The authorities of the Federal School of Statistics, Manchok, Kaduna State, have said that the lack of a perimeter fencing around the institution was exposing the school community to constant security threat.
“The school sits on 33.27 hectares and has no fence; herdsmen freely trespass into the compound and graze on it which constitute a security threat to us,” the Rector, Mr Victor Mangbon, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), on Friday in Manchok.
He lamented the porous nature of the school environment which allows cows to move around even during classes, causing distraction to the students and teachers.
“Another challenge is that of vandals. Unknown persons take advantage of our porous situation to remove just everything on sight.
“Farmers also enter the compound and put up farms on every available space. This is certainly not ideal,” he said.
Mangbon said that the school had not been able to erect a fence around the compound because of limited resources.
“We cannot do this fencing on our own. The resources are just not there,” he said.
The Rector said that the little renovations going on in the school were funded with internally generated revenue because no allocation or intervention was coming from any quarters.
He appealed for the establishment of an agency to cater for Monotechnics the same way TETFUND was catering for Universities, Colleges of Education and Polytechnics.
“We are like a Monotechnic and we are appealing for interventions. We wrote to TETFUND but they will tell you we are not in their mandate for any intervention.
“So, if we can have a government agency that will cater for our own peculiar needs just like the Universities, Polytechnics and Colleges of Education have TETFUND, we will appreciate it,” he said
He called on prominent sons and daughters of southern Kaduna to come to the rescue of the school given that it was the only National Diploma awarding institution in the entire Southern Kaduna Senatorial District.
“We need such support to operate optimally so as to attain the mandate of meeting the statistical manpower needs of Nigeria and the entire West Africa sub-region.
“This is supposed to be an international school that caters for the statistics manpower of not just Nigeria, but West Africa as a whole.
“Ghana, Mali, Niger, Senegal and other West African nations are supposed to send their people here for training in statistics, but that is not the reality on the ground,” he lamented.
A correspondent of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), who visited the institution, observed that it had no semblance of a tertiary institution as only a handful of physical structures, begging for refurbishment, could be seen. (NAN)