The ruse of a free education in Nigeria

Sir: The Nigerian government should, as a matter of urgency, address the prevailing moribund status of all public schools with a view to rebranding them for visible rapid transformations. Over the years, while successive governments, have usually pretended to provide free and qualitative education to the citizens because learners are not asked to pay school fees, the evidences all around public schools however point at a growing and visible rot which ought to be of utmost concern to all well-meaning citizens since by and large, the children of the poor are continually being denied proper education that can enhance and shape their lives towards a brighter future.

Perhaps the biggest fault rests with the citizens who never ever are willing to face reality and always believe it is the duty of the government to provide free basic amenities including free education as part of dividends of governance or as part of government’s obligations to the community.

Even after years of glaring abandonment of the public schools to their fate, the citizens still expect whoever is coming to seek their votes to put free education at the forefront of his campaign promises or forget nursing any political ambitions or aspirations.

Free education in parts of Nigeria continues to witness a very great abandonment and translates to the greatest deceit of all times. In truth, those who initiated and introduced the concept of free education to the country shortly after Nigeria’s Independence were quite sincere in their approach and practice considering everything put in place to ensure its success.

With adequately qualified teachers, well-equipped libraries and laboratories, and all the other paraphernalia put in place which were visible in all schools, the seriousness of the government at the time was fully established and everything went smoothly quite as expected.Years later however, free education became only a tool of capturing votes and then presenting an utter mockery of free education which is firmly rooted in various forms of propaganda.

The greatest insincerity of successive governments towards the children of the poor who enrol in public schools is in the area of inadequacy of teachers for various subjects. The shortage of teachers in Nigeria’s public schools is so alarming as to warrant declaring an urgent state of emergency. All public schools are grossly under-staffed and public schools for many decades are no more than atmospheres of chaos.

In most schools, there are only a handful of teachers to attend to so many learners and worse still, some times, the few teachers are nowhere to be found and students  are therefore left on their own to engage in different rough games around their school compound completely unguarded. This inadvertently gives room for students to learn different antisocial attitudes which gradually prepare them towards cultism and hooliganism.

The question to ask is why successive governments find it difficult to recruit the needed number of teachers in all subjects for all its schools more so since thousands of graduates roam the streets searching for jobs?

The time has therefore come for the federal government to come up with relevant legislations that can adequately address the growing rot in Nigeria’s public education sector. Nigeria cannot be playing the ostrich as it has done for decades while expecting positive results.

With the millions of graduates roaming the streets, there is no reason any public school in Nigeria should be under-staffed. Even though most of so-called qualified unemployed graduates are the same product of a failed system and therefore mostly unemployable, yet there are still many of them who truly excel and will deliver if given the opportunity.

There should be rapid employment of teachers to be deployed to all public schools. Besides, most of the dilapidated structures which have been on their spots since the schools were founded several decades ago should be demolished and new ones erected so as not to continue to jeopardize the lives of both learners and their teachers.

• Jide Oyewusi, a retired Director of Education, is also the Coordinator of Ethics Watch International, Lagos.