Former Minister of Education, Dr Oby Ezekwesili, believes that education has to be the business of everybody, as it is an investment rather than just a business.
While canvassing for a partnership between the Government and the private sector towards moving the Nigerian education sector forward, she noted that there were different levels of enormous returns that could be earned from investing in education.
Dr Ezekwesili recalled her time as the Minister of education, revealing how bad the state of the system was within the federal ministry. She referred to her project as “Crisis”, stating that quite early she “knew there was no way Government could solve the problem (alone).”
Speaking passionately on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily live from Abuja, venue of the Nigerian Economic Summit, which had been focusing on developing the Nigerian education sector, Dr Ezekwesili said “Education is a system” and it should not be handled like an element of politics but a major part of nation building.
While speaking about the current state of the sector in comparison to her time as Minister, she said that her investigations revealed that the results in the sector were nothing to smile about, emphasizing that the country’s investment had not produced the result commensurate with it.
She admitted, “We were not in a good place when I was there, and you reflect to 7 years after and it’s declined even further. Do we need any more indicators to discuss these issues?”
Speaking about the way forward, Dr Ezekwesili said that there was need to keep a track of what the Nigerian youths were doing with an emphasis on the available academic facilities in the country. She explained that this involved asking what students who are not in the universities or polytechnics were doing with their lives and creating alternatives to the existing academic system the country operates.
She spoke about the establishment of the Vocational Enterprise Institution and Innovation Enterprise Institution. These according to her, are schools set up mainly to train people with skills to drive innovation and ideas as the new paradigm in Nigerian education.
She said that the rationale behind this was to build a partnership that has the authority of industry practitioners as a means to earn the trust of Nigerian youths. She also said that this was to drive the value of innovation, productivity and self-employment.
In further describing how these would work, she revealed that celebrity filmmakers and veteran actresses, Hilda Dokubo and Joke Silva had been accredited to set up such Innovation Enterprise Institutions in their fields, because of the belief that they would be better trusted to offer practical knowledge and real inspiration in their schools rather than the usual government establishments.
She explained that a complete education package should be a combination of the ‘Mechanical’, which is about the skilled knowledge; the ‘Affective’ which entails the moral values; and the Cognitive, which refers to the quality of reasoning that should be deposited in students by the teachers.
The quality of teachers in Nigerian schools then came to the fore as she spoke about the need to retrain the teachers at a shared cost between the government and the private sector. She decried the presence of Grade 2 teachers still in the system without any upgrade in their knowledge as ridiculous in the current age, noting that many kids now knew better than their teachers.
She, however, said that this should be an initiative of the government. Emphasizing such regulatory part of the sector as being solely a role of the government, she said that the investment intervention would be more productive when the system had been made receptive to development.
Dr Ezekwesili also cited the quality of policy driven discussions that the young anchors of Channels Television’s breakfast programme, Sunrise Daily engage in as one of the key features that would add value to the development of Nigerian education. While commending the team, she admitted that the country had not had this high level of policy driven debates for a very long time, a situation she believed had contributed to the decline.
She also urged the current government to wake up to the situation, as she said that the government was missing out on an important part of its role.
