The rot I saw at the Education Ministry – Oby Ezekwesili
By IME OLA
Tuesday, November 21, 2006

As the storm over the purported sale of unity schools begins to settle, the Minister of Education, Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili, has reaffirmed her resolve to reform the ministry, with the aim of taking it back to what it used to be.

Mrs. Ezekwesili, who spoke recently during a visit to The Sun headquarters at Kirikiri, Lagos, said those who were against the reform deliberately misinformed the public on the issue.
The minister, who presented a gloomy picture of the rot in the education sector, urged Nigerians to ignore politicians who have no vision for the sector.

She warned that if the rot in the system was not addressed, the country was at the risk of creating a republic of Italy girls, Yahoo boys, miscreants and hardened criminals; thus emerging as a country that created highly skilled and motivated criminals by the year 2020.

The minister also explained that government had no plans to commercialize unity schools. Giving more insight into the public/private partnership management of the schools, she said, "it would work in the kind of way that we set the rules to guide the operations of the schools."
She added that "the school fees won’t change because it is not commercialization. For the ministry, we say we want to fund our children’s education, not through bureaucracy. Let’s find our partners in the Parents Teachers’ Associations (PTAs) school-based organisations, old Boys/Girls Associations. We want to take the bureaucracy away so that our children can excel."
She expressed confidence in the partnership, adding that it would work because their interest in the schools is not for profit.

Exerpts.
The first six weeks
We came on this visit to the media because I think that it is important for us to situate what I have been able to see of our education system. Like you, before I got to the Education Ministry, I knew we had problems with our education system, but I just thought the problems were easy to analyse until I got to the ministry. I am a hard core data person and I do things on the basis of evidence, I do trend analysis as a matter of professional interest. As it’s usual with me, I go into a sector and I go into an assignment. I have no cue of what it is about, but what I do is that I humble myself and say I need to learn, I need to know what the issues are.

I did that for the first six weeks of my being in the Ministry of Education. I did not say a word to anybody, all we did was to gather all the materials that we needed to gather within the ministry and from outside, as the case may be. One of the first things that we knew was that, in today’s world, there are six spheres of education that any country’s Ministry of Education spends its time on.
We have Early Childhood, Basic Education, Secondary Education, Tertiary Education, Adult-Non-formal and Special Needs Education.
The first thing for me was what our scores are as a nation, concerning each of these spheres of education.

Early childhood education
We took Early Childhood sphere and looked at policy, structure and governance, the physical infrastructure that are available to deliver it, deployment of technology within it, academic achievements, monitoring and inspection, the quality of curriculum, teacher quality and supply, the funding, the equity issues.

We took up each of these spheres and then said, what kind of performance? So, we did an analysis of what we were seeing for each of these spheres. So, for Early Childhood Education, for instance, the performance was very poor.
Early Childhood Education is so important today, because it has been found empirically by research that the ages of two and three are very important in cognitive start-up. So, if you left a child of two to three years and you are thinking that he is still a baby, you have missed an important point in the cognitive maturation.

This sphere of education in our country is totally an elitist one as it were, the public school system has no place for it because nobody is thinking about it as an important sphere. Following the pyramid structure of economic set up in our country, it means that a very tiny percentage of people at the orbit are giving their children that leg off, so the country is losing.

Primary education
We took primary education, we looked at the school age population to know what we have for it. The composition of our population, the world census fact sheets on composition of countries and population says that about 42.1 million of our children are between the ages of 1-14 years. The relevant question is, what levels of education are captured in that age range? We have 22.3 million for primary school, 3.6 million in junior secondary schools, giving a total of about 25.8 million.

Compare it to what that number is saying. We can see that more than 40 per cent of those who should be in the school system at this age are not there. We are not enrolling enough of the children who should be in the school at that school age. We are massively producing a huge population of a particular generation that are going to be illiterates because they are outside of the school system at the age they should be within the school system. That’s an important issue for a Minister of Education to think about.

Secondary education
We should have some population of about 33.9 million. About 2.8 million are in senior secondary. Federal Government, frankly, does not have business with it.
However, it did take on the matter of unity schools, so it decided on the basis of special intervention to do something that would create some islands of excellence to be known as unity schools for the symbolism of our national integration.

When we talk about the reforms, people think that the issue is about unity schools. No. That is what the Federal Ministry of Education pretended to itself that it is what its responsibility to the society is all about. Even if they say deal with the issue of unity schools and leave every other thing as it is, we are in serious trouble with education. That is the point to take away.

The latest World Bank analysis shows that only 30 per cent of the population that should be in secondary school are in school in Nigeria. It’s scary. Somebody at the Presidential Forum on Education said I should not call it crisis because we don’t have a crisis. The president said okay, we can call it a challenge. Whether crisis or challenge, we are in serious trouble with our education.
Tertiary education

Global standard is that for a developing country, we should be able to have at least 20 per cent of the youthful population in tertiary level of education. In Nigeria, we have just 3 per cent, South Africa is 18 per cent, Brazil, 25 per cent. So, you see, we have a problem.

Special needs education
This is an issue because it has an impact on the capacity of democracy to function. Every society has got people who are challenged in one form or the other. The education system must have a vision for their special needs whether in terms of curriculum, teacher and materials. We could not find any real attention for special needs education.

9-year basic education
Because of the new 9-year basic education programme, we have made some progress. A child who has finished primary six must go on to a 3-year of junior secondary education before we can give a certificate to that child. In terms of structure and governance, there are issues because this is a level of edcuation provided by the state and local governments. In terms of physical infrastructure, you can see the low score, deployment of technology, very low score, academic achievement is scary, monitoring and inspection, low score, quality of curricular has a high score because there is a new curricular for primary/junior secondary education.

What has it done? It has brought back things like Civics and Moral Instruction into the social studies component. Now, the president has said Civics should stand alone. We have integrated things like creative thinking, entrepreneurial studies. At that age, the Nigerian child is not thinking about coming out of school to go and wreck the economy. He is saying that he can conceive some ideas that would add value to the society.

Other areas like teacher quality and funding also score very low. For funding, state and local governments are supposed to be in charge of this. That also explains the revenue allocation formular which is based on the principles of federalism, that there is a centre that would be providing for shared services.

How we failed
For me, the three levels of government have failed in Education. The failure is coming from the fact that as a Federal Government, working through the Federal Ministry of Education, we ought to have been so conversant with what was going on in the provision of these levels of education by local and state authorities to have arrested this decline on time. That is our responsibility because we are called Federal Ministry of Education and our responsibility is to be the federating, coordinating organ for policy articulation and delivery for Education.

Through the Federal Inspectorate Service, we are able to take charge of things that begin to go wrong in the way that state and local governments are doing this work, because we have totally diverted ourselves to our pigeon holes and this was happening and we did not wake up to it.

The second level of failure is with the state and the local governments not realising the importance of education when they decide that it is more interesting to go constructing a state university instead of focusing and applying the resources they have to the foundational level of education. They decided to invest on some grandiose projects than to spend majority of the resources investing in education and health. Those choices that state and local governments make in terms of where they are investing resources shows up immediately in this kind of failure. They are failing to provide things in the way they should be provided.

Many children would sooner give you the full lyrics of 50 Cent’s music than they can recite the pledge. If 50 Cent turns around to tell our young people that education is the best thing that they can do, we will have more children waiting to get education, because he has more influence over their minds now. These are the issues.

People think internet and other crimes, examination malpractice, are big issues, I say, no. It is actually a sympton of fundamental distortions

Bureaucracy and corruption
The whole governance structure is polluted by corruption. Bureaucracy now does not look at schools the way it used to be. The corruption you see in bureaucracy has entered into the administration of education and it has done the greatest disservice to the nation. The same way that corruption is entering into health delivery. It destroys the nation. Corruption entering into the construction of this and that, it is a different kind of impact.

But when corruption enters into the system that grows the human talent and capacity then, the nation is in trouble. This is the real issue in the education system and structure in Nigeria today. Whether it is at the level of the ministry or the agencies, Federal or state levels or any other structure of government involved in any responsibility for education, corruption has been having negative impact on the kinds of choices we are making concerning how we are educating our children. So, that’s an issue.
Academic achievements

For basic and secondary education, it is awful. I was at the Senate Committee summit on Education recently and a professor delivered the keynote lecture and put the performance of secondary schools in Lagos State for some years on the screen for all to see. Only 10 per cent passed WASSCE with five credits including English and Mathematics, so, I said thank God, somebody else is bringing out the kind achievements we are seeing amongst our children.

For our own unity schools, we did a ranking of schools performances across the nation over the last six years in NECO examinations to find the best 100 schools in the country. The first Federal Government College featured as number 54. It is a tragedy. What do schools exist for? Is it not for academic achievement? We are totally failing there.

For tertiary education, we also looked at the academic achievements, it is awful. So, we have an education system where academic achievements have taken the back seat. We have institutions but we are not producing academic achievements.

Quality of curricular
This is a real issue for universities, polytechnics, Colleges of Education. They have outdated curricular that do not fit into what companies are looking for. In the last six years, the university system actually got increased funding, but what is the structure of the funding?
There are other issues, cultism, examination malpractice, student abuse, system abuse, student management issues, poor research opportunities. People who are sitting as lecturers but never had the opportunity to spend time investigating knowledge, questioning existing knowledge, giving us new frontiers of knowledge because there are no opportunities. Nobody is funding that activity. Other nations use scholarships to get their students into academic excellence. We looked at tertiary education and what we saw there is like a funnel syndrome where you are graduating an average of 4.5 million from secondary school every year.

Out of that number, we have an average of 1.2 million people waiting to take the JAMB examination to go into the universities. Of the 1.2 million, an average of 200,000 will pass the University Matriculation Examination. Last year, for instance, we witnessed the lowest number so far, 868,000 wanted to enter the universities and 200,000 scored the pass mark. Out of that number, only 148,000 could be admitted based on carrying capacity regulations. What has happened to the rest?
The Education Ministry properly focused ought to have picked it up because it did not just happen overnight.

Over the years, this was going on and the children went back home to their angry parents. So, you had angry children and angry parents, and we just carried on.
We are not being conscious of the fact that we were growing an army of angry people, rejected people, disenchanted people.

You are talking about the funnel syndrome, they get into school, finish over time, another problem starts as they go into the warehouse. They get rejected, unemployed or underemployed. We are producing less and less of the leaders of tomorrow, the doctors, lawyers, policy makers, the managers, the entrepreneurs and the professionals. Instead, we are in danger of mass producing miscreants, disaffected and rejected, the misdirected, the unlearned, the angry, the agitated and the hopeless.