You may call it teacher’s inhumanity to students and you won’t be wrong.
The sight was both pathetic and annoying.
For long, students of Hafsat Ahmadu Bello Memorial Secondary School,
Sokoto, have had to endure learning in the most uncomfortable way.
Only a few classes in the school have enough seats to accommodate them. For
long, they have to put up with taking lectures while seated on bare floor.
Most use prayer mats to protect their whote tops from the floor’s dust,
while other come to classes with extra wrappers to spray on floor as they
sit.
While they have to put up with the most uncomfortable situation to take
lectures daily, a few blocks away, 200 sets of classroom furniture were
locked away, unattended to, and left to rot away.
But their suffering came to an end last week when the committee set up by
Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal to implement the state of emergency declared
in education visited the school.
The visit was facilitated by the need to individually assess problems of
various schools and make recommendations to government on how best to
address them.
“Upon visiting the Hafsat Ahmadu Bello Memorial Secondary School, Sokoto,
students were seen taking lectures while sitting on the floor. To our
amazement, a few blocks away, 200 new classroom furniture were locked away
unattended to. We immediately ordered that the furniture be arranged in the
classes in need, and the school management was admonished to always
prioritise the need of the students at all times,” said Dr. Shadi Sabeh,
who led members of the School Needs Assessment sub-committee during the
visit.
“So while the government has provided facilities, the school management
will decide not to utilize them. The school managers must key into the new
vision for better schools or all our efforts will be in vain,” he added.
The joy of the kids could not be contained as they took the lead in
arranging the chairs in their classes by themselves.
