The Governor of Zamfara State, Dauda Lawal, has lamented the poor state of the education sector in his state.
The governor made the remark during a visit to the Tertiary Education Trust Fund in Abuja.
In a statement released by the Fund on Saturday, Dauda was said to have solicited the help of TETFund to reposition the education sector in order to move the state forward.
“As you are all aware, Zamfara is a small state facing the challenge of insecurity, most importantly in the area of education. If you check all the statistics, you will agree with me that Zamfara is not doing too well and therefore we need to be encouraged…
“It is a known fact that without education, we will not be able to achieve anything and we will continue to be backward,” the governor said.
Governor Lawal, who recently assumed office, said he anchored his campaign on security and education, saying he was, however, challenged with the little available financial resources to address the problems.
“Bearing in mind the financial resources of the state, I have a limitation, and this is the place the help will come from, ES (Executive Secretary) I am here, Zamfara needs help. I know you are doing very well but you can do better,” the governor said.
The governor commended TETFund for its various projects across tertiary education institutions in the country.
Responding, the TETFund boss, Sonny Echono, congratulated the governor on his victory in the March 18 governorship election.
While saying that TETFund was very delighted with the governor’s passion for human capital development, Echono said Zamfara is rich in resources, and expressed the need to harness the potentials of the state for its educational development.
On the request by the governor, the Executive Secretary said TETFund had already made provision on issue of security as it affects public tertiary educational institutions.
“The number of institutions in Zamfara, the number one challenge they face over the years, especially in the last few years is the issue of insecurity. We did made some plans for most of the institutions because this year under our intervention we made provision for security infrastructure.
“We have harnessed the requests from the institution’s, in fact, we started with one of them but we have about three that we believe we will be able to do something about in the next couple of weeks and we will be able to make allocations in that regard.
“We will also make other intervention based on the approved guidelines that we already have while those that will not come this year, we will prioritise them for next disbursement cycle,” Echono said.
