By Ebele Orakpo
Mrs Comfort Arinze  is the Proprietress of Model Learning Centre, Nursery & Primary School in Jinkwoyi, Abuja. In this chat with Financial Vanguard, Mrs Arinze speaks on her school, the challenges and Nigeria’s education sector and says that without education, there will be no development.

Excerpts:

Beginning:

After obtaining her Grade 12 certificate in Canada, Mrs Arinze went on to obtain a diploma in Accounting/Business Education also in Canada. Upon her return to Nigeria, she continued her education, obtaining a Professional Certificate in Education from the Institute of Education, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria after which she did her NCE and then a Bachelor of Education degree in Linguistics from the same university before she ventured into the education sector.

Motivation:

Arinze

“My husband wanted me to do a job that will enable me stay at home and look after the children. So I decided to establish a school. The school, Model Learning Centre, started from Zaria when we returned to Nigeria from Canada in September 1982 with just two children in our garage.

Rapid growth:

The school started growing rapidly with the help of my  husband, the late Professor Edwin Arinze. We had about six classrooms at a point and we had to look for more space so we went to Samaru village, Zaria and rented a place at Hayin-Dogo and another place also in Samaru. We had two branches at a time.

Crisis:

After a while, my children had to go back to Canada and I had nine schools including a boarding school in Ikara, Makarfi, Hunkuyi etc all in Kaduna State. Then  there was this big crisis in year 2000. So many people were killed and many schools in Zaria were razed to the ground. At that point, I had to relocate to Abuja.

Relocating to Abuja:

When I came to Abuja, I did not have as many schools as I had in Zaria. I started with one school because I had abandoned so many of my things in Zaria to escape with my life. Since then, I have been in Abuja trying to nurture the one I started. The competition is stiff. I started nurturing it from scratch. Right now, we have three blocks including a storey building. We give God all the glory. Some of our children are graduates today. There are doctors, lawyers and other professionals among them.  The school has been doing well in spite of all the competition in Abuja.  Every corner you look, you find schools. I was the president of the Association of Private Schools and in Jinkwoyi alone, we had 104 schools then but now, we have much more; up to 150-160 schools. Some have been closed down for one reason or the other.

Full accreditation:

In March last year, Model Learning Centre got its approval and full accreditation to run the school to any level and I give God all the glory. It is not by my power or might.

The school has two buses and things are moving on well.

Number of children:

We have over 250 children, with fluctuations here and there. We had our 14th graduation on July 15. The school is still growing, we are still building. We have Pre-nursery (Kindergarten/Crèche) class, Nursery 1, Nursery 2. I scrapped Nursery 3 because virtually what we do in Nursery 3 is what we do in Primary one. So from Nursery 2, they go to Primary one up to six. Some of the classes have up to two arms. We have about 28 staff members – teaching and non-teaching staff.

Challenges:

In this area, we have so many challenges especially in the area of payment of school fees. Our fee is very low compared to those in the heart of Abuja. Our fee is as low as N17,000 to N25,000 in this area. During the Ebola scare, elections and because of the insurgency, there was so much insecurity and because of that, I lost about N500,000 (bad debt) because so many families left town and refused to part with the little money they had to pay school fees.

That affected all the schools in the suburbs. This term, we also faced the same thing. The parents have tried but many of them find it very difficult to pay school fees because we have a lot of low income earners here. The high income earners prefer to go to schools in town where they pay N80,000 or more per term and some even pay in dollars. But here, the highest is N25,000 but if we have lots of children, we can manage. The children who pay high school fees are not even performing better than ours. We had this McMillan competition for English and maths aptitude test and our school came third out of over 70 schools that participated and we won a trophy. It is not that the quality of their teaching is better than ours. We have qualitative teachers. What we do here is that we enrich our scheme of work a little bit more. For example, in Primary six, you see us taking some topics from JS1. The children have been doing well both in their internal and external  exams.

The least qualification of our teachers is National Certificate in Education. We have Arts and Craft, French, Islamic, Computer science teachers and others.

 Education sector:

Education is absolutely necessary for national development. It is very essential. If for instance we have two friends, Mr A and Mr B and Mr A is educated while B is not, and both are given N200,000; A will make something out of it because he will know how to use the money to grow his business while Mr B may not be able to do so well. He may have the wisdom but may not know how to apply it properly.

Education is very important and without education, you cannot forge ahead in life; you cannot go to some places and you are limited in so many ways.  Education opens doors for you. It is the key to success. You cannot be too old to go to school, no matter your age, you can go to school and develop yourself.

The private sector is doing very well but the public sector is not.

In some public schools, children still sit on floors; some don’t have desks to write on and yet, you see some of the teachers doing their private businesses in school. They do not pay proper attention to the children because their pay is not good so they try to do other things to make ends meet.

You have to have money to give your child a good education otherwise, he will end up in public school with incessant strikes.