The State of Osun is once again embroiled in another turbulent controversy reverberating across the country, as the State is known to be in the recent past. The Christians, spearheaded by Osun Baptist Convention, are protesting the government’s reclassification of school system in the State. This is to be the new educational policy in Osun.
The State of Osun is once again embroiled in another turbulent controversy reverberating across the country, as the State is known to be in the recent past. The Christians, spearheaded by Osun Baptist Convention, are protesting the government’s reclassification of school system in the State. This is to be the new educational policy in Osun.
As widely reported in the media, the protesters were armed with holy bibles and hymnbooks of various sizes like spiritual warriors on a warpath with Satan. They also held banners and placards to advertise the reasons for their mission to wrestle with the government: they do not want the ‘merger’ of schools in Osun. Their denominational excuse is the fear of “obliterating the Baptist heritage” and “granting right to muslim students to wear hijab at a school founded by the Christian missionaries”. The presence of security operatives, on hand to maintain law and order, at the scene were defied by the protesters.
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This is not the first time the Christian community would protest the policy of government in the State of Osun. What makes the difference now is the confrontational approach that attracts front-page coverage of a newspaper. The fervour and vigour with which the recent protest was executed calls for real concern. What then could have gone wrong? What could have turned the gentle doves to the wild, belligerent birds? At least the lacklustre, preceding administration never experienced this kind of Christian protest. Why Aregbesola’s government is painted with the brush of a regime that likes winning and dinning with controversy?
These pertinent questions and many more propelled my interest in the investigation of this whole affair. After consultation with many naive and uninformed colleagues within my immediate community, an inquisitive trip was made to the State capital. Ahead of the journey, I put a call to a friend in the government. And in a long chat, I was made to realise what the school reclassification is all about and its essence.
The policy was explained as an innovative way of implementing the country’s educational system of 6-3-3-4, with a sustainable concept of empowering the children beyond literacy to the level of practice in global education standard and self-empowerment. The process is to automatically lead to changing of the known nomenclatures of Primary school, JSS 1-3, and SSS 1-3 to create Elementary, Middle and High schools without affecting 6-3-3-4 Nigerian educational system. The elementary school will take primary 1-4; the middle school will absorb primary 5-6 and JSS 1-3; while high school will have SSS 1-3. The elementary school absorbs the pupils in the age category of 6-10 years and they are now being fed free by the government. The structures that are built for this grade are cited within the neighbourhood and they are not only provided with the state of the art facilities but have each the capacity of 900 pupils at ago. Middle school which has the capacity of 900 to 1000 will have the age range of 10-14 years and it is cited within the maximum of 2-3 kilometres radius. This also will be supplied with standard facilities, far and above those in the elementary schools. The high school, however, is for those in the age range of 15-17 years and will have capacity of 3000 because it will be a large complex containing three schools, meaning each school will have capacity for 1000. The high school will have staff quarters, school managers, boarding and modern sporting facilities etc. The pupils of this level are those being given free computer tablets known as Opon Imo. Nevertheless, all these schools will be provided with medical centres, standby power generating sets, instructional materials and customised exercised books.
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At the conclusion of this discussion with my friend, I was tongue-tied but left more confused than I was prior to the conversation. Why would any person or institution then protest against such a laudable, innovative and commendable initiative?
In my bewilderment, I consulted with ordinary people on the street and some civil society activists in the State. I was made to understand that the government did not just wake up in a day dream and launched into this new educational policy. It was a product of a well thought out process from the Educational Summit initiated by the government in 2011. The summit was presided over by the foremost educational expert and literary giant, Prof. Wole Soyinka; and a host of other eminent personalities also participated in it. A committee tagged OSCHOOL, comprising all stakeholders in the State’s education system as members, refined and approved the system.
However, the simple and major aims of the policy are to group together, in classes, the pupils of same age bracket with each class containing as fewer as possible for easy learning. The proliferation of mushroom schools will be a thing of the past with standard and well-equipped schools for all ages. As a result, the scarce resources of the government will not be over-stretched in an attempt at providing necessary teaching tools and aids for different categories of pupils. More importantly, the government will uplift the standard of public schools to an elegant standard fit for learning and teaching. These and many more are what the reclassification portends for the people of Osun.
It must be noted at this junction that Muslim communities are also protesting against the policy. Going by the media reports, they have protested in Iwo, Imesi-Ile and some other places. They are only not as loud as their Christian counterparts. Even before now, they have gone a step further by instituting an action in a court of law against the government.
With the revealed positive and progressive tendencies of the reform, why the hue and cry? A discerning look at the grievances of Baptist Convention is in two parts. One part is laying claim to the ownership of the schools while the other is resisting hijab-wearing Muslims as pupils at the Christian schools. Where in these two claims is Baptist Convention correct? The ownership of the missionary schools has been taken over by the government and all the entitlements paid to the owners since 1975. Thus, these schools are no more missions but public schools, and by inference, secular schools. It is just by sheer grace that their missionary names are still retained till date. This is a tenacious revelation, with facts and documents. Is the Baptist Convention ignorant of this fact or just consciously playing politics with education?
The second part which is about the hijab-wearing pupils is a very grievous offence as it breaches the position of the constitution on it. It espouses the discrimination against a fellow being on the basis of religion. And the constitution frowns at this. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended), under Chapter 4, Section 38, Subsections (1) and (2), provides that “Every person shall be entitled to freedom of thought, conscience and religion or belief... No person attending any place of education shall be required to receive religious instruction or take part in any religious ceremony...other than his own, or religion not approved by his parent or guardian.”
How can it be explained that the church that should be at the forefront of agitating against the violation of human rights is preaching prejudice? Or was it not for the same struggle that Martin Luther King Jr., as a Baptist Reverend, fought tenaciously and lost his life? Something has definitely gone amiss.
Contrary to misinformation spewed in the public domain, the missionaries do not own, manage or fund the only girls’ schools in the State. Since the 1975 take-over of the schools by the government, over 100 schools were built by the Baptist Convention without any as a single sex school.
Perhaps, there is the need to pierce the religious mask given to the agitation. In essence, there is an urgent need to appraise the past. What was the state of education as directed by the predecessor of Aregbesola? A cursory check shows that most public schools then were P.T.A-run. It was the parents’ body that employed teachers for the schools, most of whom were secondary school graduates. They were paid seven thousand naira as salaries and classically called P.T.A-teachers. Parents provided chairs and tables for their children to use at schools.
Most often, for the lack of security, the pupils carried the chairs on their heads in the morning to their respective schools and to their homes after closing hours in the afternoon. The parents also had certain amounts they contributed to the schools as development fees. The contributions of the then government were one or two blocks of buildings of low standard in each schools and the payment of salaries to a handful of regular staff. Since there was no provision for toilets or latrines, the pupils eased themselves around the school compounds. By the time the government was packing its bag and baggage in 2010, after seven and half years in the saddle, most of the buildings had become dilapidated and the school surroundings were in total shambles.
But the odor of the putrid degeneracy in the education then was probably not strong enough to spring the Christian and Muslim communities into the kind of actions they have engaged in recently. Notwithstanding, it is a common knowledge that during that time, while public schools were festering like a sore thumb, the private schools, though very expensive, were blossoming like the fertilized flowers. Thus, the proprietors of these schools then smiled to the banks with their windfalls. Sadly enough, there was no agency or body to supervise and monitor their low quality and poorly paid secondary graduate ‘teachers’ that they exploit to teach the innocent pupils. Therefore, it was a ding dong case of ‘you rub my back and I rub yours’ between the government and the private school owners.
I am sensing, possibly, that the sin of Aregbesola is that he has come with the determination, never seen in any previous government in the state, to salvage the educational system of the State. Initially, it was dismissed as a joke of the political soapbox. But when they started seeing buildings rising up with modern facilities, they became jittery of what would become of the fate of their own private schools. The governor is now seen as a man possessed with a strange spirit that has to be exorcised.
But there are other sins of the governor. He is not just a Muslim but a devoted one in look and nature. His government was the first (and the only one so far) to have declared Hijra as a public holiday for the Muslims. This earned him all sorts of names from a Muslim fundamentalist to a Taliban and Boko Haram. And the Christians declared that he came with the agenda to turn Osun into an Islamic State. The governor, however, had not finished yet. He further declared a public holiday known as Isese day for the traditional religious practitioners. The Muslims, who had earlier commended him for recognising their “New Year day” pitched an uncommon tent with their Christian counterparts and labelled him a babaalawo (herbalist) and an occultist. In a similar vein, school uniforms distributed freely to students has ELLA (Education and Learning Leading to Accomplishment) as the label of the school uniform; the cry was that the children wearing the clothes would become victims of money rituals.
Equally, Aregbesola remains the only governor to have accorded traditional religion practitioners an equal leverage to operate. (That is understandable in a State that can be rightly described as the cradle of Yoruba race and traditional beliefs.) Today they have more courage to be proud of their chosen faith. Despite the high level of disenchantment and no love lost between the Christians and Muslims, they have always found a common, hypocritical ground when it comes to condemning traditional religion. Meanwhile, the sermon of the governor is that religious tolerance is when a thousand flowers of religions can blossom together. And that the sky is wide enough for the millions of birds to fly together without any clash. No wonder, there has never been a reported case of a religious clash in the State of Osun.
Life can be so ironical when one looks at what a genuine leader has to pass through in bringing a progressive change to his society. As a leader, who is committed to education, Aregbesola sent about 98 medical students to Ukraine to continue their medical programme. These students became victims of the Osun State University, established without any provision for their clinical training. No university was prepared to accept them for the requisite training. Hence, their fate was left hanging until Aregbesola assumed office in 2010. He could have ignored them and denied ever been the cause of their predicament.
Aregbesola, who is called an Islamic fundamentalist, donated millions of naira to Baptist Convention during its 2013 convention in the State of Osun; gave N10 million to Osun CAN and provided N35 million for the burial of late Prophet Abraham Obadare, the former General Overseer of WOSEM. All spent from the taxes of the hardworking payers.
Each time I reflect on all this, what comes to my mind is the song of the musical maestro, Ebenezer Obey, in his record titled the ‘The Horse, The Man And His Son’. He opines in this record that no matter how wise you are, you can never satisfy human beings. But what is important is that you are serving the good of the generality of your people to the best of your conscientious ability.
What Aregbesola has brought to Osun is a revolution without bloodshed. But what has been realised is that, revolution, whether bloody or non-violent, must have its resisters. The only thing that does not resist itself is change itself.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of SaharaReporters
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