By Adesina Wahab 

Ike Ofuokwu, a lawyer cum chartered administrator, is the Chairman, Advisory Board of Chrisland Schools. In this interview, he speaks on issues relating to the education sector generally and the management of private schools. Excerpts.

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What is your role as the Chairman of the Advisory Board of Chrisland Schools?

I am Ike Ofuokwu, a legal practitioner and a chartered administrator. My role is to coordinate members of the board. We have a team of eminent Nigerians who are on the board. Our duty is to formulate policies and strategic planning for both the present and the future running of the group of schools and to create a pathway for the management to do so.

Do you think private schools in Nigeria have policies to make the needed and expected impact? 

If the truth must be told, a lot of private schools that are coming up look at the situation from the business point of view and perspective. Chrisland Schools did not start as business, it started as a passion to positively impact the society. But today, you will just see a man who has the money and who sees owning a school as a lucrative business, would go and open one for his children or wife and as a result, many don’t have the standard to follow. If you want to know the position education is today in our country, it is in a precarious and dicey situation. 

Fundamentally, many of today’s parents need parenting. You will observe that they hand over everything to the school. Private entrepreneurs have now taken this as a business advantage. You will see many schools don’t know about safeguarding, child protection policy, quality assurance among others. All they do is just to put up nice buildings and tell you they have this and that. But luckily for them, they are doing very well, why?  Because there is a great gap created for them to thrive on the part of the regulators, the government. You find out that the regulators also need regulation too. Somebody is regulating you and in their own public schools, they don’t have one quarter of the facilities the private schools have. Even when some of these private schools are not doing well, it seems they are doing well and every parent now wants to take their children there. Many of us attended public schools when they were in good shape. The dilemma today is that apart from few private schools that have the passion for education, child moulding and upbringing and that are training people for tomorrow not today, many schools are just springing up in the name of education, but they are really business concerns. In Chrisland Schools, we stand for brining up a total and all-round child.

How can government upgrade the standard of public schools?

One of the characteristics or traits of a developed society is how they run their education system. Education is one sector you don’t politicise. It is not out of place for the government to seek those who have invested in education and are running their institutions well and ask them for guidance on how they are doing it. Fundamentally, why public schools are suffering today is, if we want to call a spade a spade, education is not cheap. Government is running education with zero financial policy. If we want to be honest, up to the university level, what happened to public primary and secondary schools, is now happening to public universities. You would see that systematically, public tertiary institutions are being suffocated daily and the private ones are rising up on a daily basis. Why you may ask. The truth is that if you call me now to come and run the Federal Ministry of Education, the first thing I would do is to call a meeting of all stakeholders, the staff unions, the parents, the students and others and we need to agree that quality education does not come cheap. 

There must be a price tag to quality education. It is through that we fund research, provide facilities and others. The only question would be, how do we take care of the indigent students? It is simple. There must a properly constituted Scholarship Board and welfare schemes for the poor to enjoy the benefits of education. It is not to set up a Scholarship Board or a Student Loan Scheme where you find out that it is only the children of bank directors or ministers or top politicians that are benefiting from the schemes or scholarships. The state must pay for the poor and the poor in return work for the state. But the rich must pay for education.

We saw the case of former President Barak Obama of the United States, it was while he was the President that he paid off his student loan through which he studied as a lawyer. Government must extricate education from politics. It is not a comedy, it is a serious business. This is because it is what we impart on the young ones that will show what the future of our society will be like. 

It is like the government is in a dilemma regarding increasing fees in public schools, what is the way out?

It takes political will to do so. You must be willing. Today now, they have removed fuel subsidy, are we not living? Whether we like it or not, the rich must pay for the education of the poor. Even in my law firm, there are some cases we handle pro bono. But when it comes to the turn of the rich, we make our money from them. If we have say 100 clients, it is like 10 that are paying for all. We charge the rich to cover for the poor. You are my friend, now if you have a matter, how to get you out of the problem is what we will be working at, we know we cannot charge you like we would do a rich client that is not our friend. The earlier the government understands this, the better. Almost all our medical personnel have left. It is cheap to train a medical doctor, nurse or pharmacist here, but they go to the United Kingdom or the United States and make so much money, meanwhile, their counterparts there are still paying student loan for the next 10 or 20 years. You know why the government is finding it difficult to take the necessary steps, when they set up a Scholarship Board for instance, it is subjected to the whims and caprices of politics. So, the poor will not enjoy it, but the moment the poor enjoy it, they will support it.

How has your board been able to improve the image of Chrisland Schools?

Because we are running a big brand, we have noticed that our rivals want to be where we are. Any small opportunity, they run to the social media. 

Also, when some parents can’t put their homes in order, it is the school they pile everything on. We have some cases where there is no need to drag us into. There is a matrimonial case now where the couple, who have issues to settle, are saying that Chrisland is supporting the husband against the wife and the husband is also saying we are supporting the wife against him. Both sides are accusing us. Is that possible? 

But for us in Chrisland, our custom is to isolate our learners from matrimonial issues. The fastest way some people think they can make name is to drag Chrisland into issues that do not concern us.

Sometime ago, we had a teacher who was sentenced in a sexual matter. Chrisland was not represented in the matter because if we have a lawyer, the learner is ours, the teacher is a staff, who are we going to protect? We realised later that the essence of dragging Chrisland into the matter is because the parents wanted to seek asylum. 

They are abroad today, they have been given asylum. In our VGC campus, a few years ago, a parent alleged that her daughter, two years old, was molested, we said that was not possible. They brought the matter to me. I called the woman, and asked her where she lived and worked, she told me. 

She said she is a sales person in a car shop. I asked after her husband, she said they lived separately. With all sense of modesty, such a person cannot afford Chrisland Schools. I called the school to ask when that child joined us, I was told it was September of the year and the issue cropped up on November, just two months after. I told her that Madam, in our nursery section, all the workers there are females, this is because of our past experiences. I said there is no problem, let us take the matter to the Police Zonal Command in Lagos. The woman said no, that she had realized that the.problem was from her home. She wanted to blackmail us or use us to get asylum abroad by claiming her family is being threatened because of her case with us. This is why we now have a policy that no matter where you are coming from, somebody must recommend you to Chrisland before we accept your child. In fact, from the next academic session, before we admit a child, both parents will come for a chat. The moment the parents are not living together, it is an epidemic. They want the teacher to teach their children how to sleep and wake up, how to brush teeth and do everything because they have failed in their own responsibilities. Luckily for us, we have a Parent Teacher Association that knows we are doing everything possible for the children. That is why you see them rising up to defend us when anything happens.

Why are private schools always in the news for the wrong reasons?

As we talk now may be a student is being raped or killed in a public school, but you don’t hear about that. The private schools deal with elitist parents. Those who have the wherewithal to fight you. The other day, a lady was raped and killed in a BRT bus, was the BRT system shut down or did anybody protest? A lot of things happen in public schools too, but who closes them. Parents send their children to private schools because they think they are safe and secure there. One of the consequences of growth is scandals, every road to success is dotted with scandals and if you focus on them, you won’t grow. It is for you to overcome. 

How do you evaluate your teachers and curriculum?

Our evaluation is in public domain. It is seen in the quality of our products. Two years ago, we had the best result in A Level in English Language in the world. We had the best result in Mathematics. If not for our curriculum and the standard we have set in education, very few schools will get the needless bashing like we did and come out unscathed. We get positive recommendations from parents daily. Our quality assurance is high and some private schools come to us for quality assurance. In the last WASSCE, we had 47 or 48 students with 11 A1s including English Language and Mathematics and if not for English Language, there was an issue with it, we could have had up to 100 students in that category. Let me tell you that some of our students focus on Cambridge A Level examinations. Two years ago, we had the best results in Cambridge.

For public schools, there are brilliant minds, but the environment is not conducive. In some of these schools, parents assist children in getting good results, we don’t condone that in Chrisland. How do you explain a situation where somebody will get good grades in WASSCE but will get to the university and won’t be able to defend that.

During my time, I got admission to the university with A Level results and I got 10 points. While trying to register, I saw a guy who had 15 points in his A Level too and he registered for Business Administration. I was wondering that he should have sought admission into some other courses, anyway, in his first year in the university, he failed.

We need a proper education policy from primary to university level. There must be a standard. If we don’t have a standard to follow, then the future of the country is in jeopardy. 

It is the younger generation that will build this country and they are leaving for other countries. Even if we are given the best President, the generation that will build the country have Japa. We should make education attractive and not a punishment. We must make our schools conducive for learning. I have been to some private universities, their lecture rooms, hostels are conducive. They are not overcrowded, how will students not come out with good grades. Lecture rooms and hostels are air conditioned in some places. But what about our public ones? They are over crowded. The way out is that we must let the rich pay for the poor and the poor will serve the state.

Recently, the management of the University of Ibadan raised the alarm about some female students selling their eggs, any legal implications?

Somebody will say it is their right to do so, but are they aware of the consequences? I will use this to answer that question, why is it that Nigerians would see a bad leader and still vote for him? It due to poverty. If universities are run the way they should, there won’t be anything like that. In Babcock University for instance, indigent students are involved in Work Study Scheme and are earning something. Some of those girls selling their eggs want to be attractive to our aristo politicians. Some governors still hold parties and they would send coaster buses to campuses to bring girls for their friends. We need to criminalise such impunity. Some governors are not even role models to their children. Those are the things we avoid in Chrisland. When we call your child and we ask him who are his role models and he cannot name at least one of the parents as being among them, then there is problem. 

What legacy do you want to leave as the Chairman of the Advisory Board of Chrisland? 

We are doing our best to ensure that corporate governance policy is in place. When we institutionalize that, things will fall in line. Whether the chairman of the advisory board or members are there or not, you will find out that a transformative system is in place and everyone knows what to do. We want to make Chrisland Schools, apart from being the largest in Africa, a foremost private group of schools. 

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