Education reforms: Roadmap for the APC government

The challenges of the lack of the political will and government commitment; gross underfunding; dysfunctional policy structure and system; inadequate and dilapidated infrastructure; outdated teaching, learning and research facilities; lack of desirable attention to teacher education and professional development; and appropriate curriculum concerns; are just some of the fundamental issues needing to  be addressed by […]

The challenges of the lack of the political will and government commitment; gross underfunding; dysfunctional policy structure and system; inadequate and dilapidated infrastructure; outdated teaching, learning and research facilities; lack of desirable attention to teacher education and professional development; and appropriate curriculum concerns; are just some of the fundamental issues needing to  be addressed by President Buhari’s Education Minister.
These challenges have persisted in Nigeria’s Education Sector; not because of any form of lacuna of relevant policy initiatives, but because officially, Education of the citizenry has been so treated with levity that there is only a decadent situation to show for all the efforts by previous Governments at all levels.
Given the abysmal state of the Education Sector in Nigeria at a time that the President Buhari-led APC Government claims to be poised to rescue Nigeria from eminent collapse of an almost failed state, the Ezekwesili Reforms Agenda and the Egwu Road Map for the Education Sector needs to be harmonized to address critical areas for an impact oriented, results-driven, and evidence-based sector-wide delivery. A Committee of notable education development technocrats may need to be set up for this purpose.
Time has come now in Nigeria for a demarcation of areas of responsibility for the different sub-sectors and extra-ministerial discharge of policy implementation as against the current overlaps that are only allowing room for an over-bloated so-called official technocrats-driven system in the Ministries of Education which indeed are only festering of corruption. Most important thing to be done in this regards now is to re-determine sub-sectors of responsibilities for the different levels of the Education System- Basic; Secondary; and Tertiary.
For me, the Federal Ministry of Education should now limit its responsibility to overall policy overview through Quality Assurance mechanisms and restricting direct interventions to only tertiary education development; while states should take the sole responsibility for Basic and Secondary Education with the Local Governments focusing on Mass Literacy for the Education for All Agenda and National Orientation. And with such an arrangement, FME should hand over all Federal Secondary Schools under its purview to States or interested stakeholders to run as model schools.
Of course, restructuring calls for policy, legislative and even constitutional reviews, but they are worth doing if we are to achieve an impact oriented and results-driven education system in Nigeria. The restructuring requires that all state tertiary institutions be negotiated to be freely handed over to the Federal Ministry of Education or to have them run by collaboration of State Governments on agreeable terms to be brokered by the FME.
State governments should then focus more on Basic, Secondary, and Innovation and Enterprise Education for the children and youths. By this restructuring, basic and secondary education funds with the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) and FME which go un-accessed in years of backlogs can be re-appropriated to the State Governments through the Federation Allocations. Basically with this approach, UBEC should cease to exist, while States that desire can restructure the various State Universal Basic Education Boards (SUBEBs) or fashion out more efficient approaches for realistic results-oriented basic and secondary education delivery.
The National Orientation Agency (NOA) which has now become part of the mouth piece of the Information Ministry as well as the National Commission for Nomadic Education (NCNE) should be merged with the National Mass Education Commission (NMEC) to become one National Agency to work directly with Local Governments across the country to deliver on a renewed national mandate of “Mass Education for National Rebirth and Reorientation” in the context of the APC Government Change Mantra. The Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) and the National Teachers Institute should be merged to deliver strictly on the mandates of Teacher Professional Development and Professional Practice Regulation.
The Public Examination bodies need to evolve more innovative approaches to curbing the endemic malpractices plaguing the fabric of the credibility of public exams in Nigeria today.  The Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) needs to refocus more on Academic Aptitude Testing for ensuring that candidates recommended for admission have the required tertiary education pre-entry skills and potential, especially for professional courses. This refocusing by JAMB will eliminate recurrent overlapping of conducting multiple academic achievement tests for school leavers.
Given the present economic down-turn in Nigeria, we can only for now articulate a coordinated Funding Policy with components of Resuscitating Donor Partnership (World Bank, ESPIN, UNESCO, USAID, JICA) Funding (which have not been adequately maximized upon); Corporate Social Responsibility Harnessing; Government Inter-Agencies Sector Synergy Harnessing; and Phased Benchmarking for Incremental Budgetary Allocations to the Education Sector beginning with a threshold of minimum of 18%. The World Bank was intent on providing bond facilities to the tune of millions of dollars based on agreeable phased revamping of the Education Sector through a Road Map Policy that was never utilized.  
The foremost thing to do to address the teacher capacity gaps is to have all teachers, especially at the basic and secondary levels appraised to determine their training needs for the Institutes of Education and NTI to develop Structured Capacity Development Modules for hands-on capacity rebuilding over a period of time. Teachers found to have been engaged with fake certificates should be dismissed along with those found un-trainable. The kind of mass training by NTI which was funded through the MDGs must be avoided. The Teacher Education Curriculum is long overdue for reviewing at the NCE and undergraduate levels.
As Minister for Education, Obiageli Ezekwesili sought to revolutionarily open up access to tertiary education when she developed the approach of elevating selected Polytechnics and Colleges of Education into Universities status and converting many more of them into campuses of existing Federal Universities. Indeed, the APC-led government should go ahead to elevate the Kaduna Polytechnic and Yaba College of Technology to Universities of Technology status in addition to the four Colleges of Education already so elevated to University status. Opportunity should be given to States that are willing to have their Universities and other tertiary institutions absorbed as campuses of Federal Universities closest to these institutions. The cost of doing this will be far lower than creating completely new universities in the name creating access.
The task of rehabilitation of the education sector in Nigeria today requires innovative thinking out of the box, or even thinking without the box strategies and approaches to be initiated and sustained over a target period of time. There should be no quick fixes which fizzle away as soon as ministers are changed. Sustainable and focused strategies with funding approaches based on resource mobilization from all stakeholders are what we need to save Nigeria’s education sector from eminent collapse.
Kolo is immediate-past Vice Chancellor, Niger State-owned Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai.