How land grabbers invade Kaduna schools – Hakeem Baba-Ahmed
From Misbahu Bashir, Kaduna What effort is your association making to improve your alma mater? It has earmarked the sum of N100 million to renovate hostels and laboratories and we have a project by the Central Bank of Nigeria for the provision of computers. Anybody who knows the school five years ago and goes there […]
From Misbahu Bashir, Kaduna
What effort is your association making to improve your alma mater?
It has earmarked the sum of N100 million to renovate hostels and laboratories and we have a project by the Central Bank of Nigeria for the provision of computers. Anybody who knows the school five years ago and goes there now will see changes. We have kept a very close eye on the way the school is run and we maintain very close relation with the Ministry of Education as well as the community. Today, I can say that the college is one of the best secondary schools in Kaduna State and with all due modesty, I have to say it was as a result of the presence of highly committed old boys association which I am privileged to lead.
Were you able to solve the problems of lack of furniture and dilapidated classrooms faced by the college?
We have concentrated on putting pressure on the government which owns the school to undertake those tasks and there is hardly a month that goes by that I don’t go to the school, sometimes with some of the executive members. The teaching facility and environment are fairly good compared to other schools but it could do better. We have a very thriving system where year groups make a lot of contributions; some provide furniture, some provide computers and some provide funding for teachers handling extra lessons on JAMB and SSCE. We even have a private company that has come in to build a massive structure to be donated to the old boys and the school. We are grateful to our members.
How have you been able to determine the effectiveness of quality teaching or otherwise?
I can say that judging by the performance of our students in the last four or five years, we have improved tremendously. We take very active interest in results. We monitor how our students do in SSCE, NECO and JAMB and because we have kept very close eye on teaching and put pressure on the Ministry of Education to make sure that they send teachers particularly for basic subjects such as mathematics, English and sciences, we have been very fortunate.
One major problem being faced by public schools in the state is encroachment of their lands mostly by privileged persons. Do you have such problem?
When I was elected president of the association, I made a pledge in the presence of everybody including the Emir of Zazzau, Alhaji Shehu Idris, that one of my priorities will be to stop encroachment into the school lands. Unfortunately, we failed because the regulatory agencies including the Ministry of Education, school authority, Kaduna State Urban Planning and Development Authority (KASUPDA) and the police failed to impose the plans and the strategies adopted. More and more people kept on coming into the school and building homes. So, I have to say that I failed in that endeavour not for want of effort but because we reported the cases to former governors, Ahmed Makarfi, Namadi Sambo, Patrick Yakowa and Ramalan Yero and people kept building houses on the school land. We reported the matter to the police and we later discovered that it is typical of the way things happen in Nigeria. Nigerians don’t have respect for laws and institutional lands have become everybody’s gain. People will simply walk into hospital land or school land and build on it. But I am very happy that Governor Nasir el-Rufa’i has finally taken a stand and we support him entirely. We hope he will succeed in retrieving our land and follow through and do the same thing in other institutions. He had stopped all illegal buildings by land grabbers and ordered the demolition of such buildings.
How would you advise the government to revive the falling academic standard in rural schools?
The government of Kaduna State has made the right decision by prioritising education and we have to commend it for that. I don’t think there is anything that the governor and his deputy can do that will be more useful than breathing new life into public education right from primary school. I am very happy with all the decisions they have taken in this regard including the introduction of compulsory education, feeding programme, free education programme and schools visits. I saw a few weeks ago when the deputy governor visited Government Girls Secondary School, Soba. If you know the standing of that school before and see its dilapidated hostels and classrooms now, you will be shocked. This is why Nigeria is becoming a polarized society because only children of the poor go to government schools. Children of wealthy people go to private schools so poverty creates more poverty because the children of the poor get poor education. Wealth creates more wealth and you now have a society developing along class lines. The only way you deal with that issue is to begin to address the public education. The children of the poor must receive quality education by making sure that the schools are good and teachers are well motivated with instructional materials. Government should provide these things and sustain the policy.
The standard of education has collapsed entirely and we have to revive it. Teachers are not interested in teaching. Government employs teachers to teach physics, biology, English and mathematics and they end up in private schools where they get higher pay. In rural areas, teachers barely go to class and students don’t have good living and recreational facilities and libraries yet, we send our children there. Those schools breed barely literate pupils and barely literate pupils cannot provide the foundation for development. The foundation for good economic development is good human development.