which was held in Gusau on Friday.
He said that Nigeria’s national security was threatened by insecurity with significant consequences on the stability of the country’s education.
Radda said, ”The challenges can be overcome through the adoption and use of an early warning system which can identify either a transient or persistent hop.
”Insecurity has a variety of dangerous effects on schooling that were also dynamic in character.”
He added that in order to reduce school kidnappings in Nigeria, a combination of proactive and reactive measures need to be adopted simultaneously by the security agencies.
”Other factors responsible for insecurity were corruption, poverty, unemployment, ethnic and religious intolerance constituting significant impacts to Insecurity in Nigeria as a nation.
”Insecurity in Nigeria is attributable to a variety of reasons which need to be addressed to allow peace to prevail in the country.
”Nigeria’s educational institutions have been negatively impacted by insecurity recently due to the lack of manpower, low quality of education, internal learner displacement and closure of educational institutions,”Radda added.
According to him, environmental, social, financial and psychological factors had either directly or indirectly impacted on the educational institutions.
Radda, therefore, lamented that this had led to a spike in the number of out- of-school children in Nigeria and African countries.
According to the governor, UNICEF data has shown that the number of out- of-school children in Nigeria stood at 18 .3 million.
He said, ”This is an alarming figure as it positions Nigeria as the country with the highest number of out- of- school children globally.”
Radda called on the Police, DSS and other security agencies to be more proactive and act professionally in order to gather intelligence on school child abduction.
According to him, this can better be done using the models of crime-soft-spot, crime-temporary–spot and crime-chronic-spot..
Radda also itemized some solutions to the security challenges affecting educational institutions, which include sound governance.
Others are synergy among security agencies, fair distribution of nation’s resources, job creations and eradicating poverty among others.
The highlight of the event was the inauguration of the new complexes of the College of Health Sciences, School of Humanities and Management Sciences as well as the School of Sciences.(NAN)
