Three million Almajiris roam Kano streets – Ganduje

The Governor of Kano State, Abdullahi Ganduje, on Thursday observed that there are about three million Almajiri children roaming the streets in the state.

The Governor stressed the need for the seven states of the North West to identify the economic advantages they can use to move the region forward and tackle their common social problems.

He said: “These seven states, should try, identify the economic advantages that we can lay our hands on as to move this region forward. And what are the social problems that we are having? In Kano, we undertook a survey and we found out that we have more than three million Almajiris and Almajiri syndrome is one of the serious problems that we have in the north-west geopolitical zone.

“What we discovered from our survey is that many of these Almajiris come from the Niger Republic, some from Chad, Northern Cameroon and some from other states of the north-west.

“So, if we can come together 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.

“I thank the governor of Kaduna state for creating this kind of environment for us to come together, as especially for us to discuss the economic integration of the north-west zone.

“This is the first time, since the inception of this democracy in 1999, where the seven governors (of the north-west zone) decided to come together to form a forum. We even went to the extent of employing a consultant who is giving us the green light on various issues on economic development.

“First of all, let me start with the position of the North-west in Nigeria. We are the most populous geopolitical zone, constituting 25 percent of the population of Nigeria. With regards to land mass, we have 23 percent of the land mass in Nigeria. What we require now is the political will to come together and be fully integrated – socio-economic integration beyond paper integration, an integration that will bring development in terms of institutions and in terms of programmes that will improve the quality of lives of our people.

“It will be very important to have an integration commission which looks into the development capacity of our institutions, because whatever we want to do, if our institutions are not developed, then whatever we do may not be actualised. Also, it is very important to have data so that we know our point of strength so that we know the comparative advantages we have. So if we can get a data bank, it will assist us to quicken the process of the integration.

“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 specialise 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”, Governor Ganduje said.