18/07/2020
WHO WILL SAVE NIGERIAN STUDENTS?
By Becky Igyuse
In saner societies, it is the responsibility of the government to serve quality education on a platter of gold to all of its citizens. In Rwanda, a very tiny, non oil producing country in Africa, government has taken education so serious that no single private person ventures into education as a business there. I mean, you can’t simply compete with the government as an investor in education except and unless you are a philanthropist who just wants to team up with the government.
The reverse is the case in Nigeria where there is a colossal collapse of the public educational system. Back in the 60s down to the early 80s when the Nigerian educational system was still standing on its kneels, you could count the number of private schools on your finger tips. What was termed private schools were basically missionary schools which were favorably competing with government schools. Wholesale private schools as we have it today were very few and most were wobbly. I personally had to change from a private secondary school in my third year to a government comprehensive secondary school where things were better and graduated better. That’s how it was, but today, things have become so degenerate that private schools have turn out to the salvation of our children in education, no matter the shade and color.
What ordinarily ought to have been a social responsibility of the government is now vested in private hands. Some of us are in education not for want of businesses to invest in. If you count the most highly flourishing business persons in Nigeria like Dangote, Rabiu, Afolabi, they are not in education and they are doing fine. Most of us, private individuals are in education out of our desire to lift Nigeria out of the scandalous fall in levels of education for the future of our children, put simple. As someone from Benue state and as a one time Cargo Export Manager with a foremost aviation ground handling company, I can do better selling yams than being in education yet government’s attitude towards education got some of us ‘entangled’ here, just to borrow a word from Jadda-Smith. Yes, we have no choice than to fall in love with education!
Having found ourselves where we are, it is unfortunate that this same government that has wedged the neck of education and pushed it down the ocean, tends to look at private school owners as antagonists, as fishermen in strangers’ ponds rather than contemporaries and partners in business. Otherwise, how can one explain how this government is handling Covid 19 and the reopening of schools. Government is not speaking as a participant in education. The picture one gets from Abuja daily is that of a high Chief, sitting on a very tall chair and giving instructions to its subordinates, instructions that he seemingly has nothing to do with or very little. To start with, government is the biggest proprietor of schools in Nigeria. Government, even if it concludes that pupils and students in private schools are no longer Nigerian citizens, has more work to do in accordance with its current guild lines and protocols for the reopening of schools. Yet, government is acting like; yes, stop disturbing me, take twelve days and a copy of my guild list, prepare and reopen schools, if you like. Where is that done?
It is time government realized that in every public primary school in every nook and cranny across the country, in every public secondary school and tertiary schools, it has less than two weeks to build additional classrooms, additional hostels, temporary isolation centers, build and equip dispensaries etc, etc for schools to reopen. This isn’t going to be a big deal for private school owners. They are in business; those who will sink will sink, those who will float will float, parents will realigned their children but government can’t decide which villages and towns public school pupils will go to school and or not for noncompliance with the guild lines. It has a responsibility to carry all of its schools along and at once.
It is also a fact of business that when a business person incurs additional cost in the process is carrying out his or her business, he or she passes that cost to the consumer in order to remain in business. It is pertinent for government to understand that additional cost to private school owners is an additional burden to parents who are already pressed down financially by Covid 19. Soft loans which the government is touting are no solution here because these loans invariably will be paid. The question is with whose money? Are they going to be paid by the private school owners in themselves or with money coming from parents of pupils/students? How much poorer will the parents of our students be after covid 19 is another question.
That said, since schools were closed in March in accordance with government’ directive, two months was time enough for government together with school owners to have come up with credible, implementable solutions to tackle Covid 19. I mean, if one has foresight, one can’t just close schools, go home to sleep, snores and wait for a clamor to wake one up before starting to talk. Nothing realistic will come out of your mouth. Is it that we didn’t know at the time schools were closed that we are going live with this thing? Was it so difficult to have started working out plans for the reopening of schools at the point closures were ordered? To any sane person, it’s more difficult to build classrooms, hostels, dispensaries, isolation centers and so forth within two weeks than to have taken two months to work out solutions and two months to implement, from March to July. It’s only God that can work miracles. The fact still remains; our students are out of school, may not graduate and Covid 19 is not likely going anywhere. We must together to find workable solutions that will poke fingers into Covid 19’ eyes. Enough of the Abuja’s grandstanding, it’s taking us nowhere.
