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The educational
backwardness of Kano State is a cause for concern as the state could
not develop without a well trained citizenry, member of the House of
Representatives, Farouk Lawan has said.

Mr Lawan, who is
chairman of the House committee on education, and a governorship
aspirant on the platgform of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), said
it is shameful that Kano state is far behind all the states of the
federation in the area of education; and referred to the recent
assessment of states performance on education carried out by the
Universal Basic Education Commission which indicated that the state
performed poorly.

Adamawa State
emerged the 2008 overall winner, and won N900m out of the N3.9billion
earmarked for the 2007 and 2008 Universal Basic Education good
performance grants. In the 2008 category, Katsina State came second;
Jigawa State, third; Bauchi State, fourth; Federal Capital Territory
(FCT), fifth; and Kogi state, sixth with a cash reward of N450m, N350m,
N250m and N150m respectively.

Mr Lawan said the
poor score should be blamed on poor leadership in the state since 2003
when the All Nigeria Peoples’ Party (ANPP) government, headed by
Governor Ibrahim Shekarau assumed the helm of affairs of the state. The
lawmaker spoke shortly after he formally informed the leadership of the
state PDP of his intention to contest the governorship seat in 2011.

“This is a very big
problem, in a society where majority are not educated,” he said. “What
baffles me is that the government of the day is not doing anything on
education. What did they do with the whole money they have been
collecting in the last seven years? This should be a lesson for us so
that we can elect people who have value for education.”

Mr. Lawan, who was
a former registrar of the Kano State Polytechnic, assured that a
PDP-led administration would wake up to its responsibility of providing
quality education to the people of state.

Be fair to all aspirants

He also pointed at
the prevalence of drug abuse among the youth in Kano as another
indictment of the ANPP-led administration, and added that the existence
of both problems indicates that the state government was not proactive
in youth development in the state. “Kano is at a risk of remaining a
laughing stock in the comity of progressive states in the country,” he
said.

Promising to tackle
these problems if elected in the 2011 polls, Mr Lawan pledged to revive
the lost glory of Kano as the leading commercial centre in the country.

“This can be
achieved through the provision of basic infrastructure like power,
security, agricultural incentives to farmers and employment
opportunities to the teeming population of the unemployed in the
state,” he said.

He urged the Farouk Iya-led leadership of the state executive of the
party to be fair and just to all aspirants in the primaries, and
enjoined supporters of the party to close ranks to ensure the defeat of
the ANPP in the 2011 polls.