Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on Social Investment, Maryam Uwais, said yesterday that elected officials tend to focus more on infrastructure while in office and neglect other sector, especially education.

According to her, this has impacted negatively on education and contributes to the increase in the number of out-of-school children in the country.

While noting, however, that infrastructure was critical to the development of the country, Uwais said other national issues, such as poverty, education also needed attention and encouragement.

Uwais, who made the observation in an interview on Channel Television's breakfast programme, Sunrise Daily yesterday, spoke against the backdrop of data of United Nations Education Fund, UNICEF, which put out-of-school children's figure in the country at over 20 million, though the federal government claimed a much lower figure.

Noting that the politics of addressing the rate of out-of-school children was not encouraging.

She said: "So, there are many reasons and I think government is trying to put all these together.

"We should be more holistic about how we handle these issues. I agree with you that the numbers are large but there are many issues as I said and even structure the issues.

"When elected officers get into government, they are more interested in seeing what is tangible, pointing at something and saying this is my legacy. When you budget for education at the state level, most of the money tends to go for infrastructure. But there are other issues that are more important and I am not downplaying infrastructure.

"We need more infrastructure; we need to look at the poverty issues, the underlining issues that compound the problem need to be addressed."

She said despite all government interventions so far, there seemed to be very little progress recorded regarding the number of children recorded out of school.

"We have a population that is growing much faster than our economy and we are not really targeting those issues that are increasing the numbers, there are so many disparities. We need to be more strategic about what it is that is causing this numbers," she said.