By Ishaya Ibrahim
Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, claimed in a tweet via his handle, @GovKaduna, that the United States has no privately owned primary schools. That all the schools in the states are government-owned.
“It’s striking to me that United States of America, one of the most capitalist countries in the world, has no private primary schools. This makes us more determined to restore the quality of primary education in Kaduna,” he said.
Fact check conducted by TheNiche with the United States Department of Education revealed that contrary to what El-Rufai said, the country has both public and privately owned primary schools. In the US, primary schools are called elementary schools.
A 2014 survey carried out by the US Department of Education shows that the country has 89,543 elementary schools. Out of this number, 22,509, representing 25 percent, are privately owned, while 67,034, that is, 75 percent of the elementary schools in the US, are public owned.
This is not the first gaffe Governor El-Rufai has made on twitter, for which he has been contradicted.
Shortly after President Muhammadu Buhari commissioned the Kaduna-Abuja train project in January, Senator representing Bayelsa East, Ben Bruce, had tweeted that former President Goodluck Jonathan deserved the credit for initiating and almost completed the project. But El-Rufai disagreed, arguing that it was former President Olusegun Obasanjo that initiated and raised funds for the project.
TheCable, an online newspaper, did a fact check which disproved El-Rufai’s claim. The newspaper’s findings aligned with Ben Bruce’s claim that the Abuja-Kaduna rail project was approved by Jonathan.
