A business called Education
Private sector education is a get-rich scheme in Nigeria
By Halima Hamidu Musa
Nigeria’s
public sector education is notorious for the incessant labour
strikes by poorly paid teachers, the parlous infrastructure that
makes learning a curse, and meager funding by government. But
private sector education has equally become notorious for the
rip-offs, poorly trained teachers, bizarre schooling environments
and proprietors whose motivation for investing in education is
purely for commercial gains. In Africa’s most populous country of
150 million people, everything is ‘rust, rot, grab and shame.’ The
education sector is about big business and not some Aristotelian
philosophy on sound mind building. Leave educationists to theorise
on education as the bedrock of a nation. In bustling Lagos and
influential Abuja as well as the other cities, education is the
mining field where investors reap bounty harvest.
Several primary and secondary schools were closed down in Lagos last
year. The authorities claimed the schools were poorly equipped and
not duly registered. Illegal schools were established primarily for
the money with no qualified teachers and are often set up in noisy
and dirty environments.
According to the Executive Director of Child Help in Legal Defence
of Rights to Education, Mr. Debo Adeniran, the commercialisation of
the education sector has put the future of many children in
jeopardy. He said resources that are supposed to be spent on public
schools are being pocketed by a few people in the corridors of power
who in turn use such money to establish and maintain their own
schools.
“Our public schools lack everything that is good. Even the
environment in which the teachers, pupils and students have to
operate is nauseating. The schools are bad because money allocated
for their development were not well utilised. The facilities are not
there to make learning easy while the teachers have to make do with
whatever learning aid they see,” said one critic.
Private schools have mushroomed in the last five years owing to the
neglect of public schools on the part of federal and state
governments. And the results have been mixed for varying factors.
Good private schools come pricey. Owned by former military rulers
and ministers of the country, they serve only the very rich and
influential class. The schools provide the desired quality education
that no longer exists in the public schools. They include El-Amin
International School, the American International School Abuja (AISA),
Nigeria/ Turkish Intl. School, Loyola Jesuit College, Premier
College, and Cherryfield College among others.
But the good private schools are few leaving the sector open to the
exploitative antics of a preponderance of hawkish institutions in
many Nigerian cities. Critics say the typical private school in
Nigeria is no longer a veritable alternative to the failings in the
public schools. The Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) affirmed during
its strike last year to demand for implementation of the Teachers’
Salary Structure; “while teachers’ salaries are generally poor, the
NUT appreciates that conditions are much worse for teachers of the
private schools.”
The “genuine and altruistic necessity to provide better alternative”
has long giving way to making the private schools an excellent
“source of income for some unscrupulous proprietors who pay little
attention to the need for improved performance of their students,”
says the editorial of one of Nigeria’s leading dailies: Daily Trust.
The proof is in the “perennial bad results in public examinations as
proprietors pay scant attention to the important issues of
recruiting qualified teachers and providing other teaching aids.”
But some schools have devised clever means of scoring high from
their shallow enterprise. Driven by sheer craze for the monetary
profit and the need to project their schools as excelling in
national examinations, many private schools hire mercenary students
to write national qualifying examinations to boost their schools
ranking. The result is that beneath the high grades lie a rot that
defines poor performance of the children at both national and
international level outside of the picture created by the schools.
“The total picture of education is scaring. You have students
whether in private or public schools who see good examination
results as something parents and schools should hire mercenaries to
get. To study hard is old fashion,” said Francis Istifanus, who
worked in a private school in Kaduna City, northern Nigeria before
leaving to set up his real estate agency last year.
Like the public schools they were created to correct, most private
schools are characterized by dilapidated and empty libraries where
such exist; unqualified teachers that provide cheap labour required
to maximise profits; and noisy environments that make learning
impossible. One well-known private secondary school in north of
Kaduna employs university graduates fresh out of school and yet to
do their national service. They provide cheap labour but eliminate
the required bond between pupil and teacher in the short period they
spend in the school before they go for their national service.
Another school in Lagos State, western Nigeria regularly employs
students of the universities in the city. The student-teachers teach
for a quarter of the money a qualified teacher would ask for. A 75%
savings on salary is a temptation only few schools would resist,
said Tom Obaseki, who, jointly with his wife, runs a private college
in Lagos.
“One disturbing [practice] is the ever-increasing fees levied on
parents by these schools, even while the quality of service is
dwindling or even downright poor. The levies include lesson and
textbooks charges. Some even charge fees not in the Nigeria currency
but in Dollars, Pounds and Euros, a practice that is against the law
in Nigeria,” says the
Daily Trust
Many private schools could compare with the best outside the country
in terms of schooling environment and the teaching staff. But for
the majority, learning comes in ‘trickles and thatch.’ In the Angwa
Rimi district of Kaduna, a secondary school with only three class
rooms and one full-time teacher who doubles as the principal sums up
Nigeria’s education system. It is a long road for policy makers in
Abuja to actualize the desired goal in a county where public funding
for the country’s education in a year is less than 30% of what any
big university in the United States of America would spend in 12
months.
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