The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Expensive

  • Education is expensive, but churches should consider members, says don

    Professor of Guidance and Counseling, Prof Mopelola Omoegun, has debunked claims that mission schools charge too much.  However, she said church-owned institutions need to consider ways to help their members afford the fees for their wards.

    Prof Omoegun, who is the Chairman, Board of Trustees of the Lagos Girls Anglican Grammar School (LAGGS), Lagos, spoke at a press conference to commemorate the school’s 60th anniversary last Friday.

    The University of Lagos (UNILAG) don said given the facilities that churches provide without government support for their schools what they charge as tuition is not expensive.

    She said: “Let me correct that notion: education offered by religious institutions is not expensive.  By the time you compare private schools and those owned by churches, you will know it is not expensive. They have to break even because it is business, they have to pay the teachers well, and on time, so that there will be commitment. They also have to procure equipment and make sure the learning environment is conducive for the students to meet up with international standards. Now when they charge, it must be done in such a way that will make them run the school properly.”

    Prof Omoegun, however, said that members who fund institutions built by churches should also be able to send their wards there.  She called on churches to find ways to achieve this.

    “I know the fees, like I said, must be expensive since there is no government involvement. But I think that is where there is a problem, if they used the tithes and offerings of the people to build the schools, there should be concession. That is my grouse, if you have used tithes and offering of the people, there should be consideration. But on the fees, it has to be high because people will expect standard, they should be ready to pay for it,” she said.

    Speaking on the school’s diamond jubilee, Prof Omoegun, who is the Dean, Faculty of Education at UNILAG, said it has achieved the milestone of 60 by providing quality education.

    “We are celebrating the 60th anniversary of this college today and it is commendable that the school owned by the Anglican Communion has come of age in providing quality education at affordable rates for the society,” she said.

    The principal of the school, Mrs Mercy Akin-Ajayi, added that this would have been impossible without the commitment of the Anglican Dioceses to educational development.

    Akin-Ajayi said the school has improved tremendously from when it was returned to the Anglican Mission by the state government in 2003.

    She said: “Since the school was returned to the original owners about 12 years ago, it has been a lot of efforts. It is a pity we cannot bring back the pictures of how it was in those days. This place was a house for miscreants. Boys from Mushin and Ojuelegba used to come here to smoke, but today, the story is different.

    “We have converted the Jakande-style shed to a block of class rooms.  We have it in a storey building housing 24 classrooms.  The Jakande structure had no windows. When it rained, every student would be in the rain and when it was hot, it would be very hot, making teaching and learning so difficult.  We have also upgraded the hall. When we took over from the government who had taken it from us initially, there was no single glass left on the windows of the hall, it took some millions to fix. We were able to do this with the fees from the students. And we still have the fees at affordable rates.”

    She added that the school hopes to use the anniversary to raise more funds, and thanked the old students who have supported the school in the past.

    “We have an old student who is a professor; she recently endowed a N5 million scholarship for students that performed well in certain subjects. This is very commendable,” she said.

    The school is one of the colleges run by the Anglican Communion in Lagos State and administered by diocese in the Lagos area. The dioceses include Lagos, Mainland, Badagry, Lagos West and Diocese of Awori.

     

  • PhD is expensive, says couple

    PhD is expensive, says couple

    After three years of hard work to earn a doctorate, Dr Temitope Oluwaseun Samuel (nee Oguntade), can now relax.

    The 31-year-old was announced the best among the 47 (including her husband) that received their doctoral degrees during the golden jubilee convocation of the University of Lagos (UNILAG) last Thursday.

    However, she spent a fortune conducting research for the programme.

    Getting married to fellow doctoral student, Olusegun Samuel, while undergoing her PhD in Micology (study of fungi) meant she had little time to enjoy the niceties of a new marriage. She also could not enjoy full maternity leave because her thesis needed her full attention.

    “It’s been a while I have been able to relax. I got married in the whole process of this PhD and I have not had time to enjoy my marriage. The research was not easy. Even the day I put to bed I was in the laboratory until 7pm. I didn’t know that I would put to bed. Six weeks after giving birth, I was back,” she said.

    When working on her thesis titled: “Studies on dermatophytes isolated from patients at two tertiary health institutions in Lagos State, Nigeria”, Dr Samuel did not know that her research to determine why fungi infections reoccurred in patients after repeated treatment would be adjudged the best for the 2011/2012 academic session.

    Now that her research work has caught attention, she hopes that health authorities will review the methods for diagnosing fungal infection.

    She said: “My thesis is a current challenge in the demacology unit of the health sector. I realised that over the years when people have different skin diseases after taking oral and topical prescriptions, they reoccur after sometime. I found out that almost all the mycology section use conventional laboratory method in diagnosing the disease. But it is not enough. In the 21st century advanced countries use both the conventional and molecular method. With both methods you get more accuracy about the exact organism causing the infection. Two organisms may look alike but by the time we use the molecular method and check the genetic make up. We can identify the particular organism.

    “The molecular method is in three stages involving: DNA extraction, Running a PCR on the extraction and using a DNA Sequencer to determine the make up of the organism. But the DNA sequencer is not available in Nigeria. The only place they have it is at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) but it is not for commercial use.”

    “Before I started this research, I took permission from the Lagos State Health Service Commission to access patients with fungal infections. They made me promise that I would give them a copy of the thesis so I hope with it they will review the method they are using.”

    Seeking more financial support for doctoral students, Dr Samuel who lectures in the Department of Botany urged government to provide an enabling environment for research.

    “PhD is not something you can achieve with a million naira. It is very expensive. I used all my salary and my husband had to take a loan for me. I was sending my samples to Maryland, United States because there is no DNA Sequencer in Nigeria. I packed it in an ice rack and sent by DHL and they would send me the results,” she said.

    Like his wife, Dr Olusegun Samuel also invested heavily on his thesis studying the effect of heavy metals discharged by industries into the lagoon on periwinkles. “You start getting loans from all sorts of places to carry out research,” he said.

    He looks forward to a time when the industry would sponsor research in Nigerian tertiary institutions which will ease the financial burden. From his experience working on his thesis: “Heavy Metal Contamination of Ologe Lagoon, Nigera and biomarkers of Oxidative Stress in Pachymelania Aurita”, he said without support of industry and government monitoring their activities, researches will remain on the shelf.

    “In foreign countries, industry sponsors this kind of study because they want to know the impact of their activities on the environment. But in Nigeria industries don’t want you to come near them because they feel they will be indicted. If you go there with letters they refuse to open their doors. Those things make you start changing the orientation of your research. Since I couldn’t get the effluent from a particular company I visited, I decided to look at the heavy metals in surrounding waters,” he said.

    Samuel, who is an eco-toxicologist in the Department of Marine Sciences, added that when industry backs research, it would create employment for various experts.

    He said: “If the industry sponsors research, they will know whether their in-house treatment of waste water is effective and what to do about it. The process of managing their effluent will create jobs. They must employ a chemical engineer to design the treatment stages; a microbiologist will check the kind of microbes that will act on the waste, while an eco-toxicologist will check whether the treatment is effective.”

     

  • ‘Good education is expensive’

    ‘Good education is expensive’

    Running a good private school requires capital investments that many proprietors are unwilling to make, says educationist, Mrs Moronke Oshosanya.

    In an interview with The Nation, Mrs Oshosanya, who runs Acehall School in Ikeja, Lagos, asserted that quality education is expensive and that school owners must be willing to train their teachers and put learning resources in place that will improve their school’s education delivery.

    “Good education is expensive. Very few schools train their teachers; very few schools have learning resources. There are fears that after training teachers they leave for other schools. But if you don’t train them, it is garbage in garbage out. But the investment is worth it because a good education impacts for live. You are able to use whatever it is you learnt everywhere,” she said.

    Mrs Oshosanya said further that technological advances underscore the need for Nigerian children to receive quality education because they now compete on a global stage.

    “Away from inability of teachers and inadequate resources, the world has become global and the Nigerian child will be competing with others around the world. Are we preparing children for the world? I was head of school, trainer and consultants before I started Acehall. When I tell proprietors there is a need to do this, they say there is no money. I got frustrated and decided to start a school that would incorporate all I know,” she said.

    In practicalising all she knows in her school, Mrs Oshosanya said her pupils feel so much at home they are unwilling to leave, and advises others to do same.

    “When you come into Acehall as a child you don’t want to leave – a major problem for our parents because their children don’t want to go home. Here, learning is fun,” she said.

    Explaining how Acehall incorporates fun into learning numeracy and literacy, Mrs Oshosanya said pupils connected the film Prince of Egypt with Mathematics. The play, based on the biblical character of Joseph who was imprisoned in Egypt, was enacted during the school’s end of year concert.

    “Take for instance Prince of Egypt, they learnt maths with the film – they calculated the distance of the Nile River and the Red Sea; they plotted graphs with their favourite characters to find out who was most loved,” she said.