States pay lip service to education – Dr. Nwaobiala

One area which people will continue to remember you as permanent secretary is on the long strike by the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP), how were you able to handle it? The ASUP strike was the most challenging period for me; very traumatic both psychologically and physically. When you negotiate with the union, particularly […]

One area which people will continue to remember you as permanent secretary is on the long strike by the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP), how were you able to handle it?
The ASUP strike was the most challenging period for me; very traumatic both psychologically and physically. When you negotiate with the union, particularly when government is placed in public glare, saying it is not implementing the agreements, it creates a lot of discomfort and being on the saddle then, I faced a lot of stress.
When you sit with the union to negotiate you spend long hours, we went through various types of negotiations at different levels starting from the ministry level until we had a thirteen hour negotiation with Mr. President before we signed a MoU that led to the end of the strike.
The strike opened up a lot of areas and I gained a lot of experience not only in collective bargain but in terms of government-union relationship. One of the things I will say about government relationship with union is that a lot of misconceptions are there and I believe that there are certain administrative procedures and information government must share with the unions.  There is the need to constantly interface with the unions let them know what you’re thinking  and what your plans are, and in any collective agreement we should be very careful especially on the parts of the government, we must not out of pressure agree to do those things that we know are practically impossible.
Among the demands, is there anyone that is practically impossible because some were not implemented, like the issue of dichotomy between HND and a university degree?
What has happened in that particular case is that out of the anxiety of government to see that the issue is resolved, a committee was set up by the SGF and I was asked to head that committee and all the stakeholders were involved in that committee, including all the unions. We discussed and made very concrete and far reaching recommendations which when implemented will overcome the problem on dichotomy.
We submitted our report about a year ago and government has not reacted to it but one of the things we did when we went to brief Mr. President was that I told him to look into the recommendations and implement as quickly as possible. There were pending issues which the previous administration couldn’t implement. For instance, the issue of the NEEDS assessment on polytechnics and colleges of education was drawn and the report submitted. There are also white papers on education panel to polytechnic and universities that have not been implemented.
We recommended that a national summit of teachers must be held where the issue on the way teachers are seen, their wage, salaries, professional development and how to get the best to be in teaching profession, how to retain them and also provide incentive for teachers that are teaching in rural communities are discussed.  These are things we must begin to think about.  Is it possible to provide special scholarships for first class graduates who want to go into teaching? We cannot continue to believe that the reward of teachers is in heaven, they must get their rewards here, and if we talk about quality of education, we must begin to look at the welfare of our teachers.
 In the North, the environment for teaching and learning is very important and if you don’t provide good environment, particularly for girl-child education, and don’t take the need of girls in schools, that could be an opportunity for them to drop out but when the school environment is friendly they will be happy. So, we placed a lot of emphasis on the training of female teachers and also try to ensure that schools are located within the immediate environment so that children don’t have to trek for too long to go to school.
One of the things we also recommended to Mr. President was school feeding. We believe that at the basic level, every child that comes to school gets one meal a day. It encourages the children to come to school, it promotes health and it will also boost enrolment and retention. There is also what we called the conditional cash transfer where parents receive grants on the condition that they will send their children to school.
There were complaints about insufficient intervention projects in higher institutions?
I had meetings with tertiary institutions and a lot of them complained about insufficient intervention projects. They said the guidelines to access the TETFund interventions are stringent and lead to delays. The minister set up a committee to review the guidelines, the idea is how do we make the funds more efficient and to ensure that institutions access the fund more quickly to ensure that the project are completed.
I was the chairman of that committee and objectively, I didn’t find the guideline cumbersome but you know people will want to get money easily.
I will not say completely that everything is perfect but if you go to a lot of our institutions, you will see that a lot of projects there are projects of TETfund.
We keep talking about spending in education but some other groups say we should also do an analysis, do a study on TETfund interventions over five years and find out what has been the impact in terms of quality of learning and quality of teaching. So, the system is not working perfectly but there is room for improvement.
There were allegations of fraud at the Federal College of Education Zaria which was recently upgraded to a university alongside five others, what is the situation like now?
I held a meeting with all the vice chancellors. By the arrangement we worked out, the rectors were made deputy vice chancellors and those university will still be running NCE programmes that are already on board until they are faced out.  Each institution was also given approval to have funding of up to N500 million by TETFund.
People were agitating for these institutions to be converted to universities but there is the fear of the unknown when government decided to make them universities, the provosts became endangered. Naturally, you have been in charge and somebody is coming to take over, there is that natural resistance. That is what happened but we called a meeting and we reached an agreement that the VC as the accounting officer must give all approvals.  You can’t have two masters on the same ship. He takes full control and the provost becomes the deputy vice chancellor and we advised them to work very closely to move those institutions forward.
Recently we noticed some of them are having some issues so I have written a letter to them stating very clearly what should be done.
You have been the permanent secretary for about three years, what do you understand as the challenges facing education at all levels?
The challenges include lack of quality teaching and quality of teachers, as well as poor welfare.
Insufficient funding is another challenge; don’t forget that basic education is mainly at the purview of the state and local governments. Some governors will say their first, second, and third priority is education but yet when you do an analysis that may not be true. There was a recent study that was commissioned by an international organization on financing education in Nigeria and the result was that states don’t fund education; they pay lip service to education.
When we say funding, it’s not just putting in money but investing it properly in education. Over N50 billion in UBEC that is supposed to go to the states have not been accessed so, some states don’t really place priority on education. There are some states that have not paid teachers for six months and they expect these teachers to continue to teach our children; teachers must get their dues.
Another challenge is huge number of out of school children. Nigeria has over 10.5 million children out of school. This is worrisome.
Also, girl-child education, especially in the northern parts of the country, is facing challenges because of some traditional and religious beliefs. A lot of girls don’t go to school and the truth is that any nation that wants to make progress must place premium on the education of its girls.
Education normally takes a chunk of the budget in terms of allocation but the challenge we normally have is in terms of releases. Sometimes out of a 100 per cent you get like 60 per cent and it truncates some of the things we are supposed to do.