The author
Agbor-Ndakaw Tabe Ekangaki, a Cameroonian academic who schooled in Nigeria years back pays tribute to departed governor of old Borno State, Alhaji Mohammed Goni
Thanks to Intervention, the Abuja based platform, I woke up this morning to be greeted with news of the passing to eternity of Alhaji Mohammed Goni, the first Executive Governor of Borno State as it were in 1979. It may interest all to know that I am a product of his free education policy which I was opportune to enjoy from Damaturu, now Yobe State. While not undermining the legacy of Sir Kashim Ibrahim, permit me to say that Goni is perhaps the real architect of modern Borno and Yobe states, using education as an instrument of social mobilization and reconstruction.
The article announcing his passing on cited Dapchi as one of his achievements. That is absolutely correct. Indeed, in his haste to make education available to all rural areas of the state and in the particular case of GGSS, Dapchi, he ensured that the school started at a primary school in Damaturu pending the development of the permanent site. This is how some of us had the opportunity to enjoy the acquaintance of Dapchi girls and even those of Buni Yadi till today. All these happened under the stewardship of his then able Permanent Secretary for Education, the late late Alhaji Ibrahim Musa who is understood to have been the Students’ Affairs Officer at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria from where he was invited by the late governor, appointed permanent secretary and assigned him the Education portfolio, being an educationist of distinction and a teacher as well as a pioneer student of the Advanced Teacher’s College Zaria.
May it please God to grant him the rest he deserves, having in his own little way, lived his life in the service of humanity.
