Baga; Northern Borno Senatorial hopeful donates N2 million to IDPs

Baga; Northern Borno Senatorial hopeful donates N2 million to IDPs

By Blogger

Dispaced residents of Baga and surrounding communities in Kukawa local government area of Borno state had yesterday received a cash support of N2 million from Hon Abubakar Kyari,  the man who seeks to represent them at the senate come next month elections."

Abubakar Kyari, is the immediate former Chief of Staff to Borno state governor, Kashim Shettima.

He had on Monday taken yet another sympathy visit to Baga IDPs camp in Maiduguri where he donated the sum of N2 million as assistance for their up keep.

Kyari was accompanied by a staunch supporter and a house of Reps candidate from the zone, Mallam Bukar Gana Kareto.

Hundreds of fishermen and farmers in Baga and surrounding communities were forced to flee their homes fortnight ago after Boko Haram insurgents moved in, killing hundreds including soldiers and took over the the area. 

Since then, nearly a thousand IDPs had flocked into the state capital,  Maiduguri even as some hundredsds more have found themselves as refugees in the border communities of Cameroon.

Mr Kareto had also given out the sum N 1 million for the

Kyari, son of  Brigadier General Abba Kyari (rtd), the former Governor of the defunct North Central States,  was between 1999 and 2003 a House of Representatives member representing part of the Senatorial District he is currently vying for. 

Between 2003 and 2011 Kyari had served as cabinet member in the the immediate past administration of Senator Ali Sheriff where he survived as a recurring decimal in the administration that had little tolerance for both political and administrative incompetence.

Those close to the then government had  attested that Abu' Kyari (as he is popularly called), remained  relevant due to his "non-negotiable commitment to excellence and dedication to assigned responsibilities -  a quality that almost earned him the blessings of Ex-Governor Sheriff when he was searching for a successor in 2011.

Kyari was in 2011 appointed the Chief of Staff to Governor Shettima - an office he turned around from being  a mere transit stopover for the Governor's visitors,  into a state of the earth administrative nerve centre of Government House Maiduguri. 

Kyari, who had been nursing the ambition of representing his people at the highest legislative office in the country, had once told journalist about a fantastic approach to ending insurgency and boosting scholarship amongst the very educationally backwards region in the country. 

He never shared the views that his people are illiterate as he always insists that literacy should not be measured by the test meters of Western baccalaureate alone.

He proffered that the system of learning the western education should be reconfigured to suite the traditional learning pattern of his people.  And in doing that, the environment of the people most be factored most of all. 

"Literacy, simply put, is the ability to read and write",  said Mr Kyari. "And here in my area we have children and people who can read and write in Arabic scripts, when you ask them to write their names in Arabic, they do it without any difficultly, but they cannot read in English, neither could they write with it. Do you call such a child an illiterate? Certainly no.

"The Chinese child does not know an English word; neither does the Indian, nor the French child, yet he or she is being regarded as literate  because they could read and write in their native languages. If they are so literate because they can read and write in their own languages, then why does a Nigerian child who could also read and write in Arabic be looked down upon as an illiterate?

"The point I am trying to make here is that if these children could learn and under harsh environment; they are able to read and write and even memorise the Quran effortlessly in such harsh weather, then it means they have the inherent capacity and intelligence to acquire the Western education, if the right approach to teaching them is adopted.

"How do these children learn? It is simple; Late in the evenings they hurdle around camp fire, reading and memorising their scripts up to around 9pm, then they retire to go and sleep; early in the morning before the morning prayers, at about 4am, they would wake up to read for about one hour or two and in the morning they would be discharged to go and help their parents or guardians as the case may be.

"That concept of learning was formulated for centuries; the people had been able to understand that because of the hot nature of their environment, they would not be able to learn during the day, so they had to resort to night and early morning pattern of learning when the weather is friendlier.  What we need to do to encourage our children and people in the hot northern Borno is to reorganise the learning process to see how we could adapt with our peculiar environment and situation". 

At the IDP camp on Monday,  Kyari worried about the future of the displaced children who had  been denied access to education in the past two year. 

"We have to all pray in our patience here the camp that God should assist our government to quickly find a solution to this problem of insurgency,  which has robbed us of our collective peace,  our homes and threatening the future of our innocent children",  he said.