Following the alledged gruesome murder of a five-year-old Hanifa Abubakar of Noble Kids Academy in Kano, Abdulmalik Tanko, the proprietor of the school, the Kano state government has outrightly revoked the licences of all private schools operating in the state.
Announcing the decision to revoke the licences with immediate effect at a press conference in Kano, the state commissioner for education Alhaji Sanusi Saidu Kiru said effecting the measure has become necessary as a result of the disturbing cases of rape among school children by some proprietors who often threw caution to the wind in committing the dastardly act.
He said, “We are really disturbed by persistent cases of rape among school children. We have recently been furnished by a report that a proprietor of a private school was caught raping a minor, and made a self confession to the effect that he had committed the offence. This time around, Hanifa’s incident came to the fore. No responsible government would continue to pay lip service to this heinous acts.
“We are going to take a punitive action against any proprietor of a private school who became enmeshed in this despicable act. Government has outrightly taken the decision to revoke the licences of all the private schools operating in the state for sanity to prevail. We are going to establish a high powered committee to thoroughly screen all the private schools we have in the state. We can only give another chance to those we have found to be clean and meet the standard required.
“With this development, we do not mean that all the private schools in operation should close shops. What we mean here is that we would not continue to allow some questionable proprietors of private schools to hold us to ransome. What we have done is meant to instill confidence in the minds of parents that there must be a safety net put in place for their children.
“We are telling owners of all private schools that there is the compelling need for them to revalidate their licences for their future operations to be feasible and in line with the procedures and laws governing their conduct. If the committee we are going to establish recommend that it has cleared a certain private school of any blemish, government would allow such a school to resume its operations.”
