Comrade Ranti Ojo Matthew is the Kogi State Chairman of the Academic Staff Union of Secondary Schools (ASUSS). In this interview, he bares his mind on Federal Government’s attitude and the way forward for the education sector amidst other issues. Excerpts…
What do you think is responsible for the decline in the quality of education especially at the elementary level?
To me, it started in 1976 with the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE), a government programme put in place in order for all Nigerian children to be educated. However, to meet up with the required number of teachers for the programme, the government went into crash programme to produce teachers. More Teachers Colleges were established. Regrettably, intake was of low quality in order to quickly meet up with the demand and so the output was equally of low quality.
In fact, the worst is currently ongoing in the National Teachers Institute (NTI) where tomato sellers, farmers and mechanics are being recruited, trained and given certificates – Grade Two Certificate and National Certificate of Education (NCE). This is under the Universal Basic Education (UBE) and in order to make teachers available to execute the mass literacy programme of the government, the issue of National Teachers Institute came up.
These programmes were not meant to produce quality but just mass literacy. That is the missing link and it began in 1976. It made the society lose the respect they have for teachers because of the mass production and their low quality.
It would be recalled that in those days, especially in the villages, after the traditional rulers, it was the teachers that people so much respected but now, that it has become an ‘all comers’ affair; teachers have lost the respect and the prestige.
To worsen it, government has politicized education, as it sees investment in education as waste in the sense that government prefers to build roads and hospital which the electorate would see and believe that such government is working rather than education, which the effect might not come until after some years. I have been telling the political class that the payment of West African Examination Council (WAEC) fees for students is a waste of government’s meager resources. In Kogi State, government pays as much as N400m annually.
The payment is political and it can never achieve something useful. I have been saying that government was just paying for students who never prepared for the exam, as there were no teachers to teach them adequately and besides, most of the students have lost interest in learning. Government believes it is doing a wonderful thing in paying for these students. Honestly, I appreciate government’s effort in this regard but the money would have been used to recruit quality teachers and fix the decaying infrastructure in schools and provide learning materials.
To me allowing the parents of these students to pay for WAEC would make them more serious as the parents themselves would monitor their children for them to get good results in the examination. Today, what we are turning out is what I call PHD: ‘Poor, Harrassed and Depressed’ students in secondary schools. If we want to help our society and the future generation, we need to guarantee that in amongst the states of the federation, Kogi State would continue to be relevant. But we must go back to the drawing board by redirecting our resources towards education.
Based on your submission, are teachers to be blamed for the decline in quality of education in the state?
You can only blame somebody you have given tools to work with. In the secondary schools here, there are areas of specialization. A graduate of Biology cannot go and teach English and a graduate of Mathematics, no matter how good, would not teach political science. In most schools, you have the principal and one teacher. To me, we can politicize everything but not education.
There is the proliferation of secondary schools; some communities that are not supposed to have more than one secondary school are having three. In all these schools, you need to employ teachers, set up adequate infrastructure and provide learning materials, but the government cannot fund it all. Instead of the government to close down some of these schools, it is saying that if they do that such communities would not patronize their party.
A critical look at the education sector shows that the low quality of teachers is a contributing factor to the low quality education. What is your view sir?
National Teachers Institute as a crash programme has no problem and the modules they are using is superb but the nature of the programme and the kind of people being admitted is the problem. Also the cancellation of the Teachers Training Colleges is one of the retrogressive steps the Federal Government took which is negatively affecting the quality of teachers.
