‘Technocrats should run education sector in Buhari’s administration’

Dele Olateju, principal, Kings College Lagos, in this interview with DANIEL OBI and KELECHI EWUZIE stresses the need for government to allow technocrats steer the ship of education sector among other issues. Excerpt:

How can we use education sector to leapfrog the economy?

We need to isolate education away from current political influence. There is no way Nigeria as a country can play politics with education. The best ministers of education are not politicians but technocrats and they don’t enjoy smooth transition.

Technocrats should be allowed to head the education sector at all levels in order to engender proper planning, development of policies and strategic implementation of such policies. If we have a stable polity and follow the roadmap as it were faithfully and religiously structure, we will be able to get used to education as a vehicle to leapfrog the economy.

We are optimistic that things can get better, we are desirous of using education for liberation of the masses, for development of the citizens, for allowing insurgency in the north east to abate.

If you are educating a group of people and they have the proper values, they will not go for insurgency and militancy. I am looking forward to seeing Nigeria using education to leapfrog itself to the level of devloped countries in the comity of nations. The league of nations that are developed got their development through education.

If the new government appoints you minister of education, where do you start from?

I will first look at the existing roadmap for education sector and see ways where I can strengthen the policies and look at the current challenges and seek for ways to solve them.

Another key area of focus will be to look at access to education. For primary education, we don’t have any reason why 45million Nigerians are out of school. If we decide that in the next 4 years, we are going to use NYSC graduates for effective literacy campaign, it will be effective because they are focused.

Since we started using the NYSC people in elections, we have had a better performance. I would enforce payment of tuition in tertiary institutions. Nigeria’s population keeps increasing and we keep having challenges of funding and we know the federal government cannot do it alone. So, we expect partnerships and collaborations between parents and governments that will assist move education forward.

I will prefer to get a better quality rather than pretending to get free institutions and you don’t get the quality. They will have autonomy in terms of fixing the fees at a moderate level. There is no absolute autonomy.

We now have a new curriculum that focuses on the areas that we have neglected in the past. To see the effect of the new curriculum is gradual and it takes time and it is not sudden.

In addition, entrepreneurship education is now the in-thing and it is a major focal area in the new curriculum. All schools now offer 20 subjects. These are skills that you acquire, so that if you are going for the normal conventional economics and you are not fit for it, you can now go for the other.

Education is on concurrent list, we have not been able to compute what the federal, state and local government are giving, There is one organisation that funds education and has been doing well through taxes deducted from companies. It is not about funding per say but about integrity of such funds.

It is about how you spend it. Throughout last year, what I got from capital allocation is about N26m out of N100m and the N26m has gone into infrastructures, to improve the facilities. It is not so much about the money but the integrity and transparency of the usage.

If there is anything we will commend the outgoing administration for, it is that they have actually done much for the unity schools. We don’t have that question of privatisation of the unity schools any longer and it has improved. What we are expecting the new government to do is to sustain the present state and do more.

How come Kings College has remained a top school?

The secret is that we are always proud to sustain the heritage. This building is a national monument, erected in 1907, two years before the college was established and it is still standing tall. Again, we are aware that over the years there have been other schools that have been competing with us, so while those people are crawling to meet us, we develop more wings to fly high above them all.

What are the challenges the school has gone through over the years and how have you been able to manage it?

The first challenge is the infrastructural upgrade. Some of the facilities have seen better days. Our main campus here, in those days had about 300 students but today it houses about 1,500 students. So, we have had to cope with the challenges of widening access.

Kings College is an elite public institution for the development and training of children from all works of life, irrespective of the socio-economic background of the parents.

We see kings College as a level playing field. Be you a child of a celebrity, a monarchy, a pauper; we are here to learn under the same roof. When students are given the opportunity to study under the same roof, those whom you think were formally dull, will pick up and prove otherwise.

What are you doing on teachers’ training?

I came into the College in 2010 and I know we needed to have a roadmap. We had a roadmap in September 2011 and we came up with the fact that we have to do infrastructural upgrade and teachers’ development so that we can train all our staff.

We do internal education and capacity building, we invite experts outside to train our staff and we also send them to other training avenues where they can increase their knowledge.

What is your relationship with your old boys?

They are formidable and rich and at the time when we had challenges, when the school had gone under, they took up the challenge and gave some funds to assist in infrastructures. They also use their connections to help like in CBN, but we still expect more from them.

They have to pay back, if they have been favoured to receive an elite education in a public school like Kings College, as a moral debt, it is only proper that they pay back to the community, society and the school.

DANIEL OBI and KELECHI EWUZIE