Bisi Lawrence
19 July 2008
column
Those who assert that the teaching profession has gone full cycle are more correct than those who say that for education.
The former are the people who know what is really at play within the core of the teachers' strike.
Only someone who wants to be publicly stoned would say anything against the demand of the Nigerian Union of Teachers for higher wages.
That is what the strike is all about - not better facilities for education, or a better system of education, or proposals for a much needed improvement in education.
It is for a higher payment for teachers and, if you wish, you may equate or approximate that to a resultant rise in the quality of education. In which case, anyone who opposes the strike would, indeed, deserve to be publicly stoned.
However, higher salaries for teachers do not necessarily presage an instant, or even gradual, improvement in educational standards. It is an indisputable fact that the remuneration of teachers two or three decades ago, was generally far below what it is today, just as it is undeniable that our standard of education generally in this country has never been so poor.
The operation of private schools has very little to do with it. As a matter of fact, public schools were almost all we used to have, apart from a scattering of "government" schools, even at the secondary level.
All the "mission schools" were private schools. When Awolowo introduced the free education scheme in the old West, the fee-paying schools were mission schools.
The fees were hardly able to go far in the maintenance of the schools, and so government approved financial aid to many of them.
These grant-aided schools, as they were known, had to satisfy certain standards which earned them the support of government.
They had very little money to pay the teachers at a time which then was very little anywhere to pay. The integrity of sound education was, all the same maintained.
But then, two things happened. The first was the introduction of the "English-speaking" school. This had to come from one particular source - that is, where the teachers mostly spoke English.
The Roman Catholic nuns, who were largely linked with education at the secondary level, also had very close connections at the primary in certain schools which were called, or attached to "convents".
That necessarily made it imperative for their pupils to learn to speak English much earlier than the other schools. No less than three of my children, like their mother before them, attended the oldest of them all, St. Mary's Convent in Lagos.
I remember how thrilling it was to hear my little daughters, at a tender age, speaking English of a quality well above some secondary school pupils.
And since these were in the colonial days when the knowledge of English was associated with academic excellence, many people wanted their children to attend St. Mary's and other schools of that nature.
The school authorities yielded to the old pressure of supply and demand and did not hesitate to increase their fees as they admitted more pupils. In no time at all, such schools formed aristocracy within the educational system. They had the money to pay higher wages and that was the first thing that happened.
The second thing that happened was that the government decided to take over schools. It was a bankrupt decision which was carried out in a mindless imitation of free education scheme of Chief Obafemi Awolowo.
Many experts are not waiting for history to identify this unfortunate move as the most devastating event in the annals of our education. In effect, it turned Nigerian teachers into Nigerian civil ervants. It naturally imposed the work ethics, moulded by the mentality and morality of the civil service, on the teaching profession.
The teachers asked for, and obtained a salary scale in tune with that of the civil service, which shot them up out of the league of their peers whom they once envied in the private institutions. And no one has been the same ever since.
The teachers in the private schools are clamouring for higher salaries and are daily deserting for the public schools.
The proprietors have to increase fees in order to meet the demands of their employees, and they are being vilified as money-makers while some of them are relying heavily on loans from the banks.
Of course, the striking teachers deserve to obtain their quest, which will then likely be followed by a massive retrenchment of teachers in the public sector, and a return of the teachers to the private sector. That would be the full cycle.
It was inevitable that the proposal of Professor Ibrahim Gambari as the Chairman of the steering committee of the Niger Delta Summit would hit the rocks. While it was still under consideration, the UN official and former Foreign Minister in the infamous Abacha government was openly rejected by most of the stakeholders in the Niger Delta.
Even some of the parties who disagreed over other issues found a common ground of agreement on their disapprobation of his choice for that position.
In the main, the man had shot himself in the foot, (with his mouth, as it were) by the uncomplimentary statements he made about the Ogoni tragic incidents which led to the martyrdom of Saro-Wiwa and his comrades. I would not like to soil this page by repeating what he said.
His deplorable utterances at that time may have been no more than the expression of a loyal servant stressing himself in the desire to stay in the pleasure of his boss.
It was very common among his contemporaries, some of whom, like himself, have found a way of still retaining influential positions in the corridors of power.
Protected by the camouflage of ethnic colouration, they have found it easy to merge with the environment of corrupt affiliations which the Obasanjo regime created within the polity.
Professor Gambari would have quietly continued to enjoy the image of a distinguished statesman like others of his ilk if the appointment had not recalled his unenviable past.
He has all the professional and personal attributes to recommend him for the Niger Delta job. But there was this stain, indelible as it was, and the seriousness of which, regrettably, Gambari failed or refused to recognize. He behaved as if it was an issue of a past era, and would not acknowledge its affinity with the current situation. That was infuriating enough.
But what many people found astonishing was that the Federal government appeared to share that misconception, and went further to underestimate what the reaction of the Niger Delta people would be to such an appointment.
That speaks of a government that has a deficient focus on the larger picture of national situations. But the Gambari saga still held a sting in its tail.
The gentleman went on to withdraw from the appointment, but only after the government had gone public that it was considering a replacement for its unacceptable nominee, in an open admission of its initial, inane faux pas - thus making the humiliation of Gambari complete.
Couldn't they have tried to save his face - and theirs - by simply, quietly asking him to withdraw on his own before the whole world was made aware that they could no longer accommodate him?
Speakers are still tumbling off their seats in our legislative houses. It is disgusting. They are being toppled by those who elected them freely as mature and right-thinking men and women, to guide the proceedings and the deliberations of the law-making processes.
Some of them seem to have courted the disaffection of their colleagues by slipping on the banana peel of "due process." Others seemed to have been caught on the wrong side of the dividing line between "power gladiators".
It has become such a usual occurrence that one would be hard put to name any nation in the history of world government that has actuated such a high turn-over of parliamentary leaders in less than ten years.
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