If one were to ask someone what the most difficult job in the world is, he is unlikely to be told that running a public school in Nigeria is. Yet it may well be.
Naturally, at age 65 and having spent a greater part of my life in journalism and local community leadership, I ought to know a few things about job challenges.
Without a doubt, our education system has been bedeviled by numerous challenges particularly since from the early 1990s when a burgeoning public education sector brought rapid, unexpected, and often nasty outcomes. These outcomes, which I shall enumerate shortly, are what our retiring school principal has had the misfortune to grapple with, these past few years, while she was in charge in Orozo.
But I must mention, first, the challenges of managing troubled students. It is with nostalgia that we all look back at parenting in the good old days, as they say. A casualty of working-class parents that have left parenting to housemaids, new money parents who often think that a rich home is the same thing as a good home, and the unsettling effects of the internet and social media on our children. Then, to whom did we leave the parenting? Our teachers, of course, and the outcome, predictably, has been a remarkable disaster. For truth be told, no one can effectively step into the shoes of a parent. Anxious parents and educationists who are scrambling to explain drug abuse and cultism need not look further afield. Enough for students.
Next are the cantankerous teachers. People in places of learning are like people in places of worship. They have an exaggerated view of their worth, intellectually and spiritually. They are always in the know and always in the right. Any public school principal will admit to you that his teaching staff and their unions ensured they never had a good sleep. I know in fact that our departing principal had quite a handful.
I recall sadly, for instance, the tumultuous tenure of one of her predecessors who shared her time between her ministry of education, the EFCC, the ICPC, and her desk, in that order, responding to relentless petitions instigated by the unions and the Parent Teachers Association. Now, add unwanted meddlesomeness of the ministry people and chronic under-funding to the cocktail; would there be need to add more?
Yet I have to be pardoned, nonetheless, to mention that which is dear to my heart – the essence of vocational education. Our subject institution, Federal Science Technical College, Orozo, Abuja is as good as any of its kind in this our little corner of the globe. With 400 staff, 2,500 students, it offers, if you permit, the old City and Guilds of London qualification, now styled differently. Good artisans and critical skills that the country is yearning for, far and beyond the bachelors of these days.
Standing at 5.8ft, Mrs. Grace Kenneth is the school’s 10th head. She has related exceptionally well with us, the host community, despite the constant bickering over matters of land boundary demarcation, trespass, and encroachment. Little wonder, though, the sprawling land at the back of the school has remained without a parameter fence since inception in the early 80s.
For a more enduring legacy, Mrs. Grace Kenneth strengthened academic standard, fixed decadent structures, and even managed to put up a few buildings and- this is also close to my heart- planted many trees!
The Karshi and Orozo community will miss her, for sure. It is our hope that she, too, will miss us.
HRH Alhaji Ismaila Mohammed, Emir of Karshi, Abuja
