Illiterate squatters are damaging the city of Abuja, authorities said yesterday.
Speaking at an international day raising awareness on illiteracy, an FCT official said illiterate squatters are “distorting the master plan” of the city.
Over one third of Nigerians are illiterate, other government experts said at the event in Kuje, FCT.
In his speech at the occasion, FCT Minister, Malam Nasir el-Rufai, said the daily influx of people into the FCT in search of greener pastures and the fact that a large number of them are illiterate, compounds the problems of housing and overcrowding in the city.
Director, Agency for Mass Education, Mrs. E. G. Hamman, in her address at the occasion, said the vision of her agency is to have the FCT free of illiterates, illegal squatters who are “a distortion to the Abuja Master Plan”.
But FCT Secretary for Education, Ms. Bolanle Onagoruwa said: “literacy is acknowledged as one of the most powerful tools of development. Therefore, any society that is desirous to develop cannot afford to have an illiterate populace.”
The Executive Secretary, National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult and Non-Formal Education, Dr. Ahmed A. Oyinlola, said at the 2006 International Literacy Day celebrations held at Kuje in the FCT that 51.6 million Nigerians are illiterate, Dr Oyinlola said the literacy rates of Europe, the US and Canada were about one per cent or two per cent. In Central America, they are between 9 per cent and 15 per cent and in South America, between 15 per cent and 21 per cent. The average in Africa is 43 per cent, he said.
He also said that countries with large populations stand to have high illiteracy rates and nations characterised by linguistic plurality, economic underdevelopment do not only have high illiteracy rates but more often than not, are politically and socially restive.