Leadership (Abuja)
Ibrahim A. Kolo
1 July 2008
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Abuja — In order, therefore, to avoid a similarity of previous scenario when agendas were set and eventual outcomes and impact were nothing to write home about, the present effort must take cognizance of certain fundamental denominators for the agenda for action in the context in which they have been articulated by seasoned educationists in the past as well as by some of the papers at the recent summit.
Such fundamentals include the need for strategic re-planning of the entire sector (which to the credit of the commissioners has been listed already in the agenda), mobilisation of political commitment at all levels, community orientation for ownership of the sector, sustained minimum of 26% budgetary allocation to the education sector, funding the massive rehabilitation of infrastructure and facilities, reforming and re-designating of teacher education and the teaching career, curriculum reforms for appropriateness and value-addedness, and addressing salient cost issues in meeting educational needs of the excluded, marginalised and disadvantaged. These fundamentals, indeed, must inform the development and institutionalisation of State- Wide-Education Strategic Plans (ESP's) and Education Sector Operational Plans (ESOP's) as the very first item on the agenda for action.
Strategic Replanning for the Education Sector: The situation of education in Northern Nigeria today needs replanning in the context of short, medium and long term approaches if efforts are to be strategic, sustainable, and institutionalised for impact creation. Many seasoned educationists today believe that planning in the education sector has since been abandoned in Nigeria. Particularly at the state's levels where annual budgets have become more of rituals while medium and long term plannings have become more of paper work and reference points of political gimmickry, rather than guidelines of efforts to be made in terms of tangible imputs based on empirical statistical indicators to guide expected development outcomes and impact.
The agenda for action must be applauded for recognising and prioritising· Education Strategic Planning (ESP) and Education Sector Operational Planning (ESOP) are critical to the repositioning of the education sector in the Northern states. The principles and modus operandi of ESP and ESOP as currently pioneered by UNICEF and Education Strategic Development Partners must be considered and carefully adopted across the Northern states. Luckily, UNICEF is nurturing these two complimentary approaches in Niger and Bauchi States and all other states must be willing to partner or dig into the experience to be subsequently garnered to evolve the required planning culture in the states education systems in the North.
Essentially, ESP and ESOP require that a definite vision for the education sector, transcending all levels and segments of the system be evolved as a sacrosanct reference point and on the basis of which empirical data baselines are derived for projections, inputs and outputs in terms of action plans. The modus operandi of ESP and ESOP is education sector outcomes for which impact is in the context of the larger societal development vision.
Probably, every state in the North needs to make clear its own vision and mission before delving into the ESP and ESOP strategies. Such visions and missions will inform the sourcing of baseline data as well as the relevant data bank to be created for the planning stages. Niger State under the focused leadership of a chief servant, for example, has already articulated a vision of developing Niger State into one of the top three state economies in Nigeria by 2020. As Niger State, therefore, replans for repositioning the education sector through ESP and ESOP approaches for example, this vision will be paramount in the kinds of inputs to be prescribed accordingly. The deplorable state of the education sector in the Northern States today is not totally the consequence of accumulated de-prioritisation and intermittent neglect but also the effect of the lack of appropriate orientation on the value of education and relevant ownership of the system. This later point (i.e. appropriate orientation of the people on the value and ownership of education) is often so missed in most past efforts aimed at reversing the downward trend that even the little gains made from time to time end up into nothingness. This is largely because the people, especially in the rural areas hardly attach the appropriate value to education and see the provision of education more as the absolute responsibility of government. In a region so ingrained in poverty with a people so bereft of the link between education and societal and people's development, it becomes understandable how dilapidated government schools will be so left as they were in such deplorable conditions with everyone as an onlooker of the calamity.
I believe that when Prof. Adeyanju made a passionate case for promoting community ownership of schools, part of what he was saying was that time had come to re-orientate our people to imbibe the culture of taking up their responsibility for appropriate contribution to educational development. While government may go all out to even mobilise resources to rehabilitate and expand schools as provided in the agenda for action, sustaining the gams would reqUIre community and the peoples' complimentary efforts before things slip back to states of deterioration.
The agencies for mass education in the Northern states through strategically designed and well funded re-orientation programmes in conjunction with state branches of the National Orientation Agency (NOA) can provide the way forward in terms of this fundamental factor in the transformation agenda envisaged through the agenda for action adopted at the Kaduna Education Summit of the Northern states.
The issue of massive rehabilitation and expansion of educational infrastructure and facilities is essentially the question of resource mobilisation to meet quantum funds required. As it is today, this is what will run into billions of naira for all the Northern states combined. It is doubtful if even the entire education sectoral allocations from federation accounts and excess crude dividends accruing from time to time will be enough to meet the needs. The point has been made previously about the need for some sort of marshal plan approach to achieve the target of rehabilitating schools and expanding them up to desirable standards which will be childfriendly and equipped for quality and functional education for all. The idea of the marshal plan is to quantify what the entire rehabilitation and projected expansion of structures and facilities at all levels will require and to partner with a consortium of Northern states friendly banks to mobilise the loan to be repaid with a long term stipulated period from annual budgetary allocations.
In this era of Public-Private-Partnerships in the education sector, every Northern state government must be willing to adopt a marshal plan approach for results to be seen in the shortest time possible and to guarantee the expected outcome and impact in the transformation of the education sector accordingly.
Funding the sector for sustenance, one of the reasons attributable to the free fall of the education sector in the North has been the inadequacy of funding arising from depreciating budgetary allocations over the years and the lack of efforts at exploring extra and alternative sources to compliment government budgetary allocations. Hence, funds needed to maintain existing structures, provide relevant services and the necessary requirement to keep the quality of the system on track seized to be made available. Thus, even if we massively rehabilitate and expand the system, without restoring funds needed for the sustenance of the system especially given the philosophy of free education preached by many of the governors in recent times, we are still likely to slide back to the state of deterioration in the sector.
Apart from ensuring the availability of funds for maintenance of structure s and facilities, purchase of relevant equipments and consumables as well as ensuring critical services like supervision, inspection, auxiliary upkeeps, etc, educational institutions must be enabled through restoration and stabilisation grants to jump-start alternative and extra sources of funding that will guarantee sustainability of resources generation efforts. The issue of restoration and stabilisation grants to be mobilised in the first instance by government is even more critical to state-owned higher institutions to enable them initiate or revive endowments, alumni and consultancy and ventures which have been recognised as veritable sources of extra and alternati ve sources of funding.
Teachers Welfare and Professionalism
As the National Policy on Education asserted since 1981 and as reiterated over the years of its revision, no education system can rise above the quality of its teachers. And, of course, the quality of teachers is determined complitarily by their professional mien as well as their welfare as civil servants. Obviously, the transformation of the education sector in the North which is the ultimate outcome value of the agenda for action cannot be fully realised on sustainability bench marks if the welfare and professional status of teachers is not beefed up to address the impact expected to be created.
Largely, the teaching workforce in the Northern States is made up of majority of unqualified, inexperienced and unprofessional personnel. The statistics by both Professor Jegede and Dr. Nkom as presented at the summit as much as point to this. Even with the smaller percentage of qualified professional teachers, they are mostly ill-motivated for the job, uncommitted to the profession and outdated in knowledge and pedagogical skills. Prof. Adeyanju's action research over the years largely points to this situation. Like the issue of lack of attention to the entire education sector, these gamut of problems of teachers welfare and professionalism boils down to the poor professional status accorded teachers by government, poor remunerations and lack of adequate encouragement for professional growth and capacity building.
The Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT) over the years has cried itself hoarse about a special salary scale for teachers to no avail. Noble efforts by the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) is yet to be fully complimented to enhance the professional wellbeing of teachers. It is taking the insistence of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) to get the State Universal Basic Education Boards (SUBEB's), especially in the North, to utilise percentage of the basic education grants committed to continuous and Mandatory Capacity Building as stipulated by the UBE Act (2003). Not much has been achieved by these modest efforts largely because of the levity with which teachers welfare and professional development is treated in official policy circles. For example, rather than put in place extraministry outfits relevant to addressing teachers welfare and professional growth, attention has been paid more to creating Secondary, Science and Technical Schools Boards which have operated more in role conflict situations with the Ministry of Education Headqualiers than evolving any innovative drives towards the quality.
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