A one-time Commissioner for Education in Akwa Ibom State, Dr. Effiong Edunam has decried the falling standards of education in the country, laying such squarely on the shoulders of government, teachers and students in failing to perform their responsibilities.
Dr. Edunam, who spoke this in an interview with StraightNews, acknowledged that the standards of education have fallen in terms of teaching and learning, declaring “And in terms of appropriate inputs for teaching and learning, it is evident at all levels that Nigeria is really lagging behind. If you go to secondary schools, most of them do not have laboratories, they do not have libraries and teachers hardly go to school.
According to him,”And as you know, most of the teachers live in urban areas and they commute to rural areas for work. Now it is commonplace for a teacher to go to school once or twice a week. And the system tolerates it. You go to many of the schools whatever could go wrong has gone wrong.
The school environment does not encourage teaching and learning. Teachers are poorly encouraged. In many cases as in the primary level, teachers are always paid last and late and with few months in arrears. Leave grants are not paid. Promotion arrears are not paid. Those who retire do not get their gratuity and pensions in time.”
He bemoaned that “And so virtually every teacher in the public system is a trader, farmer or something else to help alleviate the burden of working in the public sector. And it is not peculiar to them because the general attitude to work has declined dramatically across the board in our governmental system.
And then you observe disparity between the output of the governmental system in terms of school and the private sector. The people in the private sector hardly earn half the salary paid people in the public sector. But the private sector people have outperformed them- those in the public sector because supervision is vigilance and the proprietors demand result. But in the public system whether someone is working or not he is protected by his union.”
The ex-commissioner who was a university don lamented “And now what is worse if you want to punish or discipline anybody in service, he would bring his clan head, he would bring his Bishop, he would bring his Rev. Father- all in a bid to avoid discipline and those kind of things encourage poor output; it encourages laziness; it encourages the kind of result we have in our examinations across all the levels.
So, we want a situation where in the public sector supervision is taken very seriously. I remember in our own time in the 50s and early 60s, if we heard that the school inspector was coming all the teachers would be shivering as if a dragon was going to consume them. The school compound was kept clean and nobody sought to know the day the inspector would come. The inspector would take everybody unawares.”
Edunam queried “But now, you know what they do? The inspector gives principals and headmasters advanced notice so that all their “requirements” would be put in place before they come and the inspection would be tidied up in the headmaster’s or principal’s office so the school would then be left alone with all its adequacies. So, we want a situation where government would take its own responsibility in education sector seriously. Where schools are dilapidated, they should be promptly repaired.”
He explained “The aim of our education is to produce future leaders, ladies and gentlemen. Those are not the kind of people you can bring up in a jungle because if you see some of our schools thoroughly taken up by weeds, no flower to even beautify the environment as we used to see in the colonial time and the way some of the teachers dress and conduct themselves are not uplifting the example for the pupils and students they teach.”
He opined “So, a lot can be learnt from the proprietors of private schools- they pay less but they produce more. They worry about the nature of the environment in which the children are taught and they worry about the output of their teachers. The morale of the teacher is high. He is not somebody waiting for six months for salary to come and so we can learn from there and improve upon what happens in the public sector.”
“We do not have enough schools. Akwa Ibom government has not been building schools and it should build schools. No state or country can be too educated. We do not have enough and what has happened since government started paying WAEC fees should be a lesson to us. In the first year when the idea of paying WAEC fees was introduced in 1999 the first number of WAEC candidates in Akwa Ibom doubled.
“And that time, examination fee was N2,000. This was to show you that about 18,000 students willing to take WAEC could have been deterred from doing so by N2,000. So, we need to look at that sector a bit critically because whoever else in any other sector would demand education. So, we need to pay more attention to that sector than what we are doing now,” the educationist enjoined.
