The Gombe State Government has repatriated 700 almajiris to their various states on Monday.
This followed an agreement by the governors of the 19 northern states.
The Commissioner for Education, Dr Habu Dahiru, who spoke to journalists at the Emir of Gombe palace, said the decision of Gombe State to take the almajiris back to their respective states was to allow for their proper management.
Dahiru said the state had the support of mallams before it commenced the exercise.
“We have closed schools and we now said based on the agreement of 19 governors forum that each and every almajiri should be returned to his home state for better management. The governor has approved the movement of these almajiris back to their various states in the 19 northern states. These buses are carrying 700 almajiris identified to be from Bauchi, Borno, Sokoto, Kebbi, Katsina, Zamfara, Kano and so on.
“This will be continuous, you noticed that we didn’t want to crowd them in one vehicle, we have 65 Gombe Line vehicles. We didn’t just send them arbitrarily like that; we wrote letters with the manifest of each student, we have their names. Once we get to each state, we will hand them over to the school base programme under the Better Education Service Delivery for All. So we are taking them in batches and handing them to the government of the affected states, with a letter and security detail accompanying them.”
Meanwhile the Coordinator of Better Education Service Delivery for All, Mallam Bappah Garkuwa, has said that over 1,000 almajiri’s have returned from other states to Gombe State.
He stated, “We have over a thousand returned to Gombe from other states. We had to do medical profiling of the almajiris that are going out and we clustered the tsanya schools and notified the states to know how many are coming back.
