As Commissioner of Education, Once More
Thank you all for the well wishes, attending the swearing in ceremony and the reception that followed at ATAP this afternoon.
The second leg of my tenure as Commissioner of Education will be for consolidating our gains such that the reforms will be sustainable.
One area that I will be keen to take up is Nomadic Education. As I said at the reception, banditry and other crimes like kidnapping are related to the lack of both western and Islamic education among the Fulani, who form the majority of those culprits.
The videos are clear. Nearly all the culprits did not attend any form of school and those that are educated amongst them do not engage in these crimes. And almost all the Fulani kidnappers and bandits did not predate Nomadic Education program. If the program had given them
education, therefore, we would not have been here.
So one will not be wrong to draw a direct correlation between collapse of nomadic education and the crimes which the nomads commit, of course leaving an allowance for other socio-economic factors that have been listed time and again.
Our Nomadic Education Board for example is not funded by UBEC/SUBEB and very little comes from the state and National Commmission for Nomadic Education. The Board members visited me and wrote about these problems just before I left office about three months ago and we have finished the ground work on it. The file is there. What remains is to pursue the problems and solve them, between Bauchi, Abuja and the Forests. Let the forests roar with the sound of knowledge instead of the sound of only cows and guns.
I promise. In sha Allah.
Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde
2 September 2021
