President Goodluck Jonathan
As erstwhile Minister of Education, Prof. Ruqayyatu Ahmed Rufa’i handed over to the Permanent Secretary Wednesday, she must have heaved a sigh of relief that she had escaped an imminent strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) only by the skin of her teeth.
The union’s patience ran out two weeks ago and it has served notice to resume its suspended strike (it says it never totally calls off a strike) to protest the non-implementation of the agreement it entered into with the Federal Government in October 2009.
Ensuring stability in the education sector will be a good place for President Goodluck Jonathan to start as instability makes nonsense of any plan, however lofty, including the much-touted increased funding. How can Nigeria have good quality graduates when they sit at home for three months, receive lectures for three weeks and then write the semester’s examination?
Jonathan must make the next four years strike-free by prevailing on the National Assembly to pass the agreement into law; there is no point signing an agreement and not implementing it. The trend has always been that once ASUU starts, other unions follow.
The president should heed to call to declare first generation universities as centres of excellence for post-graduate studies – and fund them accordingly. The survival of younger universities, including the private ones, who rely on the latter for the production of their faculties, depend on this.
A lot has been said about the new federal universities. Some say they are unnecessary, that government should rather allocate more funds to the existing ones. Others say, for equity, it is not a bad idea for all states to have a federal university. The Federal Government says the institutions will provide greater access to university education.
These universities are scheduled to take off in September by admitting candidates writing the forth-coming Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), yet recruitment of staff has not started. The grant of N1.5 billion per university has been described as too little, but even this has not reached them and the universities have themselves to blame for it.
The money is domiciled in the Education Trust Fund (ETF) and the agency does not give money gratis. It has its procedure, backed by law, which the nine newly-appointed Vice Chancellors (all former Vice Chancellors) are familiar with. The first step is for them to present their approved plans of how they want to spend the money.
The confusion in the basic education sector must be cleared too. The National Council on Education has approved the issuance of certificates to graduates of Junior Secondary School. What this means is that a central body would conduct the terminal examination and the lot fell on the National Examinations Council (NECO), but only private and defence, police and other para military secondary schools presented their students for the just-concluded maiden examination. The states, where the majority of Nigerian children study, flatly refused to present their students saying they would conduct their own examination. Will they issue their own certificates as well or is NECO going to award certificates for examinations it did not conduct?
The recently developed senior secondary school curriculum is yet another issue that must be tackled. This curriculum is scheduled to take off in September with the SS 1 class and state governments are supposed to order for it. But so far, only four states have done so, which suggests that the remaining 32 states will be taking their students through the out-dated curriculum in the next session. How can such students do well in the SSCE which will be based on the new curriculum from 2014?
The same fate would have befallen the basic education curriculum that was introduced some years ago, but for the intervention of the Federal Government, which used part of states’ funds with the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) to print and distribute the document to the states. The government has to look for a way to prevail on states to be alive to their responsibilities.
Generally, the education sector, for the first time in years, appears to be enjoying some continuity. Former Minister, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, set up a Reform Agenda, which her successor, Aja Nwachukwu, did not do justice to. His successor, Sam Egwu, however went back to it and developed a ‘Roadmap for the Development of the Education Sector’. His successor, Rufa’i also built on this and developed a ‘One Year Strategy for the Development of the Education Sector’ from that document, the implementation of which she followed to the letter in the last one year.
This tempo must be maintained. These two documents and the newly published Education Data (2006-2010) are more than enough working documents for the next four years. The data have shown that states hold the key to reviving the education sector. If we get basic education right, it will impact on the other levels of education, so there has to be a way of engendering synergy between the minister of education and state commissioners of education to tackle the challenges in the sector.
A National Scholarship and Students Loans Commission has been in the pipeline for too long. Such a commission will ensure that those eligible for student loans get them. That way, those who can afford to pay for their children’s education will do so instead of the blanket ‘no tuition’ policy of the Federal Government that has done more harm than good.
In the absence of tuition, universities have been charging acceptance fees, which they jack up every year and students go on the rampage to protest the slightest of increase in these fees.
Most importantly, Jonathan must focus on improving the quality of teaching, the development of adequate infrastructure as well as the development of a template for sufficient funding of the institutions in a sustainable manner that is agreeable to all the stakeholders.
No comments:
Post a Comment