Public secondary schools in Borno State will reopen on Monday, September 26, more than two years after they were closed due to Boko Haram insurgency.

Borno State Commissioner for Education, Inuwa Kubo, told the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, in Maiduguri that Internally Displayed Persons, IDPs, who were camped at the schools, had been relocated so that academic activities could resume.

He said that repair works had been carried out on the structures in the schools to provide conducive atmosphere for teaching and learning.

The statement read: “I wish to announce that on September 26, all public schools are going to be re-opened.

“I want to state that government has repaired all the structures damaged by the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the schools, to ensure comfort for the returning students.

“Parents and guardians should please make sure that they send their children back to school,” he said.

The commissioner said it was unfortunate that proprietors of private schools in the state had taken advantage of the closure of public schools to arbitrarily hike their school fees.

“We understand that some of them have taken undue advantage of the closure to hike school fees; we will not allow the situation to continue,” he said.

“We are going to visit the schools to find out how much they are charging and how much they are paying their teachers.”

It would be recalled that public schools in Borno State were forced to close in March, 2014, after suspected terrorists attacked a school in neighbouring Yobe.

The government reopened the primary schools in 2015 but could not do so with the secondary schools as they had been taken over by IDPs.