The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) recently released its 2016 results. Over the years, they have remained a major index of assessing states’ performance in education, barring societal ills like fixing of results, hiring pliable invigilators and allied ills. While Abia led with 81.54 per cent, Rivers, Edo, Imo and Bayelsa followed with 78.59, 77.41, 76.46, 74.38 per cents respectively among candidates who passed five subjects in the examination, including English and Mathematics. Anambra, which came sixth, had 71.83 per cent. Instructively, the South West suffered a huge fatality in the results. Apart from Ondo, Lagos and Ekiti which emerged in the seventh, ninth and fourteenth positions respectively, five northern states which included the insurgency-ravaged Borno, outperformed Ogun and Osun states, which had 53.24 and 46.77 per cents respectively while Oyo State scored a dismal 36.69 per cent, placing 29th position and adjudged least of the South West states.
This columnist listened to a commissioner of education in one of the states which performed woefully in the results and later some online wayfarers, in defence of the state, asking that it should be judged by increment in the number of students who passed same examination from 1999 till date. While 2,389 students passed WAEC exam in 1999 in the state, they said, 17,051 did in 2015. This poor logic is easily defeated when you tell them that enrolment figures too have more than quadrupled within the same intervening period in virtually all the 36 states of Nigeria.
What went wrong? Why are South East states that were over the years profiled as dominated by a culture of commerce, rather than education, on the ascendancy in WAEC results, while South West, where Chief Obafemi Awolowo bemused Nigeria with his huge strides in education, is sinking in the ranking? Why did many of the Northern states, otherwise known as home to a legion of homeless youth, outperform states thought to possess Awo’s education DNA?
The answer is not far-fetched. Many of today’s governors are so fixated on the illicit wealth they can make from office, so much that the idea of leaving legacies is to them hogwash. It is unfortunate that we need to continue to make Awolowo, who 65 years ago, administered a Region which today approximates nine states, a model of analysis. By 1952, even before the Universal Primary Education (UPE) began, Awo had come up with its blueprint. Confronted by a #10m estimate for both the UPE and the free health program, even when the projected 1954 expenditure stood at #5m, Awo first cut capital costs on school buildings and cancelled housing subsidy for civil servants. He opted for mud blocks in place of pre-fabricated block cement classrooms and budgeted capital tumbled down by 70 per cent. His critics said he was opting for ‘substandard’ buildings but by 1955 when the scheme started, 400,000 pupils turned up, contrary to his projected 175,000. Assured that the quality of teachers held the ace rather than cozy classrooms, in 1956, Awo established many Grade 3 Teacher Training Colleges and trained, between 1955 and 1958, 11,000 teachers.
Many states with those shameful WAEC results are manned by governors who are captives of the fad of gigantic classroom structures, at the detriment of training teachers. Some of them invest in neither of the two, preferring the infectious obsession with stacking billions of naira on infrastructure. The results are scores of unnecessary dualised roads and humongous bridges from where substantial billions of naira kick-backs are funnelled into governors’ ghost foreign accounts. In South West today, the rotten cake of education that is kissing the canvass is decorated with glamorous icings of roads/overhead bridges that are at best white elephant.
Whatever you may have against Adams Oshiomhole who, at some point insisted on training the trainers and disgraced a teacher who could hardly spell her name, he focused on mental outputs of teachers rather than the glitz of structures. Today, Edo came third on the ranking. Peter Obi did same in Anambra. He stabilised Basic Education with a singular and courageous handing over of schools to missions. He gave the schools N6billion operating grants, donated buses, laboratory equipment, transformers and power generators, dispensary consumables, sports gears, computers and other ICT tools. Indeed, his model was adjudged the best in improved school infrastructure in Nigeria and a World Bank study headed by Professor Paul Collier of Oxford University, recommended his model for Africa and other developing countries. Today, Anambra has consistently ranked top six in WAEC.
In 2013, this columnist was on an entourage to Rotimi Amaechi’s Rivers. We were stupefied. While structures of primary and secondary schools equalled private universities’ in the West, Amaechi hired Indian and Pakistani teachers. Primary school pupils had computers, well-equipped clinics and stand-by generators. The commissioner of education of the entourage state momentarily became a photographer, snapping shots of the earthly wonders of Rivers. The man who led the entourage confessed: calling him governor where Amaechi was, was a lexical cruelty. Rivers’ state-of-the-art Bombadier which ferried the entourage was the lesson of Rivers he learnt. A friend who lived in Rivers then said it was senseless enrolling one’s wards in Rivers’ private schools; public schools were better. A week after, an adviser in the entourage state who beheld Amaechi’s wonders resigned, saying he didn’t want to be part of his state’s impending calamity. We all agreed that if the visiting state could score 1% of Amaechi’s feat in education, it would be a hero in the west. Today, Rivers is second on WAEC’s tally.
Bola Ige wanted to incubate students who would be the best in Nigeria. His government spent hugely on books, uniforms, training and re-training of teachers.
This writer is one of the proud products of that experiment. Lateef Jakande did same in Lagos and the results were outstanding. On the contrary, a governor in one of the South West states is so obsessed with structures that he demolishes old school structures, changes old school names and erects in their stead humongous classrooms that almost stand shoulder to shoulder with Sheraton Hotel. Less than 40% of the hotel rooms, sorry classes, are occupied by students whose morale are nil and teachers who haven’t been paid in months. His commissars superintend over a central school garments factory like Lenin’s USSR and they both smile to their banks with kick-backs from their humongous structures and earnings from exploitation of pupils. Can anyone be shocked that such a state towers from behind on WAEC’s score sheets?
The problem is, most governors are fixated on the billions in heists they can axe off their states and coast home with at the end of their tenure, rather than the prospect of garlands of brilliant students to be recorded in their names like Awolowo. Ask them how many teachers they have trained in the years of their tenure and instructional facilities they provided for schools and they will draw blank. The truth is, they cannot make billions of naira kick-backs from education as they do in roads and bridges. If a state hasn’t paid teachers six, seven months salaries, how can it expect them to bend over backwards to teach? If the state helmsmen thump their chests that they are making Hussain Bolt’s strides in education, ask them how many of their children attend the schools? None! When Awolowo was building those mud classrooms, his children attended them, just like children of cocoa farmers. How can you offer me what you call your best meal when you and your family see same as poisonous? Until we de-radicalize South West governors of their destructive thirst for so-called infrastructure at the expense of education and mis-belief that structure is education, the region will continue to disgrace in national education ranking.
