Kano Interview Series (8)
By Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde
HIGHER EDUCATION
At the Ministry for Higher Education, I met the Commissioner, Umar Haruna Muhammad, to discuss developments regarding the ten institutes of higher education under his Ministry. He is the youngest of all the officials I met so far, full of energy. I started by asking him to describe the development that took place under his ministry in the last one year.
Me: Can you please introduce yourself, sir?
Commissioner: I am Umar Haruna Muhammad, Kano State Commissioner for Higher Education.
Me: Education is a continuous process. The entire society subscribes to it. Whoever comes to power deals in it, doing his best and, yet, must leave behind many things unfinished as new problems continuously emerge. Can you describe the position of higher education in Kano State when you were appointed and what have your ministry done in the past one year to develop it?
Commissioner: Thank you for this question. First, I must say we met higher education in Kano State with five major problems. The first was the problem of physical structures. It was difficult to come across buildings that were in good condition. Two, we met plenty students that have not been admitted into higher institutions of learning. Three, there were no funds to pay scholarship allowances. Four, the relationship between staff unions in the various institutions and government was very poor. Five, there was a rift between National Union of Nigerian Students and the state government. These were the five problems we met here. You can add to this the serious problem of lack of state indigenes that can manage the institutions.
Me: Okay. Let us approach the issue in two ways. First, pick each of these problems you listed, one at a time, and tell us the effort you made to solve it. Secondly, tell us what the new things you introduced are.
Commissioner: Regarding structures, we directed all contractors handling construction projects in these institutions to return to their sites. We have paid them their outstanding certificates. You find this at Kano State University of Technology (KSUT), at Audu Bako, at Kumbotso, etc. Where the funds are not available at all in the institutions, we funded them to enable the resumption of work on these sites.
There is the fundamental problem of lack of accreditation of the institutions. We have provided funds to all the institutions to enable them obtain such accreditations. They are all accredited now, except the polytechnic which we are processing now. We have done it for KSUT Wudil, College of Education, Kumbotso and Audu Bako School of Agriculture, Dambatta. These are the major ones that required accreditation.
Also, we realized that we have many students seeking admission into institutions of higher learning. For example, between 70,000 and 80,000 students across the country applied to Bayero University Kano last year but only 5,000 would be admitted. So the admissions are hard to come by. To tackle this problem, we introduced degree programs at COE, Kumbotso, and NCE program at School of Legal Studies. In fact to solve the problem from a broader perspective, we introduced the Northwest University. Work is ongoing…(cut in)
Me: This Northwest University…how would it differ from KSUT? I say this because I have heard many of your critics questioning the rationale of opening new universities when the present state university, which they say was created by the same governor, is not fully established.
Commissioner: Thank God that they have admitted in the first place that the university in Wudil was established by Kwankwaso during his first tenure. Alhamdulillah. I am also glad that such critics, most of whom are members and sympathizers of the past administration, have agreed that despite their eight year tenure, they did very little to complete its establishment. Now, what they fail to understand is that Wudil was established for science and technology students. The new Northwest University, on the other hand, will be a conventional university that offers all courses. In addition, given the cultural sensitivity of Kano, there are many parents that will not allow their girls to go to “far away Wudil” for higher education.
Me: So the new University will be established here in Kano?
Commissioner: Yes. It will be established in Kano. It will be a conventional university that will offer all courses, while the first university remains a university of technology.
What is interesting is that we have sent a bill to the House of Assembly for the establishment of a fund called KETFUND, Kano Education Trust Fund, for the management of these institutions such that even after our tenure, the neglect that happened in the past will not happen again.
On the issue of sufficient indigenes who are qualified to run these institutions, we came up with a program of sending overseas for postgraduate studies 500 graduates in various fields who have first class and second class upper degrees. The process is ongoing. We have secured admissions for many and, in sha Allah, we will soon invite you to witness the departure of these students.
That apart, seeing that the standard of our secondary education is deteriorating, we included in our rolling plan the establishment of school of basic and remedial studies in each of the three zones in the state. Since we now have one in Kano Central, we are going to establish one in Kano South soon; then next year we will allocate another to Kano North.
Then we realize that our candidates find it difficult to go to distant institutions in the country for learning, for example, to Usmanu Danfodio University (UDUS), Sokoto, SBRS, Funtua, etc. So we came up with an idea: We will build a hostel in any university that will sufficiently admit our students. The hostel will be dedicated to the indigenes of the state. Doing this will reduce the pressure on the university for providing accommodation to its students from the state. We have done this in UDUS and SBRS Funtua, within last year alone. And it pays, because we have seen an increment in the number of our students that are admitted in these institutions.
There is also now a good understanding between the government and staff unions in these institutions. We have resolved the issue of migration – meaning, once you obtain a higher qualification, you are entitled to migrate from one level to another. It was stopped before; we have reintroduced it. Students are now received here warmly, unlike before when they could not even come. I just finished a meeting with one of their organizations. There is a good working relationship between government, staff and students in the state.
Me: You mean learning has resumed in all the institutions and there is no industrial action going on presently?
Commissioner: There is not a single institution on strike. All our institutions are running their calendars well. I forgot to tell you that when we came, we found that teachers in all the institutions were on strike, except in KSUT whose union is under ASUU. Not a single union went on strike since our inception.
Me: Apart from your effort in resolving issues that you met on ground when you came to office last year, are there new things that you have introduced?
Commissioner: The new things we introduced or we have in the pipeline are not many. But you have seen that there are a number of things already: There is a new university, a new school of basic and remedial studies, the sponsorship of 500 postgraduate students to study overseas, and the establishment of the Faculties of Medicine and Pharmacy at KSUT. These are the few new things we have introduced so far.
Me: Regarding students, you remind me of the issue of scholarship. Though we all know that the number of students is increased many folds and that there are competing demands on the resources of government, don’t you still feel that N15,000.00 is too small as scholarship for students? Is there any plan to hike it, even by a bit?
Commissioner: I am glad that you have reminded me of the omission. When we assumed office, scholarship has not been paid since 2009. This was the person sent to investigate the matter (pointing at an official sitting opposite us). The previous government has claimed that it owed N300million to the students. Through our auditing effort, we saved for the government the sum of N68million. We established committees for payment. Even at the payment, we were able to save another N14million. Yesterday, we discussed how we can source money for scholarship. We resolved to acquire for the Board some assets that will permanently bring the income needed to meet its demands such that it can be on its own. All these are efforts towards reforming the system. Approval has been given for the computerization of the scholarship awards such that there will be proper accountability of the disbursements.
Now, if you consider the population of Kano state and the scarce resources of government, it will be difficult to increase the amount for each student. But if at the end, we are able to establish that the number of students claimed is dubious in the first place, with the savings that would accrue, we can consider increasing it.
Me: Finally, what message do you have for the people that voted you into office?
Commissioner: I will tell them that we have kept the promise to use their resources prudently. Thank God, this is very clear. Everybody knows this is a transparent government. Our running cost has been increased from N1.6million to N2.5million. We are prudent in how these funds are used. We have done away with a lot of wastes. We don’t owe even a casual labourer any outstanding payment, unlike before when they were owed three to four months payments. They are paid monthly now, promptly.
I would like to add that on top of all these developments, we have improved on the supervision of these institutions. There were only two vehicles for this purpose. Right away, we are provided now with five new Toyota-Hilux vehicles for inspection. This has enabled us an up-to-date knowledge of activities in our institutions because we have a strong inspection team.
Me: Thank you honourable commissioner. May God bless you and assist you in the discharge of your duties.
Commissioner: Thank you Dr. I am grateful.
Kano
9 June 2012
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Interview (3): Ibrahim Shekarau
Interview (3)
By Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde
Ibrahim Shekarau
On 17 April 2012, I was hosted by the former executive governor of Kano State, His Excellency, Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, the Sardaunan Kano, who spoke on the measures required to improve on the standard of education in our public schools. A digression led us to a discussion on President Jonathan’s almajiri schools project for which Shekarau foresee a woeful failure. Finally, he discussed the position of Northern Governors and the need for a central body to coordinate common development projects in the region. This is how the interview went after the exchange of pleasantries.
Me. Your Excellency, I know you have been a teacher and a civil servant all your working life before you were elected the governor of Kano State. You have spent eight years on that seat. You have seen it all. You felt the heat. You wore the shoe, so you know where it pinches. In the recent seminar on Muslims and Democracy in Nigeria, I heard you eloquently analyze the endemic problems that have afflicted the education sector. I would like this interview to focus on the solutions for the benefit of all.
As a start, which areas, in a nutshell, constitute the silver bullet in improving the standard of education at the primary and secondary schools level in this country?
Shekarau: In a nutshell, three things must be provided to substantially improve on the standard of education. They are: infrastructure, teachers and instructional materials.
Let us start with infrastructure. This means the infrastructure of classrooms, laboratories, hostels, library, game facilities, etc. Most schools are currently overpopulated. Facilities, where they exist, are therefore overstretched. This has a bearing on learning due to its effect on the other two components – it overloads teachers in their duties and overstretches the use of the available instructional materials.
Over the years, there has been a deficit in infrastructure in virtually all public schools. It has not been commensurate with the increase in population. There is the need to catch up, which calls for every government to do a lot of sacrifices, in fact to spend even beyond the 26% of its budget as the minimum recommended by the UNESCO. For this, some people are even calling for declaration of state of emergency in the sector, whatever that means.
The difficulty here which all governments face is that of competing demands. Let us on the hypothetical plane say that the idea of state of emergency is accepted and all levels of governments allocate, say, 40%, of their resources to education, people will not stop to take government to task on other sectors: water supply in urban and rural areas, access roads, basic healthcare, etc. Here, the decision of the executive alone to allocate such resources would not be enough; the electorate and the legislature have to be sufficiently sensitized to accept that from now to about, say, ten years, we should forget any serious road construction, forget expansion of our hospitals, forget establishing new water treatment plants, forget..
Me: But that is impossible because people will face these politicians complaining about lack of attention to roads, hospitals, etc.
Shekarau: There you are. Unless that is done, you cannot catch up. Two things are involved in this infrastructure business: Expanding it to reduce the population of classes in existing schools, and opening new schools to accommodate many more new students. The two have to go hand in hand.
Me: Sir, with due respect, many of my readers will ask – just as some people did at the seminar – what did you do while you were there as the executive governor of your state?
Shekarau: We approached the problem from different perspectives. One, we said, since we cannot solve the problem at a go, we decided that between now and ten years we will annually take about five schools – three for boys and two for girls – and address every need of each of those schools. We build more classrooms to reduce students’ population to say 40 students per class; provide more teachers, staff room, toilets, sporting facilities, and staff quarters; furnish every classroom, laboratory, etc. Schools that enjoy this upgrading of their infrastructure should not complain for the next ten years. Then we instruct that no more overpopulation should be tolerated in such schools.
Then we said we will annually budget for building 1000 classrooms in our effort to build new schools and expanding existing ones which have not benefitted from the complete overhaul program I just mentioned. If we would be lucky to achieve continuity, we thought, my successor would continued along that path. This is the secret of the success of Lagos. I was at the 60th anniversary of Tinubu. All his commissioners, including the present Governor, were summoned to speak. All of them admitted that 90% of what Fashola is doing now was planned during Tinubu. Fashola was part of the government as chief of staff. Tinubu also retained 90% of his council members throughout his term and second term. So assuming that in Kano this program has continued for another eight years, one could see how far we have gone.
Me: How much of that target have you achieved, and what exactly were the constraints?
Shekarau: We have overhauled about ten schools and built between 5,000 and 6,000 classrooms during my tenure. We recruited 6,000 additional teachers to man them. Unfortunately, there is a limit, we clearly understood, to how far one could go along this path because while, on the one hand, every increase in classroom space will lead to the desired goal of decongesting existing ones, it will, on the other, demand for other things, like additional teachers and infrastructure. At the secondary school level, you will need at least three additional teachers per each additional classroom. That will in turn increase your recurrent expenditure. Therefore, unless you moderate your ambition, you will reach a point where other sectors become severely affected due to competing demands on the scarce resources of government. And people will start to blame you.
With all due respect, this is the problem with the almajiri schools which the President recently opened in Sokoto. In the first place, it is wrong to call them almajiri schools. You can call them Qur’anic schools or tsangaya schools, but not almajiri schools. Two, the President has created a bad impression by giving them new uniforms and school bags, meaning they are automatically going to undergo the primary school system. It won’t succeed. Yes. That is the ultimate goal, where we will have all children going to Qur’anic schools or tsangaya are well dressed, etc. But where you have a system of six hundred years, you want to supplant it with another that is less than a hundred years, where you want to overnight change a population of students that is five to six times what we you are used to, you are bound to fail. First of all, when you bring them to the classroom, who is going to teach them? You are expecting their malams to adjust overnight to a new teaching method where you have a classroom with students taught in bulk instead of the individual-student approach that they are used to. As we are today in Kano, government is not able to solve the current problems of infrastructure for its existing schools. How do you take care of new the ‘almajiri’ schools?
Me: Sorry to cut in. You have delved into this tsangaya project during your tenure. Again, what then was your approach?
Shekarau: What we did was to keep their curriculum undisturbed; and without bringing in new teachers. What we did was to initiate confidence building measures by improving on the condition of learning of the schools and the welfare of the students and their teachers. We started providing for halls to accommodate the children when they learn or sleep; basic drugs and toilet soaps to improve on their health and hygiene; electricity to light the schools when they read at night, reducing the hours they waste in gathering firewood and exacerbating our desertification problem; etc. They started to trust us. Then we picked the young graduates among them that have memorized the Quran. You often find that they are don’t have a trade to live on. Some we taught them tailoring, some shoe making, some welding, etc. They were thus empowered to employ these skills in earning a living during non-school hours or school-free days.
For those that could justify that they had farms, we bought them ox-ploughs and the bulls to drive them; each year we distribute fertilizer to them, free, to encourage in feeding their families and their students. We picked about five of them from every local government and took them to Gambia for a week’s study of how schools like theirs are run without bara (child begging); they were also taken to Sudan, Saudi Arabia and so on – to five different countries – to enable them know that the transformation we were calling them to undertake was not a ploy but something that is undertaken by their Muslim colleagues in other countries. When they return, they share their experience with others.
Then in every quota, we pick a number of the allarammas (teachers of Quranic schools), under the sponsorship of their respective local governments, to attend a seminar where they will listen to great scholars and professors in Islam who, like them, have equally memorized the Quran.
So in the end, we did not introduce anything new into their curriculum…
Me: But you tried to build confidence first…
Shekarau: Exactly. This is the way. But if you jump overnight and bring in ABCD, 2 + 2, pencil and exercise books into a student population that is five to six times what you presently have, you will go nowhere. You will fail.
Me: Was it why in the recent BBC Hausa program, all the allarammas that were interviewed on the project expressed fear, saying, “Look! These people are coming to take over our schools…?
Shekarau: Exactly. That is the impression. It is not even the fear of losing the Qur’an, but also that of turning them unemployed because you are introducing a completely alien system. They would say, “Even the little that we get from the tsangaya through zakka, sadaka, etc., because of the presence of these students will stop once they are not there.” So you are indirectly denying them a source of income and they will be ready to fight you for that. Since they are a sort of a misfit into your new system without a role to play, they will hardly accept it.
Me: Okay. Let us return to the infrastructure issue in our conventional schools. I am sorry for digressing us into the tsangaya thing. I knew you did something about it and it would be good to share the experience, as you have ably done now, with my readers.
Shekarau: The only way out of the infrastructure problem is for governments to put in a lot of funds, if the public would permit that because the same people would not accede to lack of water, electricity, healthcare, etc., to dedicate 50% of the budget to education for ten years.
Me: And on teachers?
Shekarau: How do you produce the teachers? Per every classroom in junior secondary school, with the seemingly professionalized curriculum, you need a minimum of five teachers per class, even with the possibility of some teachers manning more than one subject. This will not be a small number. So even if you provide money for the infrastructure, what plan have you made to provide the required number of qualified teachers and sustain them on your payroll?
During my tenure, I have employed additional 6,000 teachers, as I said previously. But because of political mischief, people think that by doing so you are bloating the pay roll and increasing the wage bill, forgetting that it is not wise to be building classrooms without employing more teachers. In some states, teachers are even retrenched. In fact, in 2001, Kwankwaso’s government then retrenched over 1000 teachers in the name of non-indigenes while there were no indigenes to replace them. One school alone lost about 32 teachers in that exercise alone.
My thinking as a solution to this is two or three things. There should be an automatic scholarship for all students in our colleges and faculties of education. This will attract qualified students to participate. But what is happening now, only the leftovers go for education courses, generally speaking.
Secondly, instead of the prevalent belief that products of our science schools should read courses like medicine and engineering, a certain percentage of them could be granted a package of sponsorship and incentives to read science education such that they can come back and impact on these children. We started it towards the end of my tenure. This is what led me into teaching. As a product of Aminu Kano Commercial College, our vision was to become accountants, etc. But I was good in arithmetic, and then mathematics. My result got missing in my form and my uncle was contacted by the university. When I went to the Academic Office at Ahmadu Bello University, one of the staff, having seen my excellent performance in mathematics and other science subjects said, “What the hell are you going to do with accounting. Come and read mathematics. That will make you great, renowned.” Then I went for that. Then at departmental registration, another counselor said, “Why don’t you go for B. Ed (Maths) such that you can go back and impact this talent on others. That is how I got to read Maths (education).
Then, thirdly, comes the issue of teacher retention because it is one thing to recruit teachers, it is another thing to retain them. That is why we introduced different incentives during my tenure: science teachers allowance, rural teaching allowance, games master’s allowance, house master’s allowance, etc.
Me: Okay. We have heard you on infrastructure and teachers, what remains is the aspect on instructional materials…
Shekarau: Lack of instructional materials is also part of the reason behind this massive failure in examinations. Before, when we were students, if you take English for example, you are given assignments in composition, essay writing, etc. The teacher will collect it, at least once or twice a week, and mark it for you, indicating your errors and correcting them accordingly. This is practically absent in public schools now. No books to refer students to. Even teacher’s materials like protractor, campus, etc. are absent. The child doesn’t have a math set, and the teacher doesn’t have a blackboard set. There is no way learning would take place. It is imperative, therefore, to provide instructional materials.
Me: So what did you do here?
Shekarau: As a policy, we said during my administration that provision of English and Maths textbooks for every child are compulsory on government and we started it. A bank offered to build classrooms. We told them to instead buy Maths and English books from publishers, and they did. The same thing with old boy’s associations. We gave them the statistics of our students at the secondary school level and they also assisted.
If you speak about laboratories, there aren’t sufficient labs. Where they are available, they are at most designed to accommodate forty students only. What do you do where you have more than five times that number of students? Five students would gather on an apparatus. Some of them may not touch it throughout the period. It may take even more than a year before someone would have the turn to run a single test.
The whole thing became a vicious circle. These half-baked students are admitted into colleges of education and universities. At the tertiary level too, such problems obtain – no enough infrastructure, no equipped laboratories, etc. These products are those that return to teach at the secondary school level. That is why, as we were just discussing before the interview, you can find a mathematics graduate who cannot pass a common entrance examination in mathematics! So it is like garbage in, garbage out.
My idea on all these, is that these facts have to be brought to the attention of the President, legislators, governors, etc. And the general public needs to appreciate the degree of the problem. A consensus must be reached regarding the enormity of the problem and the attention it deserves. I raised this issue thrice in the Governors’ Forum. I did not want to enumerate the problems myself but advised that we needed to assign a group of professionals who will study this problem and report back to us. But most governors are only interested in their re-election, so they go for things that the ordinary brain will appreciate quickly - physical projects, like construction of buildings and roads, electricity, hand pumps, etc. The public accepts that you are not performing until they see your grader on the road, regardless of whether you stealing their wealth or not.
So from the President down to legislators and the public, an appreciation of the problem is needed. If that appreciation is acquired, an agreement on reducing physical development projects must be reached at such that less boreholes are drilled, less roads are built. More money can be saved for education and human development. This is only possible, despite the intention of the executive, with the understanding and approval of the legislature who, traditionally, will veto it because they want physical projects to be carried out in their constituencies to justify their elections.
Now, in case such funds are available, they must be spent on all the three aspects we mentioned earlier – infrastructure, teacher training and provision of instructional material. Increasing classrooms without increasing teachers and improving their welfare will take us anywhere. When I was first employed as a teacher, I had a furnished house, a car and a rural teaching allowance such that once I shop for the month, I didn’t need to return to Kano until another month. In the morning I would be in the class, in the evening on the games field, in the night at prep and so on.
Me: Sir, is there anything you would like to put across to my readers?
Shekarau: Yes. I would like people to appreciate the nature of government and how its present structure particularly in the North hinders our regional development. In the North, we always talk with nostalgia about the era of Sardauna, forgetting the structure of government then. There was only one Premier for the entire Northern Region, one government. Policies of that government in almost all the sectors are uniformly applied in all the provinces from Adamawa to Sokoto to Kwara to Benue to Kano, etc. There were all over the place same marketing boards, same agricultural policies, and so on. Groundnut from Bauchi and other provinces is brought to Kano, piled up and loaded to wherever. That was how the pyramids were produced. Today, there are nineteen independent Sardauna, each heading in a different direction.
We need experts to study the benefits of our commonality and political leaders to believe in their proposals and implement them. If I were to bring an investor to Kano today and I could produce only a thousand tonnes of raw material, it will be of little benefit him. But if we will bring the same material from all nooks and corners of the North, it will be a big market.
Unfortunately, many people ask of what benefit is the Northern Governor’s Forum. If you ask me, I will say, “Nothing.” Meetings are held to discuss Bank of the North, NNDC, etc., while the same governors killed these things. There was a time when Joseph Sanusi, the former CBN governor, gathered us, the Northern governors. He was a southerner, a Christian. He challenged the nineteen of us to retain our accounts with Bank of the North. By that time, only four of us retained those accounts, all the rest have transferred their monies to other banks, largely for selfish interest. Sanusi continued to appeal to us. There and then one of us told him that he will not return his money to the Bank, saying, “After all, it is a bank of Kano.” Sanusi said what are you talking about?” Wallahi, it was something so trivial, unexpected of a person at the level of a governor. He was aggrieved that when the banks were reorganized, the management was changed and Abdulkadir Yakasai was brought in as MD, and, by some coincidence, Sadauki Kura, was appointed to head the supervisory team. Sanusi swore to us by God that the two appointments were made by two separate bodies without any consideration to places of origin but the records of performance in the banking industry. Most of these governors collected the loans of the bank and abandoned it without paying them.
Again, with all due respect to all of us as the governors, each of us sees himself as the chief executive of his state so why would he learn from another or collaborate with him? So we tried to sell our experience of tsangaya but some people, from side talks, were saying, “Are we so bereft that it is ANPP governors that will tell us how to handle our cases?” So the absence of a body that will coordinate things makes it difficult for any progress to be made. If Bauchi would solve its almajiri problem today, for example, it will experience an inflow of almajirai from Kano. But if these things are coordinated, a fairly common treatment will go a long way in resolving many of the issues. The same thing applies to desert encroachment. Tree planting was common during Sardauna, from Borno up to Sokoto. But today, what Jigawa plants will not be known to Kano.
This made me in 2006 to suggest an idea to General Gowon. I said, “Sir, why don’t you constitute a committee of reputable people to make twenty of you, who will summon us to a meeting. Each governor will keep aside his cap as a governor at the gate of the meeting. Challenge us with guidelines on our common problems – desert, agriculture, almajirai, etc. – to adopt common policies.” Though each governor is doing his best – especially if you listen to him – but there is no synergy in spite of the common environment within which we operate.
It is I mentioned to Justice Mamman Nasir at the recently concluded Elders Forum meeting that was summoned by Maitama Sule: “So long as we do not carry the Governors Forum along, we will only be wasting our time. Whether we like it or not, they control the resources and, by extension, the people; it is they that cause the money to circulate.” That was also my argument with my friend Nasiru (El-rufai) in an initiative that we started initially. He said that the problem is the governors, ‘yan iska, that we must fight them, etc. I said, “If they gang up, they can frustrate you. You can only abuse them. But kyan dara kasawa (of what benefit would it be?). So instead of abusing, call them and give them their due respect. Let our elders and get them to agree on some things such that anyone amongst them who reneges on his promise would be held accountable by the public. A blanket treatment will not take us anywhere. People will just say, ‘When you were there what did you do, without coming and listening to your explanations?”
So these are some of the things I wanted to highlight at the seminar though I was not the speaker at the occasion.
Me: Thank you, Your Excellency, for hosting me and sharing with us from the wealth of your experience. I believe it will be of immense use to my readers. Ma’assalam.
Kano
3 June 2012
By Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde
Ibrahim Shekarau
On 17 April 2012, I was hosted by the former executive governor of Kano State, His Excellency, Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, the Sardaunan Kano, who spoke on the measures required to improve on the standard of education in our public schools. A digression led us to a discussion on President Jonathan’s almajiri schools project for which Shekarau foresee a woeful failure. Finally, he discussed the position of Northern Governors and the need for a central body to coordinate common development projects in the region. This is how the interview went after the exchange of pleasantries.
Me. Your Excellency, I know you have been a teacher and a civil servant all your working life before you were elected the governor of Kano State. You have spent eight years on that seat. You have seen it all. You felt the heat. You wore the shoe, so you know where it pinches. In the recent seminar on Muslims and Democracy in Nigeria, I heard you eloquently analyze the endemic problems that have afflicted the education sector. I would like this interview to focus on the solutions for the benefit of all.
As a start, which areas, in a nutshell, constitute the silver bullet in improving the standard of education at the primary and secondary schools level in this country?
Shekarau: In a nutshell, three things must be provided to substantially improve on the standard of education. They are: infrastructure, teachers and instructional materials.
Let us start with infrastructure. This means the infrastructure of classrooms, laboratories, hostels, library, game facilities, etc. Most schools are currently overpopulated. Facilities, where they exist, are therefore overstretched. This has a bearing on learning due to its effect on the other two components – it overloads teachers in their duties and overstretches the use of the available instructional materials.
Over the years, there has been a deficit in infrastructure in virtually all public schools. It has not been commensurate with the increase in population. There is the need to catch up, which calls for every government to do a lot of sacrifices, in fact to spend even beyond the 26% of its budget as the minimum recommended by the UNESCO. For this, some people are even calling for declaration of state of emergency in the sector, whatever that means.
The difficulty here which all governments face is that of competing demands. Let us on the hypothetical plane say that the idea of state of emergency is accepted and all levels of governments allocate, say, 40%, of their resources to education, people will not stop to take government to task on other sectors: water supply in urban and rural areas, access roads, basic healthcare, etc. Here, the decision of the executive alone to allocate such resources would not be enough; the electorate and the legislature have to be sufficiently sensitized to accept that from now to about, say, ten years, we should forget any serious road construction, forget expansion of our hospitals, forget establishing new water treatment plants, forget..
Me: But that is impossible because people will face these politicians complaining about lack of attention to roads, hospitals, etc.
Shekarau: There you are. Unless that is done, you cannot catch up. Two things are involved in this infrastructure business: Expanding it to reduce the population of classes in existing schools, and opening new schools to accommodate many more new students. The two have to go hand in hand.
Me: Sir, with due respect, many of my readers will ask – just as some people did at the seminar – what did you do while you were there as the executive governor of your state?
Shekarau: We approached the problem from different perspectives. One, we said, since we cannot solve the problem at a go, we decided that between now and ten years we will annually take about five schools – three for boys and two for girls – and address every need of each of those schools. We build more classrooms to reduce students’ population to say 40 students per class; provide more teachers, staff room, toilets, sporting facilities, and staff quarters; furnish every classroom, laboratory, etc. Schools that enjoy this upgrading of their infrastructure should not complain for the next ten years. Then we instruct that no more overpopulation should be tolerated in such schools.
Then we said we will annually budget for building 1000 classrooms in our effort to build new schools and expanding existing ones which have not benefitted from the complete overhaul program I just mentioned. If we would be lucky to achieve continuity, we thought, my successor would continued along that path. This is the secret of the success of Lagos. I was at the 60th anniversary of Tinubu. All his commissioners, including the present Governor, were summoned to speak. All of them admitted that 90% of what Fashola is doing now was planned during Tinubu. Fashola was part of the government as chief of staff. Tinubu also retained 90% of his council members throughout his term and second term. So assuming that in Kano this program has continued for another eight years, one could see how far we have gone.
Me: How much of that target have you achieved, and what exactly were the constraints?
Shekarau: We have overhauled about ten schools and built between 5,000 and 6,000 classrooms during my tenure. We recruited 6,000 additional teachers to man them. Unfortunately, there is a limit, we clearly understood, to how far one could go along this path because while, on the one hand, every increase in classroom space will lead to the desired goal of decongesting existing ones, it will, on the other, demand for other things, like additional teachers and infrastructure. At the secondary school level, you will need at least three additional teachers per each additional classroom. That will in turn increase your recurrent expenditure. Therefore, unless you moderate your ambition, you will reach a point where other sectors become severely affected due to competing demands on the scarce resources of government. And people will start to blame you.
With all due respect, this is the problem with the almajiri schools which the President recently opened in Sokoto. In the first place, it is wrong to call them almajiri schools. You can call them Qur’anic schools or tsangaya schools, but not almajiri schools. Two, the President has created a bad impression by giving them new uniforms and school bags, meaning they are automatically going to undergo the primary school system. It won’t succeed. Yes. That is the ultimate goal, where we will have all children going to Qur’anic schools or tsangaya are well dressed, etc. But where you have a system of six hundred years, you want to supplant it with another that is less than a hundred years, where you want to overnight change a population of students that is five to six times what we you are used to, you are bound to fail. First of all, when you bring them to the classroom, who is going to teach them? You are expecting their malams to adjust overnight to a new teaching method where you have a classroom with students taught in bulk instead of the individual-student approach that they are used to. As we are today in Kano, government is not able to solve the current problems of infrastructure for its existing schools. How do you take care of new the ‘almajiri’ schools?
Me: Sorry to cut in. You have delved into this tsangaya project during your tenure. Again, what then was your approach?
Shekarau: What we did was to keep their curriculum undisturbed; and without bringing in new teachers. What we did was to initiate confidence building measures by improving on the condition of learning of the schools and the welfare of the students and their teachers. We started providing for halls to accommodate the children when they learn or sleep; basic drugs and toilet soaps to improve on their health and hygiene; electricity to light the schools when they read at night, reducing the hours they waste in gathering firewood and exacerbating our desertification problem; etc. They started to trust us. Then we picked the young graduates among them that have memorized the Quran. You often find that they are don’t have a trade to live on. Some we taught them tailoring, some shoe making, some welding, etc. They were thus empowered to employ these skills in earning a living during non-school hours or school-free days.
For those that could justify that they had farms, we bought them ox-ploughs and the bulls to drive them; each year we distribute fertilizer to them, free, to encourage in feeding their families and their students. We picked about five of them from every local government and took them to Gambia for a week’s study of how schools like theirs are run without bara (child begging); they were also taken to Sudan, Saudi Arabia and so on – to five different countries – to enable them know that the transformation we were calling them to undertake was not a ploy but something that is undertaken by their Muslim colleagues in other countries. When they return, they share their experience with others.
Then in every quota, we pick a number of the allarammas (teachers of Quranic schools), under the sponsorship of their respective local governments, to attend a seminar where they will listen to great scholars and professors in Islam who, like them, have equally memorized the Quran.
So in the end, we did not introduce anything new into their curriculum…
Me: But you tried to build confidence first…
Shekarau: Exactly. This is the way. But if you jump overnight and bring in ABCD, 2 + 2, pencil and exercise books into a student population that is five to six times what you presently have, you will go nowhere. You will fail.
Me: Was it why in the recent BBC Hausa program, all the allarammas that were interviewed on the project expressed fear, saying, “Look! These people are coming to take over our schools…?
Shekarau: Exactly. That is the impression. It is not even the fear of losing the Qur’an, but also that of turning them unemployed because you are introducing a completely alien system. They would say, “Even the little that we get from the tsangaya through zakka, sadaka, etc., because of the presence of these students will stop once they are not there.” So you are indirectly denying them a source of income and they will be ready to fight you for that. Since they are a sort of a misfit into your new system without a role to play, they will hardly accept it.
Me: Okay. Let us return to the infrastructure issue in our conventional schools. I am sorry for digressing us into the tsangaya thing. I knew you did something about it and it would be good to share the experience, as you have ably done now, with my readers.
Shekarau: The only way out of the infrastructure problem is for governments to put in a lot of funds, if the public would permit that because the same people would not accede to lack of water, electricity, healthcare, etc., to dedicate 50% of the budget to education for ten years.
Me: And on teachers?
Shekarau: How do you produce the teachers? Per every classroom in junior secondary school, with the seemingly professionalized curriculum, you need a minimum of five teachers per class, even with the possibility of some teachers manning more than one subject. This will not be a small number. So even if you provide money for the infrastructure, what plan have you made to provide the required number of qualified teachers and sustain them on your payroll?
During my tenure, I have employed additional 6,000 teachers, as I said previously. But because of political mischief, people think that by doing so you are bloating the pay roll and increasing the wage bill, forgetting that it is not wise to be building classrooms without employing more teachers. In some states, teachers are even retrenched. In fact, in 2001, Kwankwaso’s government then retrenched over 1000 teachers in the name of non-indigenes while there were no indigenes to replace them. One school alone lost about 32 teachers in that exercise alone.
My thinking as a solution to this is two or three things. There should be an automatic scholarship for all students in our colleges and faculties of education. This will attract qualified students to participate. But what is happening now, only the leftovers go for education courses, generally speaking.
Secondly, instead of the prevalent belief that products of our science schools should read courses like medicine and engineering, a certain percentage of them could be granted a package of sponsorship and incentives to read science education such that they can come back and impact on these children. We started it towards the end of my tenure. This is what led me into teaching. As a product of Aminu Kano Commercial College, our vision was to become accountants, etc. But I was good in arithmetic, and then mathematics. My result got missing in my form and my uncle was contacted by the university. When I went to the Academic Office at Ahmadu Bello University, one of the staff, having seen my excellent performance in mathematics and other science subjects said, “What the hell are you going to do with accounting. Come and read mathematics. That will make you great, renowned.” Then I went for that. Then at departmental registration, another counselor said, “Why don’t you go for B. Ed (Maths) such that you can go back and impact this talent on others. That is how I got to read Maths (education).
Then, thirdly, comes the issue of teacher retention because it is one thing to recruit teachers, it is another thing to retain them. That is why we introduced different incentives during my tenure: science teachers allowance, rural teaching allowance, games master’s allowance, house master’s allowance, etc.
Me: Okay. We have heard you on infrastructure and teachers, what remains is the aspect on instructional materials…
Shekarau: Lack of instructional materials is also part of the reason behind this massive failure in examinations. Before, when we were students, if you take English for example, you are given assignments in composition, essay writing, etc. The teacher will collect it, at least once or twice a week, and mark it for you, indicating your errors and correcting them accordingly. This is practically absent in public schools now. No books to refer students to. Even teacher’s materials like protractor, campus, etc. are absent. The child doesn’t have a math set, and the teacher doesn’t have a blackboard set. There is no way learning would take place. It is imperative, therefore, to provide instructional materials.
Me: So what did you do here?
Shekarau: As a policy, we said during my administration that provision of English and Maths textbooks for every child are compulsory on government and we started it. A bank offered to build classrooms. We told them to instead buy Maths and English books from publishers, and they did. The same thing with old boy’s associations. We gave them the statistics of our students at the secondary school level and they also assisted.
If you speak about laboratories, there aren’t sufficient labs. Where they are available, they are at most designed to accommodate forty students only. What do you do where you have more than five times that number of students? Five students would gather on an apparatus. Some of them may not touch it throughout the period. It may take even more than a year before someone would have the turn to run a single test.
The whole thing became a vicious circle. These half-baked students are admitted into colleges of education and universities. At the tertiary level too, such problems obtain – no enough infrastructure, no equipped laboratories, etc. These products are those that return to teach at the secondary school level. That is why, as we were just discussing before the interview, you can find a mathematics graduate who cannot pass a common entrance examination in mathematics! So it is like garbage in, garbage out.
My idea on all these, is that these facts have to be brought to the attention of the President, legislators, governors, etc. And the general public needs to appreciate the degree of the problem. A consensus must be reached regarding the enormity of the problem and the attention it deserves. I raised this issue thrice in the Governors’ Forum. I did not want to enumerate the problems myself but advised that we needed to assign a group of professionals who will study this problem and report back to us. But most governors are only interested in their re-election, so they go for things that the ordinary brain will appreciate quickly - physical projects, like construction of buildings and roads, electricity, hand pumps, etc. The public accepts that you are not performing until they see your grader on the road, regardless of whether you stealing their wealth or not.
So from the President down to legislators and the public, an appreciation of the problem is needed. If that appreciation is acquired, an agreement on reducing physical development projects must be reached at such that less boreholes are drilled, less roads are built. More money can be saved for education and human development. This is only possible, despite the intention of the executive, with the understanding and approval of the legislature who, traditionally, will veto it because they want physical projects to be carried out in their constituencies to justify their elections.
Now, in case such funds are available, they must be spent on all the three aspects we mentioned earlier – infrastructure, teacher training and provision of instructional material. Increasing classrooms without increasing teachers and improving their welfare will take us anywhere. When I was first employed as a teacher, I had a furnished house, a car and a rural teaching allowance such that once I shop for the month, I didn’t need to return to Kano until another month. In the morning I would be in the class, in the evening on the games field, in the night at prep and so on.
Me: Sir, is there anything you would like to put across to my readers?
Shekarau: Yes. I would like people to appreciate the nature of government and how its present structure particularly in the North hinders our regional development. In the North, we always talk with nostalgia about the era of Sardauna, forgetting the structure of government then. There was only one Premier for the entire Northern Region, one government. Policies of that government in almost all the sectors are uniformly applied in all the provinces from Adamawa to Sokoto to Kwara to Benue to Kano, etc. There were all over the place same marketing boards, same agricultural policies, and so on. Groundnut from Bauchi and other provinces is brought to Kano, piled up and loaded to wherever. That was how the pyramids were produced. Today, there are nineteen independent Sardauna, each heading in a different direction.
We need experts to study the benefits of our commonality and political leaders to believe in their proposals and implement them. If I were to bring an investor to Kano today and I could produce only a thousand tonnes of raw material, it will be of little benefit him. But if we will bring the same material from all nooks and corners of the North, it will be a big market.
Unfortunately, many people ask of what benefit is the Northern Governor’s Forum. If you ask me, I will say, “Nothing.” Meetings are held to discuss Bank of the North, NNDC, etc., while the same governors killed these things. There was a time when Joseph Sanusi, the former CBN governor, gathered us, the Northern governors. He was a southerner, a Christian. He challenged the nineteen of us to retain our accounts with Bank of the North. By that time, only four of us retained those accounts, all the rest have transferred their monies to other banks, largely for selfish interest. Sanusi continued to appeal to us. There and then one of us told him that he will not return his money to the Bank, saying, “After all, it is a bank of Kano.” Sanusi said what are you talking about?” Wallahi, it was something so trivial, unexpected of a person at the level of a governor. He was aggrieved that when the banks were reorganized, the management was changed and Abdulkadir Yakasai was brought in as MD, and, by some coincidence, Sadauki Kura, was appointed to head the supervisory team. Sanusi swore to us by God that the two appointments were made by two separate bodies without any consideration to places of origin but the records of performance in the banking industry. Most of these governors collected the loans of the bank and abandoned it without paying them.
Again, with all due respect to all of us as the governors, each of us sees himself as the chief executive of his state so why would he learn from another or collaborate with him? So we tried to sell our experience of tsangaya but some people, from side talks, were saying, “Are we so bereft that it is ANPP governors that will tell us how to handle our cases?” So the absence of a body that will coordinate things makes it difficult for any progress to be made. If Bauchi would solve its almajiri problem today, for example, it will experience an inflow of almajirai from Kano. But if these things are coordinated, a fairly common treatment will go a long way in resolving many of the issues. The same thing applies to desert encroachment. Tree planting was common during Sardauna, from Borno up to Sokoto. But today, what Jigawa plants will not be known to Kano.
This made me in 2006 to suggest an idea to General Gowon. I said, “Sir, why don’t you constitute a committee of reputable people to make twenty of you, who will summon us to a meeting. Each governor will keep aside his cap as a governor at the gate of the meeting. Challenge us with guidelines on our common problems – desert, agriculture, almajirai, etc. – to adopt common policies.” Though each governor is doing his best – especially if you listen to him – but there is no synergy in spite of the common environment within which we operate.
It is I mentioned to Justice Mamman Nasir at the recently concluded Elders Forum meeting that was summoned by Maitama Sule: “So long as we do not carry the Governors Forum along, we will only be wasting our time. Whether we like it or not, they control the resources and, by extension, the people; it is they that cause the money to circulate.” That was also my argument with my friend Nasiru (El-rufai) in an initiative that we started initially. He said that the problem is the governors, ‘yan iska, that we must fight them, etc. I said, “If they gang up, they can frustrate you. You can only abuse them. But kyan dara kasawa (of what benefit would it be?). So instead of abusing, call them and give them their due respect. Let our elders and get them to agree on some things such that anyone amongst them who reneges on his promise would be held accountable by the public. A blanket treatment will not take us anywhere. People will just say, ‘When you were there what did you do, without coming and listening to your explanations?”
So these are some of the things I wanted to highlight at the seminar though I was not the speaker at the occasion.
Me: Thank you, Your Excellency, for hosting me and sharing with us from the wealth of your experience. I believe it will be of immense use to my readers. Ma’assalam.
Kano
3 June 2012
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Friday Discourse 116: Scholarship: N70,000.00 Minimum
Friday Discourse (116)
By Dr. Aliyu Tilde
Scholarship: N70,000.00 Minimum
Today, our discussion is on scholarship awards in northern states. Before looking at the figures, it is important to recall the status of such awards in the past. If we are able to cast a contrast between the past and the present, then our appeal for N70,000.00 minimum will be better understood because, as al-Motanabbi said, “things become clearer when contrasted with their opposites.”
Origin
All students of northern states, except those from the former Benue and Kwara States, enjoyed full sponsorship of their education up to the mid-1980s. By full we mean they were given adequate funds by their state governments to meet all the necessities of higher learning, including tuition fees, feeding, books, transport and project allowances. Those sponsored to undertake studies overseas enjoyed additional allowances commensurate with the condition of living in their host countries.
Also, in-service students, whether on regular or ‘sandwich’ courses, enjoyed their full salaries in addition to the allowances mentioned earlier. Postgraduate students, who might not have even joined the civil service, like architecture students, also enjoyed GL 8 salaries as well as other incentives, like car loan.
We excluded Benue and Kwara states because by 1980 their ‘bursary’ were not complete awards like the scholarships of the remaining northern states. Nevertheless, the ‘bursary’ was reasonable enough to foot a substantial portion of the scholarship bill of their students on campus then.
Thus, the poverty of a family did not stop a northern child from acquiring higher education once he was successful at the ordinary or higher certificate levels. We can confidently assert that almost all our past and present leaders benefited from this generosity of government during the former Northern region or after the creation of states. This was the system responsible for meeting the manpower demand of the North between 1950s and mid 1980s. It also assisted states in the region to fill, as much as possible, their quota in federal appointments.
Figures
Coming to figures, we may not need to recall what was paid in the 1950s or 60s using the West African pound which is unknown to most of us. The figures paid in the seventies would provide a good mean between the 1960s and the mid-1980s. For the purpose of easy computation, we will put the average scholarship awarded to northern students by 1979 at N1,000.00. This may sound ridiculous today; but then, when the dollar was simply 60k, it was a big sum: $1,666.67 or N250,000.00 today!
Fat textbooks of over 500 pages, like Biology’s Vines and Rees were only N6.00; Physic’s Nelkon and Parker, N5.00; Chemistry’s Seinko and Plaine, N4.50; etc. Buying the books was not necessary because there were many stocked in the library in addition to comprehensive lecture notes of teachers. A meal was 50k, i.e. N405.00 for three meals a day (‘1-1-1’) for the whole year. Accommodation, though available and furnished, was the most expensive – N90.00. Tuition was free. The student therefore had enough money to pursue his studies unhindered by financial constraints. He was only expected to cope with the rigour of studies.
Now the reader is in a better position to understand the frivolity of the scholarship awards that present governments in the North give to their students. Let us study the data in the box presented on this page.
The amounts ranged from the least N1,200 given to Bauchi state arts students to N36,000.00 given those of Zamfara (as monthly instalments of N3,000.00 each). Putting aside the bursary award from Zamfara which appears to be a special case, the average scholarship award from the other fourteen northern states sampled was N6,870.00 and N5,170.00 for science and art students respectively. This is only 2.75% and 2.07% of the amount enjoyed by students of the same states twenty years ago in 1979.
This shows that over the past 20 years, northern states have withdrawn their subsidy on higher education by an average of 97%. But before examining the reasons why governments took this measure, let us first look at the options and implications of their action on the students and the society at large.
Options
Essentially, the states have implicitly told the students to make a choice between three options. One, they should abandon higher education, no matter their success at lower levels. Two, they should look for an alternative source of funding. Three, they should do the impossible of depending on these insufficient amounts.
The option of abandoning higher education is not something that a region already lagging behind in education should buy. Higher education is important in manpower development at both state and local government levels. The North is crying marginalization while at the same time, by figures like these, discouraging its indigenes from possessing the basic qualification required for employment. As President Obasanjo once observed, the future political crisis that our backwardness in education portends to the nation will be enormous. Without higher education how do we get the qualified personnel to man our hospitals, construct our roads, build our houses, teach our children or manage our economy? More importantly, can we make do with permanent secretaries, commissioners and governors who are illiterates? So higher education cannot be abandoned. This option, therefore, is not tenable.
The option of alternative funding, as found in the south, is meaningful only in the context of self-sponsorship. It means that only children from materially advantaged families could attain higher education. Such children include the sons of businessmen, generals, top civil servants, etc. There is nothing wrong with such children becoming educated because they will return to serve their community and advance its cause. But there is every evil in allowing education to be solely a function of wealth. No modern society with egalitarian principles will support the condemnation of the greatest portion to its population to class exploitation, illiteracy, poverty, disease, and so on. Education is the greatest vehicle of social mobility and, as much as possible, it must be made accessible to everyone. With over 70% of northern families living under poverty, the option of self-sponsorship is simply not feasible.
The third option is for a student with the qualification and zeal to pursue higher education but who is not from a wealthy background to accept the insignificant offers of his state government and hope to struggle hard enough to manage life on campus. My findings show that such a student is only building a castle in the air. The meagre amounts quoted above have not reach the students of many states for years now. The money could be approved and released but it is often stolen by members and staff of the scholarship boards. Students from Bauchi and Gombe states, for example, have not received a dime from their N1,200.00 and N3,500.00 for the third consecutive session now! Sometimes only half of the amount is paid. For example, students of Taraba State last year had their award raised to N7,000.00 per annum. What the staff of the board did was to divide the vouchers into two (of N3,500.00 each) and ask the students to sign both. They gave them N3,500.00 and promised to return after submitting the other voucher to government for claim. They never returned. What happened to these monies in both cases is obvious. It was 419, until they are paid.
The effects of insufficient funding on the student are many. Such students often lead a malnourished life of only one meal a day on campus. Sometimes, they will only manage with groundnuts or soaked garri. As libraries are poorly stocked and such students cannot afford purchasing any textbook, they depend on borrowing handouts from their classmates in addition to the few lines of lecture notes they could scribble whenever they are opportune to attend a class. The result is delayed graduation of half-baked students with extremely weak grades. Because most of their time was spent on the struggle to survive, not to study, many have dropped out voluntarily or were withdrawn as a result of poor performance.
Reasons
I doubt if this is what any of our governors would like to see. But what are their possible excuses?
The first excuse could be that their revenue now is not as good as in 1979 to warrant paying students N250,000.00 annually. I would argue that though the naira has lost its value, the present allocations, in dollar value, remains the same as in 1979. Then, the states were getting an average of N9million which is roughly the same with what they obtain today if you consider that most of the states have been further divided into two or three. Sokoto was divided into three states while Kaduna, Kano, Adamawa, Bauchi and Borno were each divided into two. Furthermore, if we realize that the federal government now funds education, ecology and a number of other sectors, we can easily make a case that there is less pressure on the states now than twenty years ago. The excuse of under-funding is therefore untenable.
The next excuse to debunk is the issue of population. We agree that our population has doubled between 1963 and today; so also enrolment and number of our schools. However, these do not signify, at least in the North that has been performing very poorly in national GCE examinations, increase in candidates eligible for higher education. This can easily be proven from the records of scholarship boards in the North. The peak was in the early eighties. In fact, bad performance of our students in GCE is the reason for, not against, restoration of full sponsorship of higher learning to the status it was twenty years ago.
The question is: what then is happening to the resources at the hands of these governments? It will not be fair to hold our present administrations as responsible for this situation. It is a something they inherited. We need to go back and find reasons lying in the negligence of military regimes that ruled this country between 1986 and 1999. They did not match the devaluation of the naira with a commensurate increase in the value of the awards and wages. Neither was it absolutely the fault of the then military governors. The fault lied in the corrupt centre that hoarded federal as well as state allocations. States were then given funds that could barely pay salaries. This led to the entire collapse of their infrastructure and essential services. Wages also became meaningless. Corruption heightened, and as we saw desperate governors carting away with state owned heavy equipment and truckloads of furniture and cattle to their villages!
Workers, through strikes, gradually fought for increase in their wages, especially from the early 1990s. But for students the situation remained the same to date. What fight could they put? They could only resort to persuasion, a language that does not appeal to governments in this country.
Present regimes can legitimately be blamed if after three years in office they failed to do anything or enough to alleviate the suffering of our students in institutions of higher learning. Some of the states have responded, though not substantially. Thus, while some have doubled the amounts to the figures we saw in the table, some are yet to add a kobo over what they inherited from their military predecessors.
An accusation that we cannot defend the present administrations in northern Nigeria against is that of misplacement of priorities. Their predecessors in the 1970s and early 1980s placed education as their first priority. On the contrary, looking at budgets of many states today, we find rural development, transport and even tourism given shares each in multiples of that of education. (Most of peanuts spent on education goes to rehabilitation of schools that serves other purposes than learning.) The money spent on sponsoring pilgrims alone from every northern state is many times more than what it spends on scholarships! This is wrong. We have spoken against this many times before, but to no avail. How can we justify the ugly situation?
Minimum
Justice demands a quick redress. If we do not accord education the highest priority and sufficiently sponsor our students on higher education, we should rest assured that we are sowing the seeds of discord in our society. We already have enough trouble right now to contend with presently. We have benefited from the wisdom of our predecessors who made sacrifices to enable us get educated. Humanity demands that as leaders today we should rekindle the torch of that wisdom after military dictatorships have put it off. It is only then that the present students, who will come to occupy our seats in the next twenty years, whether we like it or not, would have mercy over the children we will leave behind. Otherwise, they have every reason to dismiss them, saying: “Look, your father was occupying this seat while I was starving on campus before I could pass out of the university. I was given N1,200.00 per annum. So get out.” Let us save our progenies from that painful consequence by acting appropriately NOW. The money we are busy piling will not be of any use to them.
Any state in the North which is ready to sponsor higher education must think of beginning with nothing below N70,000.00 annually for any student undertaking a degree or higher national diploma. This amount is not enough on its own but it will definitely be ameliorating. Here, we salute the foresight of Yeriman Bakura who pays his students a monthly bursary of N3,000.00. But if he can sacrifice the sponsorship of pilgrims he can still raise it to N100,000.00 per student annually. He can do it; in fact he should do it because of Shariah.
The matter is personally disturbing to me because my state, Bauchi, pays the least amount N1,200.00! But we are blessed with a generous governor who does not deserve to be second to any. I believe, on hearing about it, he will pick up the challenge immediately. In addition, we call on him to immediately rid the scholarship board of some wolves that have been preying on students’ allowances. They are more suitable living among other wolves in the jungle of Yankari.
Kano is the richest among northern states and its students had the highest scholarship awards in the early eighties under the governorship of Abubakar Rimi. Now, Rabi’u Kwankwaso, a PhD, will certainly prove his grasp of the importance of education and lead other states by following the precedence of Rimi and improving on it.
From Sokoto and Kebbi states, the scholastic legacy of Shehu Danfodio and Shehu Abdullahi – the most prolific writer of the Negro race in the 19th century – denies them the sadistic tradition of starving their students. If the Shehu were to return to Sokoto today, and Abdullahi to Gwandu, I have no doubt that they will approve the restoration of N250,000.00 for students of their states.
Borno and Yobe states have a history of warfare, generosity, scholarship and leadership that they inherited from Dhi Yadain, Dunama, Alooma and el-Kanemi – people that worked hard to build civilizations in the Chad Basin at Kukawa, Ngazargamu and Dikwa. Warfare and Civilizations are today built on education. Encouraging ignorance by paying their students N3,500.00 annually is therefore the least expected of leaders presently occupying the seats of such great ancestors. We hope they will hearken to our call and redress the injustice.
In Kaduna state, the governor has tried by offering N15,000.00 to his science students. But he is still far behind Usman Jibrin and Balarabe Musa in allocating the greatest share of his budget to education and scholarships in particular.
Katsina embraced western education earlier and better than most parts of the North. It recorded the highest number of influential civil servants. Their governor, who is reported to be honest, will undoubtedly lend his ear to our call and meet the minimum his students would need in institutions of higher learning so as to maintain that record in the future.
The Nubian (Nupe) governor of Niger State should remember that their ancestors built the famous pyramids in Egypt. Why should he fail today to build a pyramid of degrees and diplomas in Bida, tall enough to be seen by sailors on the Atlantic?
And so it is with every other state in the North. Each of them has something of pride or necessity that will strongly persuade it to wake up and realize that the future in Nigeria belongs to the educated. Why should they, therefore, condemn their indigenes to servitude by their inaction?
That is the call we are making on behalf of our present and future students in institutions of higher learning. But ours is to advise; the action is left to the administrators. May God bless those of them who are humble enough to listen to the advice and act promptly. Amen.
By Dr. Aliyu Tilde
Scholarship: N70,000.00 Minimum
Today, our discussion is on scholarship awards in northern states. Before looking at the figures, it is important to recall the status of such awards in the past. If we are able to cast a contrast between the past and the present, then our appeal for N70,000.00 minimum will be better understood because, as al-Motanabbi said, “things become clearer when contrasted with their opposites.”
Origin
All students of northern states, except those from the former Benue and Kwara States, enjoyed full sponsorship of their education up to the mid-1980s. By full we mean they were given adequate funds by their state governments to meet all the necessities of higher learning, including tuition fees, feeding, books, transport and project allowances. Those sponsored to undertake studies overseas enjoyed additional allowances commensurate with the condition of living in their host countries.
Also, in-service students, whether on regular or ‘sandwich’ courses, enjoyed their full salaries in addition to the allowances mentioned earlier. Postgraduate students, who might not have even joined the civil service, like architecture students, also enjoyed GL 8 salaries as well as other incentives, like car loan.
We excluded Benue and Kwara states because by 1980 their ‘bursary’ were not complete awards like the scholarships of the remaining northern states. Nevertheless, the ‘bursary’ was reasonable enough to foot a substantial portion of the scholarship bill of their students on campus then.
Thus, the poverty of a family did not stop a northern child from acquiring higher education once he was successful at the ordinary or higher certificate levels. We can confidently assert that almost all our past and present leaders benefited from this generosity of government during the former Northern region or after the creation of states. This was the system responsible for meeting the manpower demand of the North between 1950s and mid 1980s. It also assisted states in the region to fill, as much as possible, their quota in federal appointments.
Figures
Coming to figures, we may not need to recall what was paid in the 1950s or 60s using the West African pound which is unknown to most of us. The figures paid in the seventies would provide a good mean between the 1960s and the mid-1980s. For the purpose of easy computation, we will put the average scholarship awarded to northern students by 1979 at N1,000.00. This may sound ridiculous today; but then, when the dollar was simply 60k, it was a big sum: $1,666.67 or N250,000.00 today!
Fat textbooks of over 500 pages, like Biology’s Vines and Rees were only N6.00; Physic’s Nelkon and Parker, N5.00; Chemistry’s Seinko and Plaine, N4.50; etc. Buying the books was not necessary because there were many stocked in the library in addition to comprehensive lecture notes of teachers. A meal was 50k, i.e. N405.00 for three meals a day (‘1-1-1’) for the whole year. Accommodation, though available and furnished, was the most expensive – N90.00. Tuition was free. The student therefore had enough money to pursue his studies unhindered by financial constraints. He was only expected to cope with the rigour of studies.
Now the reader is in a better position to understand the frivolity of the scholarship awards that present governments in the North give to their students. Let us study the data in the box presented on this page.
The amounts ranged from the least N1,200 given to Bauchi state arts students to N36,000.00 given those of Zamfara (as monthly instalments of N3,000.00 each). Putting aside the bursary award from Zamfara which appears to be a special case, the average scholarship award from the other fourteen northern states sampled was N6,870.00 and N5,170.00 for science and art students respectively. This is only 2.75% and 2.07% of the amount enjoyed by students of the same states twenty years ago in 1979.
This shows that over the past 20 years, northern states have withdrawn their subsidy on higher education by an average of 97%. But before examining the reasons why governments took this measure, let us first look at the options and implications of their action on the students and the society at large.
Options
Essentially, the states have implicitly told the students to make a choice between three options. One, they should abandon higher education, no matter their success at lower levels. Two, they should look for an alternative source of funding. Three, they should do the impossible of depending on these insufficient amounts.
The option of abandoning higher education is not something that a region already lagging behind in education should buy. Higher education is important in manpower development at both state and local government levels. The North is crying marginalization while at the same time, by figures like these, discouraging its indigenes from possessing the basic qualification required for employment. As President Obasanjo once observed, the future political crisis that our backwardness in education portends to the nation will be enormous. Without higher education how do we get the qualified personnel to man our hospitals, construct our roads, build our houses, teach our children or manage our economy? More importantly, can we make do with permanent secretaries, commissioners and governors who are illiterates? So higher education cannot be abandoned. This option, therefore, is not tenable.
The option of alternative funding, as found in the south, is meaningful only in the context of self-sponsorship. It means that only children from materially advantaged families could attain higher education. Such children include the sons of businessmen, generals, top civil servants, etc. There is nothing wrong with such children becoming educated because they will return to serve their community and advance its cause. But there is every evil in allowing education to be solely a function of wealth. No modern society with egalitarian principles will support the condemnation of the greatest portion to its population to class exploitation, illiteracy, poverty, disease, and so on. Education is the greatest vehicle of social mobility and, as much as possible, it must be made accessible to everyone. With over 70% of northern families living under poverty, the option of self-sponsorship is simply not feasible.
The third option is for a student with the qualification and zeal to pursue higher education but who is not from a wealthy background to accept the insignificant offers of his state government and hope to struggle hard enough to manage life on campus. My findings show that such a student is only building a castle in the air. The meagre amounts quoted above have not reach the students of many states for years now. The money could be approved and released but it is often stolen by members and staff of the scholarship boards. Students from Bauchi and Gombe states, for example, have not received a dime from their N1,200.00 and N3,500.00 for the third consecutive session now! Sometimes only half of the amount is paid. For example, students of Taraba State last year had their award raised to N7,000.00 per annum. What the staff of the board did was to divide the vouchers into two (of N3,500.00 each) and ask the students to sign both. They gave them N3,500.00 and promised to return after submitting the other voucher to government for claim. They never returned. What happened to these monies in both cases is obvious. It was 419, until they are paid.
The effects of insufficient funding on the student are many. Such students often lead a malnourished life of only one meal a day on campus. Sometimes, they will only manage with groundnuts or soaked garri. As libraries are poorly stocked and such students cannot afford purchasing any textbook, they depend on borrowing handouts from their classmates in addition to the few lines of lecture notes they could scribble whenever they are opportune to attend a class. The result is delayed graduation of half-baked students with extremely weak grades. Because most of their time was spent on the struggle to survive, not to study, many have dropped out voluntarily or were withdrawn as a result of poor performance.
Reasons
I doubt if this is what any of our governors would like to see. But what are their possible excuses?
The first excuse could be that their revenue now is not as good as in 1979 to warrant paying students N250,000.00 annually. I would argue that though the naira has lost its value, the present allocations, in dollar value, remains the same as in 1979. Then, the states were getting an average of N9million which is roughly the same with what they obtain today if you consider that most of the states have been further divided into two or three. Sokoto was divided into three states while Kaduna, Kano, Adamawa, Bauchi and Borno were each divided into two. Furthermore, if we realize that the federal government now funds education, ecology and a number of other sectors, we can easily make a case that there is less pressure on the states now than twenty years ago. The excuse of under-funding is therefore untenable.
The next excuse to debunk is the issue of population. We agree that our population has doubled between 1963 and today; so also enrolment and number of our schools. However, these do not signify, at least in the North that has been performing very poorly in national GCE examinations, increase in candidates eligible for higher education. This can easily be proven from the records of scholarship boards in the North. The peak was in the early eighties. In fact, bad performance of our students in GCE is the reason for, not against, restoration of full sponsorship of higher learning to the status it was twenty years ago.
The question is: what then is happening to the resources at the hands of these governments? It will not be fair to hold our present administrations as responsible for this situation. It is a something they inherited. We need to go back and find reasons lying in the negligence of military regimes that ruled this country between 1986 and 1999. They did not match the devaluation of the naira with a commensurate increase in the value of the awards and wages. Neither was it absolutely the fault of the then military governors. The fault lied in the corrupt centre that hoarded federal as well as state allocations. States were then given funds that could barely pay salaries. This led to the entire collapse of their infrastructure and essential services. Wages also became meaningless. Corruption heightened, and as we saw desperate governors carting away with state owned heavy equipment and truckloads of furniture and cattle to their villages!
Workers, through strikes, gradually fought for increase in their wages, especially from the early 1990s. But for students the situation remained the same to date. What fight could they put? They could only resort to persuasion, a language that does not appeal to governments in this country.
Present regimes can legitimately be blamed if after three years in office they failed to do anything or enough to alleviate the suffering of our students in institutions of higher learning. Some of the states have responded, though not substantially. Thus, while some have doubled the amounts to the figures we saw in the table, some are yet to add a kobo over what they inherited from their military predecessors.
An accusation that we cannot defend the present administrations in northern Nigeria against is that of misplacement of priorities. Their predecessors in the 1970s and early 1980s placed education as their first priority. On the contrary, looking at budgets of many states today, we find rural development, transport and even tourism given shares each in multiples of that of education. (Most of peanuts spent on education goes to rehabilitation of schools that serves other purposes than learning.) The money spent on sponsoring pilgrims alone from every northern state is many times more than what it spends on scholarships! This is wrong. We have spoken against this many times before, but to no avail. How can we justify the ugly situation?
Minimum
Justice demands a quick redress. If we do not accord education the highest priority and sufficiently sponsor our students on higher education, we should rest assured that we are sowing the seeds of discord in our society. We already have enough trouble right now to contend with presently. We have benefited from the wisdom of our predecessors who made sacrifices to enable us get educated. Humanity demands that as leaders today we should rekindle the torch of that wisdom after military dictatorships have put it off. It is only then that the present students, who will come to occupy our seats in the next twenty years, whether we like it or not, would have mercy over the children we will leave behind. Otherwise, they have every reason to dismiss them, saying: “Look, your father was occupying this seat while I was starving on campus before I could pass out of the university. I was given N1,200.00 per annum. So get out.” Let us save our progenies from that painful consequence by acting appropriately NOW. The money we are busy piling will not be of any use to them.
Any state in the North which is ready to sponsor higher education must think of beginning with nothing below N70,000.00 annually for any student undertaking a degree or higher national diploma. This amount is not enough on its own but it will definitely be ameliorating. Here, we salute the foresight of Yeriman Bakura who pays his students a monthly bursary of N3,000.00. But if he can sacrifice the sponsorship of pilgrims he can still raise it to N100,000.00 per student annually. He can do it; in fact he should do it because of Shariah.
The matter is personally disturbing to me because my state, Bauchi, pays the least amount N1,200.00! But we are blessed with a generous governor who does not deserve to be second to any. I believe, on hearing about it, he will pick up the challenge immediately. In addition, we call on him to immediately rid the scholarship board of some wolves that have been preying on students’ allowances. They are more suitable living among other wolves in the jungle of Yankari.
Kano is the richest among northern states and its students had the highest scholarship awards in the early eighties under the governorship of Abubakar Rimi. Now, Rabi’u Kwankwaso, a PhD, will certainly prove his grasp of the importance of education and lead other states by following the precedence of Rimi and improving on it.
From Sokoto and Kebbi states, the scholastic legacy of Shehu Danfodio and Shehu Abdullahi – the most prolific writer of the Negro race in the 19th century – denies them the sadistic tradition of starving their students. If the Shehu were to return to Sokoto today, and Abdullahi to Gwandu, I have no doubt that they will approve the restoration of N250,000.00 for students of their states.
Borno and Yobe states have a history of warfare, generosity, scholarship and leadership that they inherited from Dhi Yadain, Dunama, Alooma and el-Kanemi – people that worked hard to build civilizations in the Chad Basin at Kukawa, Ngazargamu and Dikwa. Warfare and Civilizations are today built on education. Encouraging ignorance by paying their students N3,500.00 annually is therefore the least expected of leaders presently occupying the seats of such great ancestors. We hope they will hearken to our call and redress the injustice.
In Kaduna state, the governor has tried by offering N15,000.00 to his science students. But he is still far behind Usman Jibrin and Balarabe Musa in allocating the greatest share of his budget to education and scholarships in particular.
Katsina embraced western education earlier and better than most parts of the North. It recorded the highest number of influential civil servants. Their governor, who is reported to be honest, will undoubtedly lend his ear to our call and meet the minimum his students would need in institutions of higher learning so as to maintain that record in the future.
The Nubian (Nupe) governor of Niger State should remember that their ancestors built the famous pyramids in Egypt. Why should he fail today to build a pyramid of degrees and diplomas in Bida, tall enough to be seen by sailors on the Atlantic?
And so it is with every other state in the North. Each of them has something of pride or necessity that will strongly persuade it to wake up and realize that the future in Nigeria belongs to the educated. Why should they, therefore, condemn their indigenes to servitude by their inaction?
That is the call we are making on behalf of our present and future students in institutions of higher learning. But ours is to advise; the action is left to the administrators. May God bless those of them who are humble enough to listen to the advice and act promptly. Amen.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Education the North (2)
Re-Educating the North(1): A Letter to Bauchi State Governor
Your revelation that only eight students out of the eight thousand who sat for the SSCE exams were successful is the greatest PR done to the state in recent history. I do not know when you learnt to be a public relations officer, though I do not know how to qualify you, good or bad. Anyway, I know the angle from which you made the revelation: it is a challenge. The results however have come to be regarded as the greatest educational scandal in the country: N600million earned only eight successful candidates in SSCE. My God, crisis!
Please share with me today my personal views and suggestions on the steps to redress the situation. Pardon me if I have not met you personally to deliver this contribution. I would not like dislocating your busy schedule nor do I have the resilience to undergo the time consuming protocol of meeting with a governor. The government house does not have E-mail either. Since it is not an isolated problem, others may also wish to benefit from our discussion. So the newspaper is unavoidably the best meeting point, from whatever angle you may view it.
A waste
This is not the first time states in the North are registering such a colossal failure in Education. The results are funny as much as we may like to regard them as mad, sad and bad. If I were in your position, I would dire dismissing all the personnel in the Ministry of Education and close it until further notice. I will hand over all schools in the state to private investors and managers, and spend N600 million as scholarship for our pupils and students in such schools.
This may appear radical but the result will be interestingly different. Please, consider the following arithmetic. If I am ready to spend yearly N9,000.00 on every primary school child, N30,000.00 on each secondary school pupil, and N50,000.00 as annual “bulgar’ (scholarship) for each undergraduate, the achievement will be incredible. I will be certain of turning out the following: 4000 very successful primary school candidates capable of being admitted into the best secondary schools in the country; 1000 SSCE, all with 5 credits and above; plus possibly the best 1000 university graduates in the country because no student presently enjoys this much as scholarship in the country.
Now, if you are ready to maintain the same expenditure over ten years, you will have 10,000 university graduates in various fields of specialization. In fact a more detailed arithmetic has revealed that the above arithmetic contains some waste that could be avoided. Also, for the fact that the graph of investment in education is linear curve, not a horizontal line parallel to the x-axis, greater success could be recorded. In any event, these are details to be sorted out later. However, the point I have attempted to convincingly make here was that there is an unimaginable gap between these results and what obtains presently, i.e. only 8 SSCE students.
If the decision to close down the ministry is considered too radical for implementation, then I will settle for what I consider the barest minimum. That is, the present education administrators in the state must be forced to re-engineer the status quo to achieve the same result. I heard you over the BBC just some minutes ago, saying that you will provide desks, books, feeding, etc. to our schools as a means of correcting the situation. Mr. Governor, I am afraid, the whole system is dead, completely rotten and antiquated. Previous administrations have tried to revive this dead body through traditional means but consistently hit the rock.
Extreme situations require extreme corrective measures. To be successful, we need a complete overhaul, inject it with modern concepts and restart all over. Otherwise, be prepared to receive the funny results that other administrators before you were accustomed to. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to abandon the future of our children to maintain what I consider a blood sucking ‘welfare organ’ under the disguise of a ministry.
Before putting forward my suggestions, I seek your indulgence to dwell briefly on the genesis of the problem in the following few paragraphs.
Genesis
It is an irony that such a scandal is happening in a state founded on knowledge social justice and revolution. Less than twenty years ago, the state was producing hardworking students that filled its quota in various institutes of higher learning. Today, such graduates are reputable academicians, consultants and public servants in the country. I do not have to go far. You are one of them, sir.
At least up to the early 1980s, the state kept pace educationally with other states in the North. However, since the middle 1980s, we started to note with sadness the decline in quality of our primary and secondary school products. It has been a national decline though it was more acute in the core-North due to three principal reasons: our dependence on public schools, the failure of the nation to manage the universal primary education (UPE) program creditably and irresponsible leadership.
I have always maintained that the UPE was an ill-conceived populist program. However, given the background of Obasanjo as a Yoruba from an environment where Awolowo has always peddled with slogan of ‘free education’, it never came as a surprise. We do not doubt the nobility of its goal, but given the cost of education, it could have been wiser to be less ambitious. Nowhere in the world has education been given free successfully to the whole population over an indefinite period of time. Against all expert advice, the Obasanjo regime embarked on opening the primary schools in every nook and corner of the country. States in the core-North were forced to abandon their gradual approach to educational development and embraced the wild dream of the ego of the then military dictator.
The Federal government was able to construct schools and pay reasonably good salaries to teachers initially. Despite this effort, we can assert that right from its takeoff the program was impregnated with a serious handicap. There was an acute shortage of trained personnel to man it all Northern states. Efforts to make up for the shortfall by sourcing such teachers from other regions still fell short of demand. So pupil-teachers came to form the bulk of its personnel. These were primary school failures who could not pass the common entrance examination or the “interview” for placement in the few secondary schools then existing in the region. Inevitably, quality of our primary schools, and later of secondary schools, started to decline quickly.
Successive economic and political developments only aggravated the situation. Like other elephant projects, the UPE came to epitomize the shortsightedness that has typified Nigerian leaders. Perhaps the oil boom was thought to be everlasting by the Obasanjo administration when it instituted the program. They could not also claim to be ignorant of the corruption that has been ravaging the country since the beginning of the early seventies. Halfway through the first term of the Second Republic, oil prices plummeted and revenues were spent in the same extravagant fashion of previous military dictators. It hardly produced its first graduates before the program became an unsustainable burden. Efforts were made to open more post-primary institutions right from the beginning, but it only succeeded in intensifying the magnitude of the burden.
The education was one of the sectors most severely hit by the large-scale corruption that took place during the Babangida administration. Whereas heavy investments were made in politics and security, all institutions of education were dilapidating by the hour. While administrators announced that education took the lion share of their budget, it was an open secret that such funds were grossly mismanaged, sometimes even developing wings. In effect, government made the least impact in sustaining the infrastructure of schools, and paid only paltry sums as salaries to teachers. The salary was itself reduced to nothing by the devaluation of a Naira that was heading towards N150.00 by the end of Babangida’s tenure.
So all ingredients required to produce satisfactory results were absent: no good infrastructure, no equipment, no tangible salaries, just naught. Despite centralization of primary school management at the Federal level, nothing improved in that direction except the series of corruption scandals.
Southerners are certainly correct to observe that we ‘Northerners’ are responsible for our backwardness especially in the education. We were certainly not prepared for the UPE, but that should not be a scapegoat. We have failed to emulate the enviable achievement of the South in this sector. Of course, when public schools in the North went down, their counterparts in the South also went the same way. However, the South has a long-standing culture of private investment in education while the North is still spoon-fed by government.
Please allow me quote Professor Itse Sagay who ((THISDAY, July 19, 1999) once put this hard fact eloquently in the following words:
“They (Northerners) have no target, they don’t say to themselves this is the level we want to reach, no. To me that is shortsightedness. We in the South do not look at any other person or group of people or geo-political zone. We want education for particular ends, to be professionals, to be enlightened, to be versatile in our lives and so we go for it, we pay for it. Most of our schools are private, expensive ones. They should forget about the South and think of education, think of the goals they want to achieve and design education for that goal and pull resource to meet (it). This whole thing of living on the back of Nigeria, of being carried like a child, is what they have enjoyed so long..”
You got it right, Prof.
Solution
The above quotation from Professor Segay summarized the problem and solution of education in the North. We need to define our GOAL. Without it all investments in the disastrous blackhole of failure. We must say explicitly why we need education. This question is not farfetched in a society with a literacy culture dating back to over a millennium. With a powerful conviction, we must pursue this goal at all cost. There has to be a DESIGN, a well-orchestrated plan to meet this specific goal. Finally, lets PULL RESOURCES to achieve it.
I cannot envisage a better proposal or a better time for its implementation. You are young enough to risk an attempt. To define a goal, design and pull resources to achieve it, certainly Bauchi State can boast of a thousand and one competent hands. I would like to briefly outline some practical steps in this direction.
1. A Committed Leadership
Revolutions like this are not possible without a responsible and committed leadership. Leaders in this country commission committees of able minds to study one problem or another, only to dump their findings and recommendations in the archives. For this reason, many people, including myself, are no longer interested in wasting their time undertaking such assignments.
So your leadership has to prove in various ways its commitment and ability to develop the state by behaving differently. I am sorry to say that the debut looks ordinary. You started with the customary complaint of inheriting an empty treasury. I consider the statement redundant because it will not take your government anywhere. It does not stop you from outlining your program for which you had over six months so far to do since your election. If the government will be the ‘business as usual’ type, it should forget about making any history. Successful changes are always achieved by making sacrifices that are hard in these days of material indulgence.
2. Formation of a Think-tank
If you are convinced that you need a revolution in education, then the next step is the commissioning of a think-tank with specific terms of reference. Their number must be small, consisting largely of intellectuals and professionals, result-oriented individuals with indisputable skill in information management with the necessary exposure to contemporary advances in learning. Since most such people are in the private sector and they may not necessarily be ‘sons of the soil’, to get the best of their ideas, they need to be paid a handsome fee, not just begging them to operate on the empty rhetoric of patriotism. This will further commit the state government and assure them that the exercise will not be in vain.
You may find some of the following points useful in outlining its terms of reference:
Collection, analysis and presentation of data on the investments made by previous governments and their impact on the sector.
Creation of a comprehensive database on educational manpower and infrastructure of the state.
Identification of social and bureaucratic elements responsible for the decline in education and how they could be overcome within the shortest possible time.
Re-engineering education resource management to achieve specific quantifiable goals at different levels and at specific intervals.
Investigating and proposing steps towards partial privatization of education in the state.
Reviewing educational curriculum in line with the state of educational development of the state.
Integrating traditional and western education to reduce wastage of time, to boost the confidence of parents in the system and, more importantly, to improve the relevance of students to their community and prepare them for leadership role in the future.
Studying the relevance and means of returning primary school management to meet local demands and pace of educational development.
Means of developing, recruiting and maintaining the high-standard manpower necessary for achieving the required result.
3. Implementation of Recommendations
The committee must submit their report within 3 months to enable the state study it and come out with a white paper before the next budget. The state government should make revitalization of education its cardinal goal and no amount of resources expended in this area would be a waste. Education has formidable positive ripple effect on other sectors of human activity.
4. Funds?
I am not discouraged by what has been depicted as the poor revenue base of the state. What a big lie! From where did the state get the N600million it expended on education last year? It also beats my imagination that a state with minerals at only a meter depth regards itself as poor.
Okay, we are poor, but what is the cause of our poverty? Obviously, it is engendered by laziness and thoughtlessness, greed and nepotism, ‘big name’ syndrome and irresponsibility.
However, if we are ready to eradicate the social afflictions that have come to characterize our leadership and adopt new approaches to resource exploitation and management, the sum of N600 million could be generated annually with ease and managed judiciously to graduate the best students in various fields of education.
Conclusion
Let me conclude by asserting that Bauchi state, which has produced the highest number of Danfodio’s flag-bearers during the pre-colonial era, and produced impeccable personalities like Sa’adu Zungur and ‘the Golden Voice of Africa’, Tafawa Balewa, in contemporary Nigeria, and indeed all states in the core-North, has both the ingenuity and material resources to re-ignite its lamp of educational glory. It can produce thousands of such scholars and become the best in the Federation by the end of the first decade of the third millennium.
That is however only possible if we have a leadership that refreshes its commitment to the progress of humanity, utilizes our material resources more efficiently, and above all, stands well above the primordial plane of material greed.
Charity, they say, begins at home. Next week we shall go beyond Bauchi State to consider strategies necessary to revamp education in the entire North.
Kaduna
3 August 1999
Your revelation that only eight students out of the eight thousand who sat for the SSCE exams were successful is the greatest PR done to the state in recent history. I do not know when you learnt to be a public relations officer, though I do not know how to qualify you, good or bad. Anyway, I know the angle from which you made the revelation: it is a challenge. The results however have come to be regarded as the greatest educational scandal in the country: N600million earned only eight successful candidates in SSCE. My God, crisis!
Please share with me today my personal views and suggestions on the steps to redress the situation. Pardon me if I have not met you personally to deliver this contribution. I would not like dislocating your busy schedule nor do I have the resilience to undergo the time consuming protocol of meeting with a governor. The government house does not have E-mail either. Since it is not an isolated problem, others may also wish to benefit from our discussion. So the newspaper is unavoidably the best meeting point, from whatever angle you may view it.
A waste
This is not the first time states in the North are registering such a colossal failure in Education. The results are funny as much as we may like to regard them as mad, sad and bad. If I were in your position, I would dire dismissing all the personnel in the Ministry of Education and close it until further notice. I will hand over all schools in the state to private investors and managers, and spend N600 million as scholarship for our pupils and students in such schools.
This may appear radical but the result will be interestingly different. Please, consider the following arithmetic. If I am ready to spend yearly N9,000.00 on every primary school child, N30,000.00 on each secondary school pupil, and N50,000.00 as annual “bulgar’ (scholarship) for each undergraduate, the achievement will be incredible. I will be certain of turning out the following: 4000 very successful primary school candidates capable of being admitted into the best secondary schools in the country; 1000 SSCE, all with 5 credits and above; plus possibly the best 1000 university graduates in the country because no student presently enjoys this much as scholarship in the country.
Now, if you are ready to maintain the same expenditure over ten years, you will have 10,000 university graduates in various fields of specialization. In fact a more detailed arithmetic has revealed that the above arithmetic contains some waste that could be avoided. Also, for the fact that the graph of investment in education is linear curve, not a horizontal line parallel to the x-axis, greater success could be recorded. In any event, these are details to be sorted out later. However, the point I have attempted to convincingly make here was that there is an unimaginable gap between these results and what obtains presently, i.e. only 8 SSCE students.
If the decision to close down the ministry is considered too radical for implementation, then I will settle for what I consider the barest minimum. That is, the present education administrators in the state must be forced to re-engineer the status quo to achieve the same result. I heard you over the BBC just some minutes ago, saying that you will provide desks, books, feeding, etc. to our schools as a means of correcting the situation. Mr. Governor, I am afraid, the whole system is dead, completely rotten and antiquated. Previous administrations have tried to revive this dead body through traditional means but consistently hit the rock.
Extreme situations require extreme corrective measures. To be successful, we need a complete overhaul, inject it with modern concepts and restart all over. Otherwise, be prepared to receive the funny results that other administrators before you were accustomed to. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to abandon the future of our children to maintain what I consider a blood sucking ‘welfare organ’ under the disguise of a ministry.
Before putting forward my suggestions, I seek your indulgence to dwell briefly on the genesis of the problem in the following few paragraphs.
Genesis
It is an irony that such a scandal is happening in a state founded on knowledge social justice and revolution. Less than twenty years ago, the state was producing hardworking students that filled its quota in various institutes of higher learning. Today, such graduates are reputable academicians, consultants and public servants in the country. I do not have to go far. You are one of them, sir.
At least up to the early 1980s, the state kept pace educationally with other states in the North. However, since the middle 1980s, we started to note with sadness the decline in quality of our primary and secondary school products. It has been a national decline though it was more acute in the core-North due to three principal reasons: our dependence on public schools, the failure of the nation to manage the universal primary education (UPE) program creditably and irresponsible leadership.
I have always maintained that the UPE was an ill-conceived populist program. However, given the background of Obasanjo as a Yoruba from an environment where Awolowo has always peddled with slogan of ‘free education’, it never came as a surprise. We do not doubt the nobility of its goal, but given the cost of education, it could have been wiser to be less ambitious. Nowhere in the world has education been given free successfully to the whole population over an indefinite period of time. Against all expert advice, the Obasanjo regime embarked on opening the primary schools in every nook and corner of the country. States in the core-North were forced to abandon their gradual approach to educational development and embraced the wild dream of the ego of the then military dictator.
The Federal government was able to construct schools and pay reasonably good salaries to teachers initially. Despite this effort, we can assert that right from its takeoff the program was impregnated with a serious handicap. There was an acute shortage of trained personnel to man it all Northern states. Efforts to make up for the shortfall by sourcing such teachers from other regions still fell short of demand. So pupil-teachers came to form the bulk of its personnel. These were primary school failures who could not pass the common entrance examination or the “interview” for placement in the few secondary schools then existing in the region. Inevitably, quality of our primary schools, and later of secondary schools, started to decline quickly.
Successive economic and political developments only aggravated the situation. Like other elephant projects, the UPE came to epitomize the shortsightedness that has typified Nigerian leaders. Perhaps the oil boom was thought to be everlasting by the Obasanjo administration when it instituted the program. They could not also claim to be ignorant of the corruption that has been ravaging the country since the beginning of the early seventies. Halfway through the first term of the Second Republic, oil prices plummeted and revenues were spent in the same extravagant fashion of previous military dictators. It hardly produced its first graduates before the program became an unsustainable burden. Efforts were made to open more post-primary institutions right from the beginning, but it only succeeded in intensifying the magnitude of the burden.
The education was one of the sectors most severely hit by the large-scale corruption that took place during the Babangida administration. Whereas heavy investments were made in politics and security, all institutions of education were dilapidating by the hour. While administrators announced that education took the lion share of their budget, it was an open secret that such funds were grossly mismanaged, sometimes even developing wings. In effect, government made the least impact in sustaining the infrastructure of schools, and paid only paltry sums as salaries to teachers. The salary was itself reduced to nothing by the devaluation of a Naira that was heading towards N150.00 by the end of Babangida’s tenure.
So all ingredients required to produce satisfactory results were absent: no good infrastructure, no equipment, no tangible salaries, just naught. Despite centralization of primary school management at the Federal level, nothing improved in that direction except the series of corruption scandals.
Southerners are certainly correct to observe that we ‘Northerners’ are responsible for our backwardness especially in the education. We were certainly not prepared for the UPE, but that should not be a scapegoat. We have failed to emulate the enviable achievement of the South in this sector. Of course, when public schools in the North went down, their counterparts in the South also went the same way. However, the South has a long-standing culture of private investment in education while the North is still spoon-fed by government.
Please allow me quote Professor Itse Sagay who ((THISDAY, July 19, 1999) once put this hard fact eloquently in the following words:
“They (Northerners) have no target, they don’t say to themselves this is the level we want to reach, no. To me that is shortsightedness. We in the South do not look at any other person or group of people or geo-political zone. We want education for particular ends, to be professionals, to be enlightened, to be versatile in our lives and so we go for it, we pay for it. Most of our schools are private, expensive ones. They should forget about the South and think of education, think of the goals they want to achieve and design education for that goal and pull resource to meet (it). This whole thing of living on the back of Nigeria, of being carried like a child, is what they have enjoyed so long..”
You got it right, Prof.
Solution
The above quotation from Professor Segay summarized the problem and solution of education in the North. We need to define our GOAL. Without it all investments in the disastrous blackhole of failure. We must say explicitly why we need education. This question is not farfetched in a society with a literacy culture dating back to over a millennium. With a powerful conviction, we must pursue this goal at all cost. There has to be a DESIGN, a well-orchestrated plan to meet this specific goal. Finally, lets PULL RESOURCES to achieve it.
I cannot envisage a better proposal or a better time for its implementation. You are young enough to risk an attempt. To define a goal, design and pull resources to achieve it, certainly Bauchi State can boast of a thousand and one competent hands. I would like to briefly outline some practical steps in this direction.
1. A Committed Leadership
Revolutions like this are not possible without a responsible and committed leadership. Leaders in this country commission committees of able minds to study one problem or another, only to dump their findings and recommendations in the archives. For this reason, many people, including myself, are no longer interested in wasting their time undertaking such assignments.
So your leadership has to prove in various ways its commitment and ability to develop the state by behaving differently. I am sorry to say that the debut looks ordinary. You started with the customary complaint of inheriting an empty treasury. I consider the statement redundant because it will not take your government anywhere. It does not stop you from outlining your program for which you had over six months so far to do since your election. If the government will be the ‘business as usual’ type, it should forget about making any history. Successful changes are always achieved by making sacrifices that are hard in these days of material indulgence.
2. Formation of a Think-tank
If you are convinced that you need a revolution in education, then the next step is the commissioning of a think-tank with specific terms of reference. Their number must be small, consisting largely of intellectuals and professionals, result-oriented individuals with indisputable skill in information management with the necessary exposure to contemporary advances in learning. Since most such people are in the private sector and they may not necessarily be ‘sons of the soil’, to get the best of their ideas, they need to be paid a handsome fee, not just begging them to operate on the empty rhetoric of patriotism. This will further commit the state government and assure them that the exercise will not be in vain.
You may find some of the following points useful in outlining its terms of reference:
Collection, analysis and presentation of data on the investments made by previous governments and their impact on the sector.
Creation of a comprehensive database on educational manpower and infrastructure of the state.
Identification of social and bureaucratic elements responsible for the decline in education and how they could be overcome within the shortest possible time.
Re-engineering education resource management to achieve specific quantifiable goals at different levels and at specific intervals.
Investigating and proposing steps towards partial privatization of education in the state.
Reviewing educational curriculum in line with the state of educational development of the state.
Integrating traditional and western education to reduce wastage of time, to boost the confidence of parents in the system and, more importantly, to improve the relevance of students to their community and prepare them for leadership role in the future.
Studying the relevance and means of returning primary school management to meet local demands and pace of educational development.
Means of developing, recruiting and maintaining the high-standard manpower necessary for achieving the required result.
3. Implementation of Recommendations
The committee must submit their report within 3 months to enable the state study it and come out with a white paper before the next budget. The state government should make revitalization of education its cardinal goal and no amount of resources expended in this area would be a waste. Education has formidable positive ripple effect on other sectors of human activity.
4. Funds?
I am not discouraged by what has been depicted as the poor revenue base of the state. What a big lie! From where did the state get the N600million it expended on education last year? It also beats my imagination that a state with minerals at only a meter depth regards itself as poor.
Okay, we are poor, but what is the cause of our poverty? Obviously, it is engendered by laziness and thoughtlessness, greed and nepotism, ‘big name’ syndrome and irresponsibility.
However, if we are ready to eradicate the social afflictions that have come to characterize our leadership and adopt new approaches to resource exploitation and management, the sum of N600 million could be generated annually with ease and managed judiciously to graduate the best students in various fields of education.
Conclusion
Let me conclude by asserting that Bauchi state, which has produced the highest number of Danfodio’s flag-bearers during the pre-colonial era, and produced impeccable personalities like Sa’adu Zungur and ‘the Golden Voice of Africa’, Tafawa Balewa, in contemporary Nigeria, and indeed all states in the core-North, has both the ingenuity and material resources to re-ignite its lamp of educational glory. It can produce thousands of such scholars and become the best in the Federation by the end of the first decade of the third millennium.
That is however only possible if we have a leadership that refreshes its commitment to the progress of humanity, utilizes our material resources more efficiently, and above all, stands well above the primordial plane of material greed.
Charity, they say, begins at home. Next week we shall go beyond Bauchi State to consider strategies necessary to revamp education in the entire North.
Kaduna
3 August 1999
Education in the North (1)
Re-Educating the North(1): A Letter to Bauchi State Governor
Your revelation that only eight students out of the eight thousand who sat for the SSCE exams were successful is the greatest PR done to the state in recent history. I do not know when you learnt to be a public relations officer, though I do not know how to qualify you, good or bad. Anyway, I know the angle from which you made the revelation: it is a challenge. The results however have come to be regarded as the greatest educational scandal in the country: N600million earned only eight successful candidates in SSCE. My God, crisis!
Please share with me today my personal views and suggestions on the steps to redress the situation. Pardon me if I have not met you personally to deliver this contribution. I would not like dislocating your busy schedule nor do I have the resilience to undergo the time consuming protocol of meeting with a governor. The government house does not have E-mail either. Since it is not an isolated problem, others may also wish to benefit from our discussion. So the newspaper is unavoidably the best meeting point, from whatever angle you may view it.
A waste
This is not the first time states in the North are registering such a colossal failure in Education. The results are funny as much as we may like to regard them as mad, sad and bad. If I were in your position, I would dire dismissing all the personnel in the Ministry of Education and close it until further notice. I will hand over all schools in the state to private investors and managers, and spend N600 million as scholarship for our pupils and students in such schools.
This may appear radical but the result will be interestingly different. Please, consider the following arithmetic. If I am ready to spend yearly N9,000.00 on every primary school child, N30,000.00 on each secondary school pupil, and N50,000.00 as annual “bulgar’ (scholarship) for each undergraduate, the achievement will be incredible. I will be certain of turning out the following: 4000 very successful primary school candidates capable of being admitted into the best secondary schools in the country; 1000 SSCE, all with 5 credits and above; plus possibly the best 1000 university graduates in the country because no student presently enjoys this much as scholarship in the country.
Now, if you are ready to maintain the same expenditure over ten years, you will have 10,000 university graduates in various fields of specialization. In fact a more detailed arithmetic has revealed that the above arithmetic contains some waste that could be avoided. Also, for the fact that the graph of investment in education is linear curve, not a horizontal line parallel to the x-axis, greater success could be recorded. In any event, these are details to be sorted out later. However, the point I have attempted to convincingly make here was that there is an unimaginable gap between these results and what obtains presently, i.e. only 8 SSCE students.
If the decision to close down the ministry is considered too radical for implementation, then I will settle for what I consider the barest minimum. That is, the present education administrators in the state must be forced to re-engineer the status quo to achieve the same result. I heard you over the BBC just some minutes ago, saying that you will provide desks, books, feeding, etc. to our schools as a means of correcting the situation. Mr. Governor, I am afraid, the whole system is dead, completely rotten and antiquated. Previous administrations have tried to revive this dead body through traditional means but consistently hit the rock.
Extreme situations require extreme corrective measures. To be successful, we need a complete overhaul, inject it with modern concepts and restart all over. Otherwise, be prepared to receive the funny results that other administrators before you were accustomed to. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to abandon the future of our children to maintain what I consider a blood sucking ‘welfare organ’ under the disguise of a ministry.
Before putting forward my suggestions, I seek your indulgence to dwell briefly on the genesis of the problem in the following few paragraphs.
Genesis
It is an irony that such a scandal is happening in a state founded on knowledge social justice and revolution. Less than twenty years ago, the state was producing hardworking students that filled its quota in various institutes of higher learning. Today, such graduates are reputable academicians, consultants and public servants in the country. I do not have to go far. You are one of them, sir.
At least up to the early 1980s, the state kept pace educationally with other states in the North. However, since the middle 1980s, we started to note with sadness the decline in quality of our primary and secondary school products. It has been a national decline though it was more acute in the core-North due to three principal reasons: our dependence on public schools, the failure of the nation to manage the universal primary education (UPE) program creditably and irresponsible leadership.
I have always maintained that the UPE was an ill-conceived populist program. However, given the background of Obasanjo as a Yoruba from an environment where Awolowo has always peddled with slogan of ‘free education’, it never came as a surprise. We do not doubt the nobility of its goal, but given the cost of education, it could have been wiser to be less ambitious. Nowhere in the world has education been given free successfully to the whole population over an indefinite period of time. Against all expert advice, the Obasanjo regime embarked on opening the primary schools in every nook and corner of the country. States in the core-North were forced to abandon their gradual approach to educational development and embraced the wild dream of the ego of the then military dictator.
The Federal government was able to construct schools and pay reasonably good salaries to teachers initially. Despite this effort, we can assert that right from its takeoff the program was impregnated with a serious handicap. There was an acute shortage of trained personnel to man it all Northern states. Efforts to make up for the shortfall by sourcing such teachers from other regions still fell short of demand. So pupil-teachers came to form the bulk of its personnel. These were primary school failures who could not pass the common entrance examination or the “interview” for placement in the few secondary schools then existing in the region. Inevitably, quality of our primary schools, and later of secondary schools, started to decline quickly.
Successive economic and political developments only aggravated the situation. Like other elephant projects, the UPE came to epitomize the shortsightedness that has typified Nigerian leaders. Perhaps the oil boom was thought to be everlasting by the Obasanjo administration when it instituted the program. They could not also claim to be ignorant of the corruption that has been ravaging the country since the beginning of the early seventies. Halfway through the first term of the Second Republic, oil prices plummeted and revenues were spent in the same extravagant fashion of previous military dictators. It hardly produced its first graduates before the program became an unsustainable burden. Efforts were made to open more post-primary institutions right from the beginning, but it only succeeded in intensifying the magnitude of the burden.
The education was one of the sectors most severely hit by the large-scale corruption that took place during the Babangida administration. Whereas heavy investments were made in politics and security, all institutions of education were dilapidating by the hour. While administrators announced that education took the lion share of their budget, it was an open secret that such funds were grossly mismanaged, sometimes even developing wings. In effect, government made the least impact in sustaining the infrastructure of schools, and paid only paltry sums as salaries to teachers. The salary was itself reduced to nothing by the devaluation of a Naira that was heading towards N150.00 by the end of Babangida’s tenure.
So all ingredients required to produce satisfactory results were absent: no good infrastructure, no equipment, no tangible salaries, just naught. Despite centralization of primary school management at the Federal level, nothing improved in that direction except the series of corruption scandals.
Southerners are certainly correct to observe that we ‘Northerners’ are responsible for our backwardness especially in the education. We were certainly not prepared for the UPE, but that should not be a scapegoat. We have failed to emulate the enviable achievement of the South in this sector. Of course, when public schools in the North went down, their counterparts in the South also went the same way. However, the South has a long-standing culture of private investment in education while the North is still spoon-fed by government.
Please allow me quote Professor Itse Sagay who ((THISDAY, July 19, 1999) once put this hard fact eloquently in the following words:
“They (Northerners) have no target, they don’t say to themselves this is the level we want to reach, no. To me that is shortsightedness. We in the South do not look at any other person or group of people or geo-political zone. We want education for particular ends, to be professionals, to be enlightened, to be versatile in our lives and so we go for it, we pay for it. Most of our schools are private, expensive ones. They should forget about the South and think of education, think of the goals they want to achieve and design education for that goal and pull resource to meet (it). This whole thing of living on the back of Nigeria, of being carried like a child, is what they have enjoyed so long..”
You got it right, Prof.
Solution
The above quotation from Professor Segay summarized the problem and solution of education in the North. We need to define our GOAL. Without it all investments in the disastrous blackhole of failure. We must say explicitly why we need education. This question is not farfetched in a society with a literacy culture dating back to over a millennium. With a powerful conviction, we must pursue this goal at all cost. There has to be a DESIGN, a well-orchestrated plan to meet this specific goal. Finally, lets PULL RESOURCES to achieve it.
I cannot envisage a better proposal or a better time for its implementation. You are young enough to risk an attempt. To define a goal, design and pull resources to achieve it, certainly Bauchi State can boast of a thousand and one competent hands. I would like to briefly outline some practical steps in this direction.
1. A Committed Leadership
Revolutions like this are not possible without a responsible and committed leadership. Leaders in this country commission committees of able minds to study one problem or another, only to dump their findings and recommendations in the archives. For this reason, many people, including myself, are no longer interested in wasting their time undertaking such assignments.
So your leadership has to prove in various ways its commitment and ability to develop the state by behaving differently. I am sorry to say that the debut looks ordinary. You started with the customary complaint of inheriting an empty treasury. I consider the statement redundant because it will not take your government anywhere. It does not stop you from outlining your program for which you had over six months so far to do since your election. If the government will be the ‘business as usual’ type, it should forget about making any history. Successful changes are always achieved by making sacrifices that are hard in these days of material indulgence.
2. Formation of a Think-tank
If you are convinced that you need a revolution in education, then the next step is the commissioning of a think-tank with specific terms of reference. Their number must be small, consisting largely of intellectuals and professionals, result-oriented individuals with indisputable skill in information management with the necessary exposure to contemporary advances in learning. Since most such people are in the private sector and they may not necessarily be ‘sons of the soil’, to get the best of their ideas, they need to be paid a handsome fee, not just begging them to operate on the empty rhetoric of patriotism. This will further commit the state government and assure them that the exercise will not be in vain.
You may find some of the following points useful in outlining its terms of reference:
Collection, analysis and presentation of data on the investments made by previous governments and their impact on the sector.
Creation of a comprehensive database on educational manpower and infrastructure of the state.
Identification of social and bureaucratic elements responsible for the decline in education and how they could be overcome within the shortest possible time.
Re-engineering education resource management to achieve specific quantifiable goals at different levels and at specific intervals.
Investigating and proposing steps towards partial privatization of education in the state.
Reviewing educational curriculum in line with the state of educational development of the state.
Integrating traditional and western education to reduce wastage of time, to boost the confidence of parents in the system and, more importantly, to improve the relevance of students to their community and prepare them for leadership role in the future.
Studying the relevance and means of returning primary school management to meet local demands and pace of educational development.
Means of developing, recruiting and maintaining the high-standard manpower necessary for achieving the required result.
3. Implementation of Recommendations
The committee must submit their report within 3 months to enable the state study it and come out with a white paper before the next budget. The state government should make revitalization of education its cardinal goal and no amount of resources expended in this area would be a waste. Education has formidable positive ripple effect on other sectors of human activity.
4. Funds?
I am not discouraged by what has been depicted as the poor revenue base of the state. What a big lie! From where did the state get the N600million it expended on education last year? It also beats my imagination that a state with minerals at only a meter depth regards itself as poor.
Okay, we are poor, but what is the cause of our poverty? Obviously, it is engendered by laziness and thoughtlessness, greed and nepotism, ‘big name’ syndrome and irresponsibility.
However, if we are ready to eradicate the social afflictions that have come to characterize our leadership and adopt new approaches to resource exploitation and management, the sum of N600 million could be generated annually with ease and managed judiciously to graduate the best students in various fields of education.
Conclusion
Let me conclude by asserting that Bauchi state, which has produced the highest number of Danfodio’s flag-bearers during the pre-colonial era, and produced impeccable personalities like Sa’adu Zungur and ‘the Golden Voice of Africa’, Tafawa Balewa, in contemporary Nigeria, and indeed all states in the core-North, has both the ingenuity and material resources to re-ignite its lamp of educational glory. It can produce thousands of such scholars and become the best in the Federation by the end of the first decade of the third millennium.
That is however only possible if we have a leadership that refreshes its commitment to the progress of humanity, utilizes our material resources more efficiently, and above all, stands well above the primordial plane of material greed.
Charity, they say, begins at home. Next week we shall go beyond Bauchi State to consider strategies necessary to revamp education in the entire North.
Kaduna
3 August 1999
Your revelation that only eight students out of the eight thousand who sat for the SSCE exams were successful is the greatest PR done to the state in recent history. I do not know when you learnt to be a public relations officer, though I do not know how to qualify you, good or bad. Anyway, I know the angle from which you made the revelation: it is a challenge. The results however have come to be regarded as the greatest educational scandal in the country: N600million earned only eight successful candidates in SSCE. My God, crisis!
Please share with me today my personal views and suggestions on the steps to redress the situation. Pardon me if I have not met you personally to deliver this contribution. I would not like dislocating your busy schedule nor do I have the resilience to undergo the time consuming protocol of meeting with a governor. The government house does not have E-mail either. Since it is not an isolated problem, others may also wish to benefit from our discussion. So the newspaper is unavoidably the best meeting point, from whatever angle you may view it.
A waste
This is not the first time states in the North are registering such a colossal failure in Education. The results are funny as much as we may like to regard them as mad, sad and bad. If I were in your position, I would dire dismissing all the personnel in the Ministry of Education and close it until further notice. I will hand over all schools in the state to private investors and managers, and spend N600 million as scholarship for our pupils and students in such schools.
This may appear radical but the result will be interestingly different. Please, consider the following arithmetic. If I am ready to spend yearly N9,000.00 on every primary school child, N30,000.00 on each secondary school pupil, and N50,000.00 as annual “bulgar’ (scholarship) for each undergraduate, the achievement will be incredible. I will be certain of turning out the following: 4000 very successful primary school candidates capable of being admitted into the best secondary schools in the country; 1000 SSCE, all with 5 credits and above; plus possibly the best 1000 university graduates in the country because no student presently enjoys this much as scholarship in the country.
Now, if you are ready to maintain the same expenditure over ten years, you will have 10,000 university graduates in various fields of specialization. In fact a more detailed arithmetic has revealed that the above arithmetic contains some waste that could be avoided. Also, for the fact that the graph of investment in education is linear curve, not a horizontal line parallel to the x-axis, greater success could be recorded. In any event, these are details to be sorted out later. However, the point I have attempted to convincingly make here was that there is an unimaginable gap between these results and what obtains presently, i.e. only 8 SSCE students.
If the decision to close down the ministry is considered too radical for implementation, then I will settle for what I consider the barest minimum. That is, the present education administrators in the state must be forced to re-engineer the status quo to achieve the same result. I heard you over the BBC just some minutes ago, saying that you will provide desks, books, feeding, etc. to our schools as a means of correcting the situation. Mr. Governor, I am afraid, the whole system is dead, completely rotten and antiquated. Previous administrations have tried to revive this dead body through traditional means but consistently hit the rock.
Extreme situations require extreme corrective measures. To be successful, we need a complete overhaul, inject it with modern concepts and restart all over. Otherwise, be prepared to receive the funny results that other administrators before you were accustomed to. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to abandon the future of our children to maintain what I consider a blood sucking ‘welfare organ’ under the disguise of a ministry.
Before putting forward my suggestions, I seek your indulgence to dwell briefly on the genesis of the problem in the following few paragraphs.
Genesis
It is an irony that such a scandal is happening in a state founded on knowledge social justice and revolution. Less than twenty years ago, the state was producing hardworking students that filled its quota in various institutes of higher learning. Today, such graduates are reputable academicians, consultants and public servants in the country. I do not have to go far. You are one of them, sir.
At least up to the early 1980s, the state kept pace educationally with other states in the North. However, since the middle 1980s, we started to note with sadness the decline in quality of our primary and secondary school products. It has been a national decline though it was more acute in the core-North due to three principal reasons: our dependence on public schools, the failure of the nation to manage the universal primary education (UPE) program creditably and irresponsible leadership.
I have always maintained that the UPE was an ill-conceived populist program. However, given the background of Obasanjo as a Yoruba from an environment where Awolowo has always peddled with slogan of ‘free education’, it never came as a surprise. We do not doubt the nobility of its goal, but given the cost of education, it could have been wiser to be less ambitious. Nowhere in the world has education been given free successfully to the whole population over an indefinite period of time. Against all expert advice, the Obasanjo regime embarked on opening the primary schools in every nook and corner of the country. States in the core-North were forced to abandon their gradual approach to educational development and embraced the wild dream of the ego of the then military dictator.
The Federal government was able to construct schools and pay reasonably good salaries to teachers initially. Despite this effort, we can assert that right from its takeoff the program was impregnated with a serious handicap. There was an acute shortage of trained personnel to man it all Northern states. Efforts to make up for the shortfall by sourcing such teachers from other regions still fell short of demand. So pupil-teachers came to form the bulk of its personnel. These were primary school failures who could not pass the common entrance examination or the “interview” for placement in the few secondary schools then existing in the region. Inevitably, quality of our primary schools, and later of secondary schools, started to decline quickly.
Successive economic and political developments only aggravated the situation. Like other elephant projects, the UPE came to epitomize the shortsightedness that has typified Nigerian leaders. Perhaps the oil boom was thought to be everlasting by the Obasanjo administration when it instituted the program. They could not also claim to be ignorant of the corruption that has been ravaging the country since the beginning of the early seventies. Halfway through the first term of the Second Republic, oil prices plummeted and revenues were spent in the same extravagant fashion of previous military dictators. It hardly produced its first graduates before the program became an unsustainable burden. Efforts were made to open more post-primary institutions right from the beginning, but it only succeeded in intensifying the magnitude of the burden.
The education was one of the sectors most severely hit by the large-scale corruption that took place during the Babangida administration. Whereas heavy investments were made in politics and security, all institutions of education were dilapidating by the hour. While administrators announced that education took the lion share of their budget, it was an open secret that such funds were grossly mismanaged, sometimes even developing wings. In effect, government made the least impact in sustaining the infrastructure of schools, and paid only paltry sums as salaries to teachers. The salary was itself reduced to nothing by the devaluation of a Naira that was heading towards N150.00 by the end of Babangida’s tenure.
So all ingredients required to produce satisfactory results were absent: no good infrastructure, no equipment, no tangible salaries, just naught. Despite centralization of primary school management at the Federal level, nothing improved in that direction except the series of corruption scandals.
Southerners are certainly correct to observe that we ‘Northerners’ are responsible for our backwardness especially in the education. We were certainly not prepared for the UPE, but that should not be a scapegoat. We have failed to emulate the enviable achievement of the South in this sector. Of course, when public schools in the North went down, their counterparts in the South also went the same way. However, the South has a long-standing culture of private investment in education while the North is still spoon-fed by government.
Please allow me quote Professor Itse Sagay who ((THISDAY, July 19, 1999) once put this hard fact eloquently in the following words:
“They (Northerners) have no target, they don’t say to themselves this is the level we want to reach, no. To me that is shortsightedness. We in the South do not look at any other person or group of people or geo-political zone. We want education for particular ends, to be professionals, to be enlightened, to be versatile in our lives and so we go for it, we pay for it. Most of our schools are private, expensive ones. They should forget about the South and think of education, think of the goals they want to achieve and design education for that goal and pull resource to meet (it). This whole thing of living on the back of Nigeria, of being carried like a child, is what they have enjoyed so long..”
You got it right, Prof.
Solution
The above quotation from Professor Segay summarized the problem and solution of education in the North. We need to define our GOAL. Without it all investments in the disastrous blackhole of failure. We must say explicitly why we need education. This question is not farfetched in a society with a literacy culture dating back to over a millennium. With a powerful conviction, we must pursue this goal at all cost. There has to be a DESIGN, a well-orchestrated plan to meet this specific goal. Finally, lets PULL RESOURCES to achieve it.
I cannot envisage a better proposal or a better time for its implementation. You are young enough to risk an attempt. To define a goal, design and pull resources to achieve it, certainly Bauchi State can boast of a thousand and one competent hands. I would like to briefly outline some practical steps in this direction.
1. A Committed Leadership
Revolutions like this are not possible without a responsible and committed leadership. Leaders in this country commission committees of able minds to study one problem or another, only to dump their findings and recommendations in the archives. For this reason, many people, including myself, are no longer interested in wasting their time undertaking such assignments.
So your leadership has to prove in various ways its commitment and ability to develop the state by behaving differently. I am sorry to say that the debut looks ordinary. You started with the customary complaint of inheriting an empty treasury. I consider the statement redundant because it will not take your government anywhere. It does not stop you from outlining your program for which you had over six months so far to do since your election. If the government will be the ‘business as usual’ type, it should forget about making any history. Successful changes are always achieved by making sacrifices that are hard in these days of material indulgence.
2. Formation of a Think-tank
If you are convinced that you need a revolution in education, then the next step is the commissioning of a think-tank with specific terms of reference. Their number must be small, consisting largely of intellectuals and professionals, result-oriented individuals with indisputable skill in information management with the necessary exposure to contemporary advances in learning. Since most such people are in the private sector and they may not necessarily be ‘sons of the soil’, to get the best of their ideas, they need to be paid a handsome fee, not just begging them to operate on the empty rhetoric of patriotism. This will further commit the state government and assure them that the exercise will not be in vain.
You may find some of the following points useful in outlining its terms of reference:
Collection, analysis and presentation of data on the investments made by previous governments and their impact on the sector.
Creation of a comprehensive database on educational manpower and infrastructure of the state.
Identification of social and bureaucratic elements responsible for the decline in education and how they could be overcome within the shortest possible time.
Re-engineering education resource management to achieve specific quantifiable goals at different levels and at specific intervals.
Investigating and proposing steps towards partial privatization of education in the state.
Reviewing educational curriculum in line with the state of educational development of the state.
Integrating traditional and western education to reduce wastage of time, to boost the confidence of parents in the system and, more importantly, to improve the relevance of students to their community and prepare them for leadership role in the future.
Studying the relevance and means of returning primary school management to meet local demands and pace of educational development.
Means of developing, recruiting and maintaining the high-standard manpower necessary for achieving the required result.
3. Implementation of Recommendations
The committee must submit their report within 3 months to enable the state study it and come out with a white paper before the next budget. The state government should make revitalization of education its cardinal goal and no amount of resources expended in this area would be a waste. Education has formidable positive ripple effect on other sectors of human activity.
4. Funds?
I am not discouraged by what has been depicted as the poor revenue base of the state. What a big lie! From where did the state get the N600million it expended on education last year? It also beats my imagination that a state with minerals at only a meter depth regards itself as poor.
Okay, we are poor, but what is the cause of our poverty? Obviously, it is engendered by laziness and thoughtlessness, greed and nepotism, ‘big name’ syndrome and irresponsibility.
However, if we are ready to eradicate the social afflictions that have come to characterize our leadership and adopt new approaches to resource exploitation and management, the sum of N600 million could be generated annually with ease and managed judiciously to graduate the best students in various fields of education.
Conclusion
Let me conclude by asserting that Bauchi state, which has produced the highest number of Danfodio’s flag-bearers during the pre-colonial era, and produced impeccable personalities like Sa’adu Zungur and ‘the Golden Voice of Africa’, Tafawa Balewa, in contemporary Nigeria, and indeed all states in the core-North, has both the ingenuity and material resources to re-ignite its lamp of educational glory. It can produce thousands of such scholars and become the best in the Federation by the end of the first decade of the third millennium.
That is however only possible if we have a leadership that refreshes its commitment to the progress of humanity, utilizes our material resources more efficiently, and above all, stands well above the primordial plane of material greed.
Charity, they say, begins at home. Next week we shall go beyond Bauchi State to consider strategies necessary to revamp education in the entire North.
Kaduna
3 August 1999
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