The Kano State Government has vowed to withdraw the licence of any private secondary school that fails to fill and return the revalidation form issued to them recently.
The Special Adviser on Private and Voluntary Schools, Baba Umar, issued the threat while addressing newsmen in his office on Thursday.
He said the issuance of the forms to the school proprietors was necessary to enable the government to have data on students in all the private schools.
Umar said of the over 7,000 public schools that exist in Kano, 4,000 collected the forms while only 2,000 plus have so far returned the completed forms.
He noted that most of the schools that were supposed to remit a 10 per cent tax of the school fees they collected to the government have failed to do so because they were not operating within the ambit of the law.
“We discovered that the majority of the school proprietors instead of paying their tax into the government account, were paying directly into the personal account of the former Executive Secretary of the board,” Umar said.
While lamenting the way private school proprietors have continued to charge parents exorbitant school fees, Umar said the state government would not fold its arms and allow such exploitation to continue.
He said no proprietor is allowed to either unilaterally increase school fees without following the laid down procedures or force parents to buy books from his or her school.
According to him, all those castigating the government on the measures taken to check the excesses of such proprietors were doing so to perpetrate their illegal activities.
The special adviser said any proprietor that was not satisfied with the measures being taken by the government to sanitise the system should challenge him at the court instead of using the media in their campaign of calumny.
However, when contacted, one of the proprietors, Ibrahim Murtala, Proprietor of Ma’aimaz Comprehensive School, said that the 10 per cent tax being collected by the state government is too much considering the fees charged by many schools are nothing to write home about.
“The school fees charged by schools depend on the location of the school. If a school is located in the city, the fees will be different from the school that is located outside the city.
“Nobody said that the government should not collect tax from private schools but it should be considerate in view of the fact that the proprietors have other commitments towards the running of the schools.
“There is a school which collects N4 million but was asked to pay N9 million tax. The government should know that we run the schools, pay teachers, and do other things,” he said.
According to him, the Association of Proprietors of Private Schools had met and reviewed the situation and resolved to go to court.
In her reaction, the Proprietress of Marshal International School, Hajia Salman, denied that private schools were forcing parents to buy books.
“The economic situation is very bad. No school will force parents to buy books but parents should know that textbooks are essential in learning,” she said.
