The report of four northern states of Kano, Kebbi, Bauchi and Katsina closing schools because of Ramadan is nothing but a dangerous intersection between religion and education. No saner society goes that way, not even in medieval era has that happened.
The reason the Taliban government in Afghanistan has attracted so much global opprobrium and ostracism is on account of its anti-intellectual position and its preference for obscurantism.
It’s obviously clear that mixing politics with religion and for a dangerous effect adding education into the mix is not voters’ preference in the four states when other matters such as figuring hunger, unemployment, improving social services, deepening education and general well being are yearning for attention.
No serious society toys with education, and with the current development it would seem these states are saying education is a Haram.
This development has become worse in the face of grim statistics concerning the region said to have above 44% out-of-school kids, which is slightly above national average.
No wonder the states in question—Katsina, Kebbi, Kano, and Bauchi—reportedly have significantly higher rates of children deprived of school attendance compared to the national average.
According to the NBS’s Multidimensional Poverty Index, Bauchi State has the highest percentage of children lacking access to education, with a figure of 54%.
Kano State follows with 35%, Katsina at 38%, and Kebbi at 45%. On the average, these four states have 44% of children deprived of education, which is10 percentage points higher than the national average of 34%.
Even in Saudi Arabia, the heartland of religious conservatism education is highly valued, and there has never been a report of closure of schools for the duration of the Ramadan. The point is that such dangerous decision is a cloak under which incompetent governments in the four states hide, and it also smacks of religious hypocrisy.
Do they observe such sanctimoniousness when it comes to running the affairs of their states? The answer is no. Many of these governors who are ‘more holier’ than the people presiding over where the hallowed Islamic faith originated from will most likely be candidates for EFCC’s investigations for graft and mismanagement of public funds
The point here is that there’s a dire need for voters to make informed choices in those states where they trivialize the imperative of education over hypocrisy.
This newspaper sympathize with the people whose rights are trampled upon arbitrarily using the instrument of state power. Those who have invested in education in those states have now been denied the right to quality returns on their investment albeit temporarily.
This is tyranny by ambush using the force of state power.
