Governor Abdullahi Umaru Ganduje has enumerated efforts of his government to tackle the menace of Almajiri(beggars) in Kano State at an interactive session with newsmen in Kano.
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Ganduje, who blamed the welter of pestering beggars in Kano on neighbouring countries, and put the number of beggars in the state at three million, listed efforts of the state to reverse the ugly trend.
He said, “We undertook a survey of the Almajiri issue. We have well more than three million Almajiris in Kano State but, from our investigation, most of the Almajiris are not indigenes of Kano State. Some are from Niger, some are from Chad and some are from other states especially from the North-West and the North-East.
“We are taking two steps. One is taking an element of integration, since we don’t have enough money to provide infrastructure for them, we don’t have money to employ teachers because the out-of-school children are almost equal to those who are in classroom.
“So what we have done is to introduce some core subjects into the Almajiri schools which are Quranic schools. We introduced mathematics, English and social studies in some of the Almajiri schools. Another part is to convince our counterparts, governors of neighbouring states, to have a common law preventing the migration of school age children. We don’t have a law that prevents any child from coming into Kano. We used to have an outfit that takes any child that comes into Kano as an Almajiri to where they came from, but they will find a way of coming back. A permanent solution is for the states, especially neighbouring states, to have laws preventing the migration of school age children. That is the step we are taking.”
