Rivers State Governor, Rt. Hon. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi has spoken about his passion for education which supports his administration’s current efforts at improving education at all levels in the state.
Governor Amaechi spoke during the two-day Rivers State Education Summit with the theme “Enhancing Sustainable Development in Education”, which he declared open on Monday, at the Banquet Hall, Government House, Port Harcourt.
Apart from the Rivers State Governor, Nobel Laureate, and chairman of the occasion, Prof. Wole Soyinka and Emeritus Professor Ajo Banjo who delivered the keynote address at the summit, also expressed their views on the way forward for education.
Amaechi said education should not be politicized because it is the right of every Nigerian to be educated.
“We should not politicize education. There is no room for politicization of education. Nothing like, see me I’ve achieved, I’ve built 20 schools, 500 schools, clap for me, give me more votes, that is not what education is about, it is not a thing that anybody should gain votes from. It is a thing that is a right of every Nigerian.” he said.
He said primary education is the foundation for good education, explaining that his administration redesigned primary education with appropriate curriculum content and qualified teachers to deliver the best.
Amaechi recalled that he received good primary and secondary school education and said the Rivers State Government intervened in the education and health sectors to make services in those key sectors available to the masses.
“When we were in Sacred Heart Primary School, we had teachers. When I was at Government Secondary school, Eberi Omuma, and Okolobiri, we had teachers. The schools may not be that beautiful but we had teachers and they were qualified teachers and they taught us. No teacher ever refused to come to class. Now you have businessmen as teachers and the reason for which you have that is that the current economy of Nigeria is in complete mess that the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer and because the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer, the same thing affects education. The children of rich men marry each other, poor men have no time to marry rich man’s child. There’s not even a time for a poor man to love a rich man’s child because you are struggling, you are struggling to battle with poverty. So if you have those challenges in life and there are people who are having those challenges, government can only do one thing intervene. Where does government intervene, education, health, water, but the key, you must have education, you must have healthcare and if you say you must pay, then all you are doing is afford the rich the same opportunity to continue to oppress the poor”, he said.
The governor noted that the state government has put policies in place to enhance educational growth, stating that the Rivers State House of Assembly also passed the Quality Assurance bill into law so that there would be regular supervision of school activities to maintain set standards.
He directed the state commissioner for education, Barr. (Mrs.) Alice Lawrence Nemi to issue employment letters to the 13,000 teachers who had already been interviewed for the job.
In his remarks, Prof. Wole Soyinka decried the poor educational standards in the universities in Nigeria with the associated problems of violence and cultism. He however, said he would be part of any efforts to save the country’s universities. Commenting on a book he read over time, Soyinka said he resents “the society that could produce, that could behave in such a way in which affairs are managed in such a way that universities are reduced to mere jungles. If you don’t have a good university for learning, it doesn’t have idea of what brilliant professors in the world, if the atmosphere of the environment is rotten you will just produce animals from universities and that is why I am very happy to be here to be part of any effort at all to resuscitate what our universities are and what they should be, to try and just brainstorm and to be very honest to find out just where things went wrong as the rotten tertiary university is trickling all the way down to secondary schools even to primary schools”.
Delivering the keynote address, Emeritus Prof. Ayo Banjo concurred with the Rivers State Governor that primary education is the foundation of the whole education system.
He pointed out that students’ poor performance in the school certificate examinations and unsatisfactory quality of many Nigerian university graduates could all be largely traced to poor primary education and called for effective supervision and constant retraining and good salary package for school teachers to advance educational growth in the country.
He said; “Two measures that can ensure an effective workforce at both primary and secondary tiers are effective supervision and constant retraining of teachers. There was a time in this country when the ministries of education maintained a vigorous inspectorate division. The inspectors were so strict that they were a terror in the schools. The effect was that teachers were kept on their toes because they could never predict when the bogey-man would turn up. Headmasters similarly kept a strict eye on their teachers. It would appear that this era is now completely gone, and instead, one all too often hears of scandalous dereliction of duty, particularly in the primary schools, on the part of so-called teachers, who apparently have hardly any interest in teaching and guiding their pupils but are on a constant watch-out for a better-paid job elsewhere”.
Earlier, the state Commissioner for Education, Barr. Alice Lawrence Nemi in her address, said the Amaechi’s administration had executed a number of education reform projects in the state.
She said this year’s education summit is the third in the series with eminent resource persons to deliver papers on education and come up with resolutions which when implemented would give Rivers children education that would make them fit into and adequately face the 21st century challenge.
Meanwhile the President of Social Action, a human rights organization in the country, Mr Celestine Akpobari has decried what he called building schools without teachers, insisting that such practice amounts to no education. Akpobari was obviously reacting to Gov Amaechi’s recent address at the education summit in Port Harcourt, where he was quoted to have boasted of flooding the state with schools.
