In his recent interview with Splash FM, the governor spoke on the initiative. That conversation sparked mixed feelings in me. One, he seemed unwilling to empathise with those resisting the idea. The Nigerian economic situation is currently creating casualties and suggestion of further sacrifice on the part of the people will necessarily activate angst. Ajimobi should hold his internally generated rage and inquire the basis of public scepticism. Beneath that veneer of cynicism is their experience of bad faith; due to years of governmental deceit, people cannot simply trust the government anymore. Ajimobi cannot simply beat people on the heads with his lofty ideas. He needs to signpost his sincerity by addressing and redressing their distrust.
He should understand the disenchantment of the generation of citizens born after the locust years. They have never derived an iota of benefit from the government yet they are called to make sacrifices all the time. We can catalogue the registers of austerity the government has inundated us with over the years – from subsidy removal to belt tightening, sacrifice, trickle-down, and all that jazz, to attest to the non-benevolence of the Nigerian state.
Ajimobi says the state is no nanny, and Nigeria should not be a socialist country. Here, he misconstrues the architecture of relationship that has existed between the state and the people till now. What subsists as socialism in Nigeria is more or less the state’s dubious means of placating public restlessness. Those hand-me-downs are not engineered to generate productivity, but defer any revolutionary ideas that hunger pangs may trigger. Even more, it saves our leaders from the tedious task of thinking through our intricate problems.
Some questions that I waited for during the interview but never came were whether the state, with this initiative, was not merely dancing around the idea of returning schools to the original missionary owners. Why is he seeking partners to take over 10 per cent of the schools when the missionary owners alone can do just that? There are many areas of clarification that I expected the interviewers to sound him on. One was to elaborate on the initiative and clarify how it might work. I am interested in knowing how the state intends to partner businesspeople that will invest their money in the schools and then recoup their investment; how the schools will be valued monetarily; and how the state proposes to still regulate the schools with the new ownership.
Also, what becomes of the other 90 per cent that are not selected by partners? Will they receive inferior quality of education?
Another question I expected was whether the idea of free education was not outdated and should be phased out. After all, as things stand now, students are variously levied and it may be productive if the money collected from them are standardised and channelled towards improving the sector. Why, for instance, make them pay education levy yet insist education is free? Why should they supply their own furniture and other materials while “enjoying” free education?
I am aware how contentious the idea of school fees is and those who have rejected the idea outright based on the consideration for the economic conditions of the people who patronise public schools are not totally wrong. Yet, there are equally strong contending realities of dwindling government revenues, a disintegrating economy, and a public education system so badly ravaged it needs huge monetary investment to be animated at all. Free education in Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s era was not as “free” as people seem to imagine it. It was paid for through taxes that were just as contentious then. Today, no state in what used to be the old Western Region has the level of agricultural productivity of the era to make “free education” possible. Asking the state to continue in that mode is to ask the state of education to remain poor so that the children poor enough to patronise it will remain poor forever.
The other line of argument that comes up frequently is that paying school fees will be at the disadvantage of children of the poor. (I must note at this point that those who bring up this argument are those whose children never attend schools with those “poor.”) The problem that I have with this refrain is that Nigeria has no objective parameters to categorise or define what it means to be poor. When “poor” comes up in policy-related arguments, it is arbitrarily dredged as a manipulative tool to blackmail parties into receding their position. Because we do not have accurate data to determine what “poor” people cannot afford, we end up using a liberal defence of the poor to keep them poor.
There are some “poor” people who can afford to pay some money for their children’s education and who should not be told they are too poor to do so. Their chances of acquiring quality education need not be imperiled by a blanket argument that confines everyone to the category of poor and abject. I should add that those who are absolutely unable to pay should not be merely handed free education, they should be made to give back to the state through some form of mandatory community service. We have reached a stage in our Nigerian lives when we should be teaching our children that the idea of “free” is an illusion that we should divest ourselves from promptly.
Full Articles : http://www.radar.ng/2016/06/the-education-kerfuffle-in-oyo-state-by.html
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