In Borno State, secondary school students can’t read and Governor Zulum is concerned

The pathetic state of education in insurgency-ravaged Borno State manifested in Malam-Fatori, Abadam Local Government Area of the state, where the state Governor, Prof. Babagana Zulum, discovered that majority of the students of a junior secondary school could not read.

Zulum, who was, last Thursday, at Malam-Fatori, the headquarters of Abadam Local Government Area, located along the shores of Lake Chad in the northern part of the state, paid a surprise visit to the town’s Central Primary School and carried out an aptitude test on about 100 students at the Junior Secondary School section of the school.

At the end of the test, the governor found out that 95 per cent of the students admitted could not read. Only seven of the entire students said they could read.

He then asked each of the seven students to read from a text book and to pronounce the phrase: “Social Studies”.

Five of the seven students pronounced it correctly while two failed.

The governor was deeply worried about the quality of teaching at the school, especially after he found out that of the 224 teachers on the payroll of schools in the LGA, only six were present during his visit, and none of them possessed the requisite teaching qualification.

Zulum’s findings confirmed a report presented to him in February 2022, which assessed quality of primary school teachers across the 27 local government areas of Borno State.