More than 64 million Nigerians, constituting 46 per cent of the country’s 140 million population, are illiterate and cannot contribute to socio-economic development of the country.
The Board Chairman of the National Commission for Mass, Adult and Non-formal Education (NCME), Paschal Bafyau, said this yesterday when the Senate Committee on Education visited the commission’s headquarters yesterday.
Bafyau told the lawmakers who were on oversight visit that it was necessary for government to give an accelerated impetus in its annual budget to the commission in order to eliminate the problem.
He also said the commission needs a total of 200, 000 facilitators who will reach the target of at least 150,000 illiterates in each state of the federation...
The Executive Secretary of the commission, Alhaji Jibril Yusuf Paiko, said they were financially incapacitated to effectively meet their statutory mandate of ensuring Nigerians are educated at both formal an non formal sectors.
He also said apart from Lagos and FCT, other state governments have been failing to settle the N7,000 allowances to the facilitators, calling on the federal government to intervene by calling on governors to accomplish their promises.
Reacting, the Chairman Senate Committee on Education, Senator Abubakar Atiku Bagudu (PDP, Kebbi) said they were at the commission in order to ascertain whether they have received the monies appropriated to them in 2009 and 2010 and to assess the level of implementation as well as constraints the commission was facing.
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