Tudun-Wada community in Kaduna state has launched an initiative to educate all children in the community to stop breeding army of uneducated and idle youths, who constitute potential security threats to the society.
The community, in Kaduna South local government area, also urged every other community across the Northern states, to replicate such initiative as a way of addressing the banditry and insurgency ravaging the region, noting that, there cannot be peace if the communities failed to educate their children.
Addressing the launching and fund raising for the project tagged, “Kafin Zage-Zagi Community Development Initiative”, in Kaduna on Saturday, the Coordinator and Kaduna state Commissioner for Environment and Natural Resources, Alhaji Ibrahim Hussaini, said it will take 30 years of actions to end the insecurity ravaging the North.
He stressed the need for proper education of the Almajiri children to prevent them from growing up to become burden to their communities and the larger society.
Hussaini added that strategies have been mapped out under the Initiative to collect development levies from every household in the community to train the children of the less privileged by educating them and giving them vocational skills training.
The coordinator stated further that wealthy individuals have been identified to train those who stand out among the less privileged children in professional courses like medicine, nursing, engineering and others.
He said the Initiative is in partnership with Kaduna Polytechnic to give technical training to the children under the Project.
A member Federal House of Representatives representing Kaduna South, Mukhtar Ahmed Monrovia, in his remarks, called on Northern Nigeria communities to replicate ‘Kafin Zage-Zagi Community Development Initiative’, in their communities.
“The essence of this initiative is to launch a community development with the sole aim of tackling education, security and skill acquisition.
“We have established a foundation which is now ready to execute what we have planned in the last two years. In the past, we needed no policeman in the communities because we were our brothers keepers, and we use to help ourselves at community level. But, presently communities have abandoned these ideals, that is why communities are today ravaged by insecurity because that sense of community has been lost.
“This Initiative has gone from house to house to identify the challenges and tackle them from the community. I call on communities across Northern Nigeria to replicate Initiative like this, because we can only fix our society from the household and community levels. If we build the culture of respect and other good values from the homes, it will extend to the community and the bigger society, our society will be safe for everyone to live in.
“If at the community level, we educate our children, give them skills, the issue of insecurity would have been addressed to a great extent, without education and means of livelihood, the youth will be totally blind and idle and they will disturb the peace of the society,” he said.
Also speaking, AIG Ahmed Ilyasu (rtd), said the insecurity ravaging the country required such initiatives.
He called for synergy between security agencies; technical and intelligence driven operations to end insurgency and banditry across the country.