Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara, has harped on the need to deal with illiteracy for Nigeria to achieve progress.
Dogara made the call while commissioning blocks of Class Rooms, named after him in Duka Wuya Special Primary school, Gwale Local Government Area, Kano State.
While commending the Member representing Gwale Federal constituency, Hon. Garba Mohammed Ibrahim for facilitating the project, the speaker noted that education remains the bedrock of any meaningful progress and development.
“I want to thank you for embarking on this project which has to do with the education of our young ones. If we must make progress, we will have to deal with the problem of illiteracy. Of recent that has been the debate in Nigeria, we all know where we are as a people in terms of education and we pray that we will be able to catch up with the rest of the country in terms of the delivery of quality education to our citizens, but this is the starting point”, the Speaker stated.
Dogara further noted that except children are educated from a tender age, it will be very difficult to educate or train them after they have grown up, and therefore emphasized on the need for proper training and upbringing of children as future leaders.
According to him, “as it is said; a child that is not trained cannot be traced, once you fail to train your child, he cannot be traced. So if our younger generation is to be traced in the future, we would have to educate them. I want to thank you for focusing on education, that is one of the cheapest things that we will do in order to bring success to our region”.
The Speaker also stressed the need to focus attention on health, saying, “the next thing is health, the health and education of the people, once we sort these out it will establish that even in the practice of religion, they will perform better if they are healthy. And in terms of managing our resources; people will do well if they are educated, farmers. That’s one of the areas that we have to go through in this region, so we want to thank you for bringing us here and this is the kind of project that we would love to be identified within this Eighth Assembly in the House of Representatives. So if you have more programs, more projects to do with education, healthcare or agriculture; anytime, any day invite us, we will come here and celebrate it with you”.