Godwin Obaseki, governor of Edo state, says the federal government should use basic education to end banditry in the country.
Speaking at a meeting with Adamu Adamu, education minister, on Wednesday in Edo, Obaseki said many uneducated Nigerians are taking risks to leave the country to do menial jobs abroad.
“First, if we do not focus on basic education and restore quality into our basic educational system, what we are having today as banditry will be a joke in another 10 to 20 years time,” the governor said.
“What was the Edo miracle? The first was to tell ourselves the truth that the structure of SUBEB we met was not working. So, I had to post out everybody we met and recruited fresh ones into the system. We focused on training our teachers as part of our reforms in transforming our education.
“For us in Edo, we had no choice, because you find children leaving secondary schools, either working as barbers or something else. Some even sell whatever they have because someone has promised them a job in Europe or travel to Libya.
“At one point in time, we had about 30,000 young men and women from Edo in Libya, waiting to cross to Europe. If they had education and could think, read and write, they would ask more questions before deciding to embark on such a risk.
“For us, that was a wake-up call. For my brothers in the north-east and north-west, with the rising wave of banditry, I think the wakeup call is to bring these children back to school and get them to learn.”
The governor said with the growing number of out-of-school children in the country, the federal government should scrap the Universal Basic Education (UBEC) if it is no longer effective.
“We have 50 million or so children under our care and over 10 million of them are not in school,” he said.
“What is our reason for existing if we have this kind of problem? So, for me, Mr. President, if UBEC and SUBEB cannot get 50 percent of these school children back to school in the next two to three years, disband them as there is no basis for it.”
