Looking at a Tsangaya school in Jigawa, 5 years after
The integration of Tsangaya Islamic education into the western system of education has helped in sending hundreds of Almajiris off the streets of Jigawa State, but an investigation by Daily Trust Saturday shows that the inability on the part of the govern
employed on grade level six, while on the other hand the cooks in the schools are on temporary employment and receiving N5,000 remuneration per month.
The schools are, by design, supposed to have classrooms, clinics, Qur’anic recitation halls, language laboratories, as well as entrepreneurship and ICT centers.
However, found out that the hostel accommodation for the pupils in Gantsa model two boarding school is insufficient, as some pupils sleep on bare floors, without mattress. Also, one of the two motorized boreholes which has been the water source for the school has since broken down, and the school cannot run the functional one on diesel because the school is not connected to electricity. A school source said if not for the alternative manual hand pump borehole, the story of water shortage in the school would been a more pathetic one.
The equipment in the entrepreneurship section of the school, which includes the ICT, tailoring and carpentry centers, have been lying fallow, as since inception they have remained under lock and key. It was also discovered that three years after the establishment of the school, most of the basic daily needs enjoyed by the pupils, like laundry soap, toilet soap and uniforms, are gradually being withdrawn.
The Director Special Programmes, Jigawa State Universal Basic Education Board, Garba Ubandi, told Saturday that there are about 700 Almajiris across the seven Tsangaya Islamic schools in the state. He added that part of the conditions for admitting an Almajiri in the school is the ability to recite from his slate at the time of certification.
Ubandi also said: “The curriculum of the model schools that covers class one to three was specifically designed by Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), but classes four to six use the conventional syllabus. In the past, the State Universal Basic Education Board uses part of its overhead cost to supply the pupils of the schools with toiletries, laundry soap, detergent and others. But now, due to poor funding, some of these have been stopped.”
Ubandi said the Almajiris attend tailoring, carpentry and ICT schools. “Model schools don’t have laboratories. The clinics are not functioning because they yet to start getting supply of drugs, so the pupils attend public hospitals like any other school-going child in the state. Plans are underway to expand these schools in order to give room for more of these Almajiris into the system.”
Tsangaya schools have been hailed as feasible ways of combining western and Qur’anic education, while eliminating the Almajiri system which has come under fire recently because of its far-less-thanwholesome methods which see students/ wards endangered in many ways.