It was a stinker, just as it was heart-rending, when Edo State government during a town hall meeting last week, opened a can of worms on the goings-on in the state primary schools. The picture was one of widespread, across-the-board falsification of ages among primary school teachers in the state. Part of the bizarre revelation was that 789 out of 1,379 teachers obtained their primary school leaving certificates before the age of 8 or 9.
Incredible – you say? That unfortunately was what the audit of the state primary schools undertaken by the Information Communication Technology Agency, under the instruction of Governor Adams Oshiomhole revealed! Thanks to the agency, the exercise confirmed the moral degeneracy by those charged with preparing our kids for the future. So bad was the situation that the duo of the Comrade Governor and the ICT Managing Director, Mrs. Olayemi Keri would lament that the society has degenerated to a point that our forefathers could never have imagined.
The story of the rot in the teaching cadre reminds of the analogy of the baker of bread who wanted everyone in the society dead; all he needed to do was to add a pinch of a deadly substance to the flower and the deed is done. This time, the catastrophe is even more unimaginable given that we are dealing with teachers who have the responsibility to mould the future of our young ones.
The statistics of the rot is certainly as interesting as it is revealing. Only 1,287 teachers representing 9% out of 14,484 teachers have proper and accurate records in the system. The rest 91% have various forms of discrepancies in their records. Another 1,379 teachers representing 11.5% claim that they obtained their primary school certificates after they had been employed as teachers. In fact, some obtained their primary school certificates not more than two years ago, from the school in which they were employed as teachers!
Indeed, merely going by what the records suggest, some of the teachers may have gone to Teachers’ Training College or obtained National Certificate of Education (NCE) before they went to primary school. The governor also gave out statistics on the teachers-student ratio in all the local governments as 30 students per teacher, a figure that is much lower than the UNESCO recommendation on student-teacher ratio, suggesting that there are more teachers in the state primary schools than needed.
And like the governor would also observe at the town hall event, monies arising from the exit of teachers by way of voluntary resignation, death, and otherwise simply vanished without trace!
We can therefore understand the governor’s exasperation when he avers that “It would not be helpful to the cause of education and our resolve to deliver quality education to our pupils if we do not deal with this issue decisively”.
No doubt, there were some positives from the audit. For instance, it showed that there are more female teachers than male teachers in the state. On this, the governor would observe: “in some cases, we have more female pupils in schools than male and that is very encouraging, because some states, are still battling with how to get their female children to school, but that is not the case in Edo.” He attributed this to the number of steps taken to restore confidence and integrity into the public schools system – the result of which is the steady increase in enrolment in public Junior Secondary Schools in the state.
Speaking on why the town hall meeting on education became necessary, the governor explained that it was to find a solution to the problems. He told the gathering: “a school with all the necessary infrastructure without qualified teachers is like an empty hall. The solution to this problem, I may not know, but I am sure, before the end of this all important meeting, the solution would come. But, before knowing the solution, there is need to understand the severity of the problems”, since according to him, “The future of our children lies in sound educational foundation. Edo State government can not afford to leave the future and training of our children in the hands of incompetent teachers”.
He also made the point repeatedly that the government was open to suggestions on the way forward just as he reaffirmed his determination to put in place a mechanism to check corruption, bribery and malpractices in the recruitment of teachers, particularly by the state Post Primary Education Board (PPEB).
According to Walter Scott, “The best part of man’s education is that which he gives to himself”. Often times, columnists, critics and commentators in the country have tended to focus most of their attention on the leadership problems bedevilling the nation, leaving out the sector that determines what entire generations become to fend for itself. It is no longer news that the nation’s standard of education has nose-dived, worse than anybody can possibly imagine if the investigation by Edo State government is anything to go by.
As it is, the fight to restore dignity and respect to our primary, secondary and tertiary institutions should not be viewed as one man’s fight, but, it should be viewed as a fight thrown at all men of goodwill in the nation. If we allow the flame that was handed down to us by our founding fathers to quench in our hands, posterity will never be kind to us!
Though, Oshiomhole has allayed teachers’ fear of possible mass sack, he stated that he needed to get all stakeholders alerted on the issue so as to find a lasting solution to the malaise.
If I understood Oshiomhole correctly, he is simply saying that the primary school system, which is the foundation of learning, needs a turnaround, not cosmetic, but in real sense, a complete change – a real transformation.
