Speech delivered at the 2nd National JESAC Consultative Conference on 28th October, 2010)
Speech delivered at the 2nd National JESAC Consultative Conference on 28th October, 2010)
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });
I would like to begin by thanking the visionary people who conceived and nurtured to reality the JOINT EDUCATION STAKEHOLDERS ACTION COALITION (JESAC) initiative. A task is half-done when like minds, working together, draw up a strategy for tackling that task. The rest – and this includes implementing the details of this action plan – is easy for the simple reason that a challenge has been recognized and the hands best equipped to meet this challenge are already at work.
Fifty years after our nation achieved self-rule, and some twelve years after we returned to democratic government after the long night of dictatorship, the nation’s education sector is in the grip of a profound crisis. But thankfully, I can also say in the same breathe that due to the work of JESAC whose core mission is transformational education, stout-hearted patriots in our beloved Nigeria are at long last thinking seriously and working together on plans to dig our nation out of this self-induced mess.
After about 25 years in the public service I have now entered politics in our county to join these untiring champions and visionaries and contribute my modest bit in the important work of national regeneration. It was Frantz Fanon, the great humanist and social theorist who remarked that every generation, out of relative obscurity, must define its mission, fulfill it or betray it. Fellow Nigerians, one key mission staring our generation in the face is equipping young Nigerians with the tools with which they can realize to the maximum their innate potentials as individuals and citizens, contribute to national progress, and make of Nigeria and Africa a community to be looked up to again in international affairs.
Education is the all-important device with which these three central goals can be met. And these three core goals, among others, are at the heart of the policy platform of my bid for political leadership.
It is now accepted world-wide that human capital development is the basis for broad and sustained development of any nation. In other words, develop the human person and you develop the nation. It was in recognition of this truism that UNESCO insisted, and continues to insist, that not less than 26 percent of a country’s budgetary allocation be given to the education sector.
For a nation like Nigeria in dire need of development in virtually all her key and strategic sectors, the question therefore should not even be whether to meet the UNESCO target, but how to ensure that it is met at the shortest time possible, and having done so, ensure that these funds once allocated, are utilized to achieve the maximum impact. In Nigeria, the total allocation to education annually has been fluctuating between 5 and 13 percent since 1999. Clearly, this is not good enough.
But I must quickly add that while money is critical, it is not the only challenge that must be addressed if our desire to make our children and wards fit candidates to take on the challenges of a 21st century world is to be realized. Friends, fellow Nigerians, my policy team and I have thought carefully about this nation’s current education impasse, and have highlighted seven main challenges and corresponding with them, have also worked out seven central strategies to meet them so that our youth can march into the future with confidence. These seven broad areas are FUNDING, ACCESS, QUALITY ASSURANCE/ REGULATION, INFRASTRUCTURE, STAFF TRAINING AND WELFARE, RESEARCH, AND STUDENT DISCIPLINE AND RELATED MATTERS.
FUNDING
Let me say straightway that I shall implement to the full the 26 percent UNESCO recommendation on taking office. Poor funding is a major cause of decay in education at all levels, primary, secondary and tertiary. Adequate funding, carefully calibrated to speak to differentiated areas of need, will revitalize academic and physical infrastructure and reverse the current woeful story of poor performance in NECO and other public examinations.
But we shall not be handing out sacks of Naira to actors in the education sector like sailors out on a binge. We shall ensure that every Naira disbursed will be carefully monitored to eliminate waste, corruption, and inefficiency. We shall not only give education funding the highest priority, we shall also prioritize a new culture of accountability and transparency so that the input and output sectors of our education sector are brought together in working symmetry.
The management of the Education Trust Fund (ETF) will be made more transparent; as all higher education unions like ASUU, ASUP and COEASU will be involved in its management. The funds will be made available as at when due while we will demand proper accountability by the recipients of these funds.
ACCESS
It grieves me that it is not all the pupils and students that are willing to study that find a place in our schools to fulfill their dream. Total primary school enrollment today is 16 million. Secondary school enrollment is 6, 625, 943. The total carrying capacity of Nigerian universities for the 2009/2010 academic session is 219,403. The figures for our polytechnics, technical colleges, colleges of agriculture, and colleges of education are also large.
Even so, the gap between demand and supply in our education sector is wide, and it is growing even wider as the general population continues to increase without a corresponding match in the supply of schools. In order to improve access we shall expand and upgrade infrastructure and facilities across board, primary to tertiary. Through careful planning, we shall expand opportunities for the willing and the able to enroll. The special challenges of nomadic education, and access in river-rine and similar difficult terrain shall be robustly met. The physically-challenged shall be brought in from the cold and provided with training specially tailored to their individual peculiarities in special centres to be opened in all the six geopolitical zones.
We shall make education free in all primary and secondary schools in this country on assuming office. We have estimated the cost for this programme, and we know it is achievable. We shall explore ways and make provisions for granting bursaries, grants, and scholarships to the needy and the deserving in our higher institutions.
QUALITY ASSURANCE/ REGULATION
Quality assurance is fundamental to any functional education system. For too long, for far too long, we have neglected inspection and monitoring in our primary and secondary schools and we are now paying for this tardiness with collapsed standards at all levels. We shall bring back and reinvigorate the system of regulatory agencies in our primary and secondary schools, and also tighten up existing ones at the tertiary level.
I recall that the provisions of Decree No. 16 of 1985 were specifically designed to ensure high standards in our university system by introducing system-wide accreditation of undergraduate programmes. But why is it that not a single of our universities made the first 1000 in the world in independent rankings published recently? Fellow Nigerians, my team and I shall reverse this negative trend by supporting academic freedom and not just university autonomy, but also institutional autonomy. I believe that members of staff of higher institutions of learning should play a large role in how their institutions are being administered. We shall strengthen and also work with the National Universities Commission to make illegal universities history and also ensure that universities offer only courses for which they are competent. We shall establish and also strengthen the National Polytechnic commission to regulate polytechnic education in Nigeria. Exam malpractice shall be confronted, and the perpetrators, no matter how highly-placed, will be made to face the full rigour of the law. Lax and indolent teachers will be ‘encouraged’ to look elsewhere to continue their nefarious activities.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Infrastructural facilities are in a state of disrepair across the land. There is a crying need for more and qualitative classrooms, lecture halls, staff offices, laboratories, libraries, hostels and sundry recreational edifices in our centres of learning. With increased funding made to work smart and as I already said, eliminate waste and corruption, these problems will be frontally tackled. The case of increased smart funding is not the usual glib campaign promise. My policy team has thought carefully about this challenge and has identified areas that can be tapped, over and beyond the Education Trust Fund intervention for tertiary institutions, to ensure that education in our country will be adequately funded across the board.
STAFF TRAINING AND WELFARE
And now I come to the part very dear to my heart. I say it is dear to my heart because as a child growing up in Yola, my home town, I saw my father toiling night and day and working with the authorities to open up new schools in Yola and other towns and villages in Adamawa province of that time. The modest achievements of my father and his colleagues was made possible only because they had the good fortune of finding extra-ordinarily capable and committed teachers willing and able to translate their vision into reality. Ladies and gentlemen, a good education policy is only as good as the teachers you recruit to drive the vision. And poorly remunerated and discontented teachers cannot implement the new education strategy that is vital to the renaissance our nation so badly needs today.
My friends, let me tell you outright that I totally reject the saying that the teacher’s reward is in heaven. It is a jibe that must not have a place in the education plan of a nation hungry to take its place at the frontiers of the 21st century, a century already defined by intense competition for markets, knowledge and skills in a rapidly globalizing world. My vision is of a teachers community in our country paid enough, supported enough, trained and retrained enough, and praised enough that they stride off to that classroom, that lecture hall, that laboratory every morning fired up and determined to perform daily miracles.
We shall retain gifted teachers and limit the brain drain with bold new staff development and remuneration policies in our institutions at all levels. The welfare of teachers will be given urgent attention, and the integrity of the profession will be restored to match, and with time, exceed the glory of teachers in our nation in yesterdays.
Using the principle of collective bargaining with staff unions in our institutions, we shall ensure that teachers and staff of our schools earn their due and thus make the professions attractive to our fresh graduates while abolishing the brain drain currently ongoing.
This I shall do, friends and compatriots.
RESEARCH
The research component of our institutions of vocational and technical education has been neglected over the years. Research is also dying off in our universities. And yet it is a self-evident truth that research is crucial to the development of a nation. The nation’s research institutes will be reinvigorated. Post graduate schools across the country would be well funded to be able to carry out adequate research in science and technology. We shall establish a National Research fund, that will be manned by experts and from which research grants would be accessed by researchers in our various institutes. This will be accorded a national emergency status in sync with our vision at giving tertiary education a major research definition.
We shall establish a world-class Postgraduate University to provide high quality training in research in science and technology and other frontiers of learning critical to competing in this new and challenging century. Where appropriate, curriculum will be reviewed at all levels to speak to emerging challenges and ensure that our children are truly at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy that is increasingly driving effort and prosperity in the world today.
STUDENT DISCIPLINE AND RELATED MATTERS
The seventh challenge we have identified is student discipline and the gamut of issues that flow directly from this vexed matter that has become the topic of discussion everywhere you go in our country. The thinking of my policy team and I, fellow Nigerians, is that it will be unproductive and ultimately self-defeating to bemoan the drastic fall in the moral and intellectual tone of student behavior without first asking ourselves the hard question of what have we done for our children and wards in our schools lately.
Our students at all levels shall be supported in and out of the classroom. But with this generosity will come the insistence that they shape up and conduct themselves as befitting those to whom we shall entrust the future welfare of our beloved nation. Working closely with the teacher community and the students themselves, we shall banish gangsters and cult members from our classrooms. The practice of so-called ‘Sorting’ shall be uprooted by tackling it at the roots. A new culture of responsibility shall be pursued, putting emphasis on education for entrepreneurship and self-help, and also instilling a civic ethos in our students so that they will begin to take seriously the injunction so eloquently captured in the motto of one of our great newspapers: ‘Shine the light and the people will find the way.’
My friends, fellow Nigerians, the challenges ahead are enormous. But no nation has ever made progress by enumerating its woes and neglecting the all-important task of thinking through these problems and how they might be surmounted. It is this task that my policy team and I are presently engaged in, in the education sector and indeed other critical areas of national endeavour.
Permit me to also remind us that it is a challenge that that icon of this sector so vital to our progress, Professor Aliu Babatunde Fafunwa, took up so courageously and selflessly until he was called home a couple of weeks ago. It is a challenge JESAC and indeed all those gathered in this hall today, have also taken up.
You here because you believe, like I too believe, that nothing is served by berating our great nation-builders and claiming that the policies they put in place to make our education sector strong and resilient are failures. No. Rather, we are called to take up the mantle where they left off. This is so because the work of nation-building is done block by block, brick by brick.
I shall work with brick builders like you to remake our education and doing so, make the new Nigeria of our dreams possible.
Thank You.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });