KANO, Nigeria — In a scene that should shame any government with an education brief, pupils at Kurna Asabe Primary School in Fagge Local Government Area are reportedly sitting on bare floors beneath leaking roofs and collapsing ceilings while classrooms stand stripped of desks and basic furniture.
The damning account, published by civic accountability group MonITNG and picked up by national outlets, lays bare a grotesque mismatch between the rhetoric of a declared state of emergency in education and the lived reality of Kano’s poorest pupils.
MonITNG’s visit, the group says, found classrooms with roofs and ceilings “falling off”, no windows or doors in some blocks, and students forced to learn on bare earth.
The organisation urged Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf to prioritise urgent repairs and to work with the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) to unlock counterpart funding.
MonITNG specifically pointed to the ₦250 billion counterpart support reportedly available for renovating public schools nationwide.
The timing of this expose could not be worse for the Kano State Government. Governor Yusuf declared a state of emergency on education last year, in a move framed as a commitment to tackle teacher shortages, dilapidated classrooms and poor learning outcomes.
Yet the gutted state of Kurna Asabe Primary suggests that declarations have not translated into uniform, timely action on the ground. The contrast between political theatre and classroom neglect is stark.
The stakes are enormous. UNICEF and multiple development reports place Kano among Nigeria’s worst-hit states for out-of-school children.
Official figures frequently cited in recent briefings estimate nearly one million (about 989,234) primary-age children in Kano are not enrolled in formal education.
This is a crisis of participation that is both a cause and consequence of failing infrastructure.
When classrooms are unsafe and humiliating, parents withdraw children; when children stay away, communities are locked into cycles of poverty, exploitation and early marriage.
MonITNG’s local survey explicitly links the physical collapse of school buildings to rising absenteeism and the broader out-of-school phenomenon.
Their appeal is practical: repair roofs, replace furniture, certify classrooms safe, and, critically, open the books on how counterpart funding from UBEC is being accessed and spent.
In plain terms, civil society is demanding transparency and project management competence to turn allocated funds into functioning classrooms rather than paper budgets.
This story is not isolated. Field documents from development partners show Kurna and surrounding wards have long featured in state rehabilitation plans — a pattern of chronic underinvestment followed by episodic repairs and new lists of “priority” schools that rarely keep their promise.
A World Bank draft on Kano school rehabilitation lists “Kurna Asabe” among named locations, indicating the site has been on the radar of external funders for some time; yet sightlines from donors and government have failed to cohere into lasting fixes.
That failure matters. Poor classroom conditions correlate with poor learning outcomes: recent local studies and assessments indicate that a tiny fraction of Kano pupils meet foundational literacy and numeracy benchmarks.
Combine that with nearly one million out-of-school children and the result is a generational crisis — vast swathes of children entering adulthood without basic skills that underpin employability, civic participation and resilience against social vices.
What must happen next is straightforward, but politically demanding. The state must:
- Publish an actionable, time-bound repair schedule for every condemned government school in Kano;
- Immediately deploy temporary learning spaces where repairs will take months;
- Open a transparent portal showing UBEC counterpart funds requested and spent;
- And invite civil society and donors to monitor roll-out.
If ₦250 billion in counterpart support is indeed available at federal level, Kano must demonstrate the capacity and will to tap it — and to show receipts.
For parents and teachers at Kurna Asabe, the demands are urgent, not strategic: fix the roof, bring chairs, stop the rain from ruining lessons.
For policymakers and development partners, the question is existential: will the state convert emergency declarations into durable infrastructure and honest budgeting, or will a generation of Kano children be written out of the state’s future?
As MonITNG bluntly concluded, “The time to act is now.”
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