BY BOLAJI ADEYEMI

OUR government officials are at it again! Instead of fashioning out an effective strategy to mend the broken walls of our educational system, they are warming up for another round of talk show. And to think that these talk shows are not organised with peanuts!

The Minister of Education recently announced that the ministry wants to organise a conference/summit to discuss the massive failure in NECO and WAEC. Not that it is a bad idea, prima facie; but the truth is that, many such conferences and summits have been organised in the past without anything to show for it in the quality of teaching and acculturation in our public schools.

The challenges bedevilling our education system are not hidden; it does not require the ingenuity of an Einstein to identify them. They are very visible at every turn. The hundred millions of naira being budgeted for this summit by the Minister to check mass failure in WAEC and NECO will only amount to another of our characteristic waste of public funds.

In fact, the conference may well be an addition to the layer of rot piled on our already decomposed education sector. Why? Because cash-strapped commissions, such as the Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC, will be the ones mandated to raise this fund!

The reasons students are failing in WAEC and NECO exams are obvious: there are no classrooms, no chairs, teachers are not motivated, no libraries and books, schools are inadequately funded, there is poor implementation and monitoring of recommendations of past conferences. You do not need another summit to articulate, understand and solve any of these problems. And engaging a consultant at heavy fee just to organise a conference to discuss the obvious is even a more pathetic misplacement of priorities.

Rather than engage in frivolous summits, the Ministry of Education should focus more attention on resolving the longstanding issues that make the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU; Non-Academic Staff Union, NASU; Nigeria Union of Teachers, NUT and other such academic bodies, down tools every given time.

It is worthy of note that during the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s administration, an education summit was also held. All the dignitaries that attended the summit took turns to lament the sorry state of our educational system. Senate President, David Mark and former Head of the Interim National Government, Chief Ernest Shonekan, were also prominent voices in the lamentation party.

They all expressed sadness at the high number of school-age children who are out of schools, the rotten education sector and its implication on the country’s vision to be among the 20 most industrialised nations by the year 2020. Years down the line, it is the same old story of mass failure in WAEC, NECO and JAMB. Our universities and polytechnics graduates are half-baked – that is if they ever get baked at all.

So, the causes of this national shame are obvious. Successive governments have paid lip service to raising the standard of education in Nigeria. But their rhetoric has not been matched with the political will to create an effective change in the sector. Instead, the sector is perennially drained of funds, and where the funds are available, unscrupulous persons at the helms of affairs would embezzle them.

Consequently, many schools are short of classrooms. Students are cramped into poorly ventilated and leaky contraptions in the name of classrooms. In classic instances, more than 80 pupils are crammed in a class, whilst some so-called classrooms are right under the tree, and worn-out automobile tyres used as chairs in some schools!

As a result, the proprietors of private schools smile to the bank, as many parents prefer to enrol their wards in private schools, where they can, at least, be assured of manageable educational facilities.

When the welfare of teachers is not adequately attended to, they look for other means to make ends meet. There are countless accounts of teachers – the very custodians of morals – soliciting money from their pupils in order to inflate their scores and promote them to higher class.

The mere sight of some public schools’ teachers is enough testimony of a squalid system. Many of them are the epitome of poverty. At a recently held Teachers’ Day celebration in Abuja, one could see poverty, dejection and nonchalance written on the teachers’ faces – the faces that should ideally beam our national pride. Little wonder then that they refused to attend the dinner organised “in their honour” by the Ministry at the highbrow Sheraton Hotel and Towers later that day.

It is high time the helmsmen at the Ministry of Education knew that repositioning the sector goes beyond huddling in conference rooms and presenting eye-catching slides. It goes beyond stacking proposals from local and international experts. It goes beyond empty rhetoric that is only read on the pages of the dailies and not reflected in the proceeds channelled to the sector.

The Minister of Education needs to get out there and have a firsthand experience of what is going on. We do not need another talk show before we fix the rot in the system.

*Mr. Adeyemi, a public affairs analyst, wrote from Lagos.