The media was awash last week with stories and photographs of the enrolment of Abubakar, the six year-old son of Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai in one of the state’s public primary schools.
Some of the photographs showed El-Rufai, his wife and some security aides taking the little boy to school to have him formally enrolled. El-Rufai was also seen in one other picture sitting in front of the headmaster with his son on his laps. There was another picture showing Abubakar in the classroom sitting on the front seat with one other pupil presumably to clear doubts, as to the authenticity of the enrolment exercise.
A very excited El-Rufai said the move was informed by on-going reforms to revamp public schools in the state and make them more competitive.
“We are determined to fix public education and raise their standards so that private education will become a luxury. As we make progress we will require our senior officials to enrol their children in public schools”.
He further explained the exercise was in fulfilment of a promise he made two years ago that his son who will be turning six years in 2019 would be enrolled in a public school as a mark of personal example. The enrolment was therefore to fulfil that promise and bolster confidence in our public schools.
Ostensibly, the overall objective is to bring up public schools to offer quality education comparable with what obtains in private schools. And when this is achieved, the lure to have children in private schools even in the face of prohibitive costs would have been substantially stymied. The society will be better for it.
Given the scandalous neglect our public education system has suffered over the years with parents preferring private schools with accompanying exorbitant fees, El-Rufai’s example would seem a step in the right direction. For one, it is an admission of the inherent dangers in the continued neglect of our public education system resulting in the lowering of standards. For another, it is a veritable statement to the effect that the poor quality of education offered in public schools would have been substantially reversed were our leaders to be sending their children to such schools. Again, he seems to be sending out signals that the quickest approach to reversing the criminal neglect of public education is for leaders to begin sending their children to such schools. With that, they will see the need to pay adequate attention to the debilitating challenges that have reduced our public education system to former ghosts of themselves.
The scenario is that of vicious cycle of neglect-dilapidated buildings; lack of teaching and learning materials, lack of seats with pupils sitting on the floor in some states and poorly motivated teachers. All these accentuate general loss of confidence in the quality of services emanating from such poorly organized schools. If any modicum of public confidence is to be restored to the public education system especially at the primary level, the starting point is to substantially address these systemic deficits.
That appears the point El-Rufai was underscoring. And he is not alone in this. He is making a very bold statement that public schools can be trusted to offer quality education. He is saying that public schools can be substantially upgraded to offer educational services that compare very favourably with what obtains in private schools. He is saying that the comatose state of public education system is consequent upon its neglect by governments and once that is reversed, standards will substantially improve. That goes without saying.
Incidentally, this rot is not peculiar to the education sector as the same malfeasance permeates the entire fabric of our national life. The health sector where our leaders prefer medical tourism abroad to fixing our hospitals is a serious case in point. The discrimination, profiling and stigmatization of our citizens abroad in search of elusive greener pastures are also on account of the squandering of our collective patrimony and wrong priority setting by visionless and rogue leadership.
If much of the resources this country is bountifully endowed is gainfully deployed to productive engagement, the nation would have been high up in the rungs of the ladder of development. And its domino effect would have been evident in all sectors of the national economy. So the deficit El-Rufai seeks to remedy in his state’s public education system is a general cankerworm afflicting all spheres of our national life. And it will require the right dose of therapy, commitment and visionary leadership to have them substantially redressed.
El-Rufai has dramatized that rot in public schools in Kaduna and seeks to shore up public confidence in it by enrolling his son in the system. If he considers that school good enough for his son, there is no reason other citizens of the state cannot have confidence in the quality of education it offers. He wants us to believe in the capacity of that school to offer quality education. We have no reason to nurse the feeling that the school is not in a position to offer quality education. For it is inconceivable that the governor would just send his son to that school as a ‘guinea pig’ just to score some point.
Yet, we have not been told how many of such schools exist presently in the state, the state of facilities provided to ensure quality education and whether the school is just a prototype the governor intends to replicate in other parts of the state. He should have gone further to provide additional information on other children of his; where they are currently pursuing their education careers. All these would have been helpful in the overall assessment of the outing especially given the media blitz and fanfare associated with his son’s school enrolment.
Opinions differ as to whether El-Rufai should have made a public show of the enrolment or have it done privately. There are also issues with the retinue of officials that accompanied him to the event including his wife, its psychological effect on the pupils and whether cheap political point is not at the centre of it all. It would have made better sense for the mother of the child to have privately enrolled him in the school without the fanfare and drama we were treated to. All these tend to cast serious doubt on the purpose the outing was intended to achieve.
Even then, disclosures that the governor spent N195 million to upgrade that school which had before now, been the choice of the affluent including a former governor of the state detracts substantially from whatever point El-Rufai intended to score. What seemed to have emerged from this is that Kaduna Capital School where the child was enrolled had even before now been considered somewhat elitist. That school is severely handicapped in serving as a gauge for the quality of education offered in Kaduna public schools. And that raises the question of the indecent haste in making public show of the enrolment when no substantial improvement seems to have been recorded in upgrading the standard and quality of teaching and learning in the state’s public schools system. It would have made better sense if the governor had come up with a list schools upgraded and revamped to offer comparable education with the one in which his son is enrolled.
It is possible to contend that this is the first phase of the upgrading and that subsequent efforts would be made to bring all public schools in the state to the standard of the one under focus. Then, he should have waited for substantial improvement to be recorded in the entire education system before going to town the way he was seen last week. And with mounting criticisms from the state against the dramatized enrolment, we are left with the inevitable conclusion that there is more to that enrolment than ordinarily meets the eyes.
It is not just coincidental that the drama is coming on the heels of the flooding of the streets of Kaduna and Abuja with campaign posters of El-Rufai for the far-flung 2023 presidential elections. Suspicion is high that vaulting political ambition is at the centre of the attempt by the controversial governor to portray himself as a man of the people.
He has not dissociated himself from the posters. And that gives further fillip to the suspicion that vaulting partisan political ambition is at the heart of all that drama. We will live to see how that ambition will serve the collective interest of our federal contraption.
