By Yusuf Islam , Yobe
Education is an integral part of the development of every society, including my dear state, Yobe where education is grappling with a lot of challenges caused by a wide range of factors such as insecurity socioeconomic factors over the past two decades.
As a private school proprietor, I have enough experience to state that private schools play a vital role in the revival of education in Yobe. Given our fast-growing population with more and more parents feeling safe enough to re-enroll their kids in schools, Governor Mai Bala Buni stands a good chance to ink his name in the book of history if he works with the private schools and supports their initiative to make a dent in a high number of out of school children in Yobe.
Private schools are struggling in Yobe because, despite their massive contribution to education Yobe, the schools are doing their best to make fees affordable to parents which hamper our capacity to equip the schools with more infrastructure, invest in training teachers, and promote competition among our pupils.
Indeed, government alone cannot fund education fully in Yobe simply because the state does not have enough resources to do so owing to social and economic factors in the state, but as the body that leads the policy direction of education, deepening cooperation between private schools and the government in the area of encouraging performance among the school kids, safety of the children and harmonizing teachers’ salaries.
As the impact of private schools becomes more noticeable in Yobe, demand for private schools is soaring, and lack of investment and government support is a stumbling block when it comes to our expansion. For example, some areas in Yobe have suffered more from insurgency than others. A lot of people have been displaced, and are therefore too poor to enroll their children in private schools. Private schools would struggle to survive in these terrains. To mitigate the issue, Mai Bala Buni’s government should try as much as possible to support private schools in order to make sure education in Yobe is improving.
Private schools can help change the story because they are properly managed and supervised. I am sure Mai Bala Buni would not regret supporting private schools.
Yusuf Islam wrote from Potiskum, Yobe
