The plight of our teachers in our public schools at the bottom of our educational ladder never seems to excite public interest beyond a casual chuckle by the important people whose children’s fate is not in the hands of starving teachers. The typical reaction seems to be: if teachers are not paid regularly, so what? After all, no one ever said teachers would get their rewards here on earth. Their treasuries are piled up for them way beyond the clouds safe from moths and thieves. They may be wretched and starve here on earth but like Lazarus, they would preside over sumptuous meals in the hereafter. Nonsense.
I bet the Daily Trust front page story of February 2 was a so-what? story. The paper, using statistic provided by the president of NUT, Comrade Alogba Olukoya, reported that most of the state governments owe primary and secondary school teachers salary arrears of between one month and 28 months. Thirteen of these states are the shameless destroyers of our education because they starve their teachers, treat them badly and yet expect them to give their professional best. The worst cases are Osun, 28 months; Nasarawa, 26 months; Kogi, 25 months; Benue, 12 months and Ekiti, nine months.
On the face of it, you might think that because the teachers appear to take their plight in their stride, they are poster children of patience and dedication. The truth is less generous to them. They may not declare a formal strike but the truth is that they are not working. They may only occasionally show their faces in the classrooms just to register their presence as employees. The pathetic casualties are, of course, the children whose parents cannot afford to send them to the very expensive private primary and secondary schools.
The real tragedy is that the national attention is focused on higher education. President Muhammadu Buhari has set up a panel to look into what is happening in our universities. But the rot in our education is at the bottom of the ladder; not at the top. The rot in our tertiary institutions is a reflection of the rot at the primary and the secondary school levels. To clean up the system, we must begin from the bottom up.
I do not think any one needs to be convinced that the primary school is the foundation of education. If you do not get it right, as I have often said in this column and elsewhere, you can never get the educational system right. It would be a long and painful process of recovery but it is the only hope we have to give back the lost integrity and glory to our educational system.
University education is important. It is so important that almost every state in the federation has at least two or three universities – federal, state and private. The executive council of the federation approves applications for new private and public universities at least once every quarter. We hold these out to the world as indisputable evidence of our great leaps in educational development. I do not think the owner of an eye-popping mansion who knows that his mansion rests on sand would be proud to show it off without appearing foolish to himself.
Several people have called on the federal government to declare a state of emergency in education. I do not think the governments and their experts in education have ever given a serious thought to that. The declaration of an emergency in education would force the nation to re-think the purpose of our education. It would empower the state to halt our penchant for the number of tertiary institutions at the expense of the quality of education. The current exploitation of parents and their children desperate to acquire education is a disgrace to the nation.
On November 13 last year, the presidency organised a retreat on education. What follows is part of my reflection on the retreat in my column for the Guardian. President Buhari spoke of the effects of decades of neglect of education in the country and pointed out that as a consequence we are contending with a high rate of illiteracy, perhaps one of the highest in Africa, north and south of the Sahara. We hold the candle to relatively poorer African countries with a high premium on education, qualitative education, to prepare their children for leadership tomorrow. Buhari admitted too that 13.2 million children are out of school in the country. The figure would be much higher if we take into consideration an estimated 10 million almajiri, child beggars on the fringes of human development.
The president then went on to say the right things that are, in the nature of politics, mildly uplifting, not because they are new but because when a president says such things, hopes tend to immediately crowd out hopelessness and despair. He said that “education is our launch-pad to a more successful, more productive and more prosperous future.” No one needed telling but coming from him it suggests, without our being too liberal about its interpretation that he is drawing the line in the sand between the current shameful situation in education and its more hopeful tomorrow.
He said, “We must get it right in this country. To get it right means setting our education sector on the right path (because the) security and stability of the country hinges on its ability to provide functional education to its citizens.”
The problem is that we cannot get our education right when our primary and secondary school teachers are not paid by many of the states as and when due. We cannot set our education on the right path when we neglect the very foundation of education – the primary school. We cannot set our education on the right path with the widening dichotomy between the children of the haves and those of the have-nots. We cannot provide functional education to our children unless there is a fundamental re-orientation in our educational system that places greater emphasis on the training of the mind and the hands rather than the passing of examinations and obtaining certificates. As I have often said, by placing misplaced emphasis on certificates rather than on the training of the mind our nation is only producing certificated morons who are neither useful to themselves or the Nigerian state.
The rot in the system is so comprehensive that it would take a long, long time to put the nation back on the path of true and meaningful educational development. But we lose more time and the rot gets even worse if we refuse to pause now and take the first step towards tackling the problem. The present and the future of our nation and its teaming leaders of tomorrow make it all so urgent. You can tell the president that.
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