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The presidential candidate of the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria (ACPN), Oby Ezekwesili, on Wednesday laid out some of the steps she would take to fix Nigeria’s broken education system if elected president in 2019.
The co-covener of Bring Back Our Girls movement spoke on “Your view” a talk show on TVC. She said that from her experience as a former Minister of Education, she found out that the problem with the sector was not money but different elements of crises.
Her words: “The education story at the time that I was the Minister of Education showed clearly that we must not immediately say that the problem of education is money.
“I found clearly that there is the money story, but if you made it a single story of money you will put money into a dis-functional system. And when you put money into a dis-functional system, you don’t get results. What you get is a well funded dis-functionality and that is not helpful to the children you want to train.”
The presidential candidate listed some of the factors that have made the educational system dysfunctional, saying her administration will identify them and fix them accordingly.
“What we’ll do is to identify the different elements of crises,” she said. “The teacher quality crisis; outdated curriculum crisis; poor adoption of technology crisis; the funding distortion crisis; instructional materials crisis; environment for learning crisis; lack of evaluation and inspection; lack of ethics in education examination practices; crisis of gender disparity; and special needs education.
The activist also identified the solutions that the government applied when she was monister, suggesting that the same measures will be taken with her as president in 2019.
She said:”We have these solutions as part of the education reforms in 2006 and 2007. On teacher adequacy and quality issues, we put a special teacher scheme that hired special teachers through the federal government. The teachers were sent to rural areas across the country. About 45,000 teachers were under the scheme.
“We introduced In-service training, professional training of teachers. 100-120 teachers across the country went through the In-service training.
“A special programme was also put in place to upgrade teachers certificate, most of them have Grade two certificate. We designed a National Teacher Institute in Kaduna programme to get them to NCE level.”