Lack of resources threaten UBE
Aminatu Yusuf, a petty trader in her mid -thirties, escorts her four-year old daughter Rashidat to a private nursery school early this month. It is Rashidat's first day in school. She is the last of three children. Two others, a boy and a girl are in a different private school. ''I do not want my children to be uneducated like me, so I have to do all I can to send them to school. I decided to put them in private schools because, though government (public) schools are free at primary level, teachers do not have time for the children as pupils are too many in class to cope with,''
Aminatu missed school herself because her parents could not afford it, then public schools were fee-paying. Nigeria in the late seventies introduced the Universal Primary Education (UPE) programme, which made primary school education free but not compulsory. The programme recorded mass enrolment of pupils, but it became a colossal failure because of corruption and lack of infrastructure and teachers.
The Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme launched in 1999 to provide compulsory and qualitative education at primary school and junior secondary school levels in Nigeria, according to experts may become another failure because of funding, infrastructure and few qualified teachers. They argue that while education has kept on expanding in terms of enrolment, the resources being provided are inadequate.
''It is not that government is not giving money but there is a gap. The demand for education is growing higher everyday but the available resources are not keeping pace in terms of the development. That is the problem of education in Nigeria,'' said Professor William Ibukun, a university don.
UNESCO’s Education For All Global Monitoring Report: The quality imperative 2005 provides a detailed analysis of factors influencing the quality of education in several regions of the world which it says could prevent many countries from achieving the Education For All (EFA) goals by 2015. They include financial and material resources for schools, the number of teachers and their training, the amount of actual learning time, facilities and leadership.
Though Nigeria was not included in the case study for the 2005 report, analysts say politicisation of the programme, ethnicisation of the supervisory committee and the current academic qualification discrepancies for the teachers participating in the scheme, may hinder the success of the UBE programme in the country. ''Though the UBE programme is good, experiences over the years have shown that only non-politicisation of the scheme could pave the way for its effective execution,'' says Professor Lekan Oyedeji, Chairman of the governing council of Oyo State College of Education, Western Nigeria.
Limited resources have led to inadequate infrastructure and qualified teachers, overcrowded classrooms and dilapidated buildings, forcing pupils especially in rural areas to take their lessons under trees in some cases. For example, during a recent tour of educational institutions in Sokoto State, northern Nigeria, a disappointed Governor Attahiru Bafarawa, described the conditions of most primary schools in the state as a ''disaster."
Bafarawa, who met pupils in most of the schools sitting on bare floor, said his findings show that council chairmen in the state have not taken their social responsibilities serious as he found it difficult to understand why local government chairmen would fold their arms and watch primary and secondary schools' buildings, in their locality turning into dilapidated structures.
The problem in the primary school education became pronounced in the last decade following controversies on who should be responsible for the payment of salaries for primary school teachers among the three tiers of government - the federal, the states and the local governments. The impasse led to unpaid salaries sometimes for upwards of six months, forcing many well-trained and qualified teachers to move to other lucrative economic sectors, or to private schools where salaries are regular.
Critics describe the level of motivation and personal welfare teachers get as professionals, as the poorest in the country as it often takes the Nigerian Union of Teachers days of work boycott to get primary school teachers paid whenever there is any salary delay. ''The attitude is not unconnected with the low regard accorded the profession often seen as a dumping ground where those already there, are then forgotten and abandoned,'' said Abdul Omar, a member of the Nigeria Union of Teachers. This has affected effective performance of teachers and lowered the quality of education in the country.
Victor Dike, an educationist, in a paper: ''Educating the Educator in Nigeria'' a year after the launching of the UBE programme by the Nigerian government in 1999, argued that much as the scheme is laudable, teachers cannot perform miracles if they are not provided with the tools to successfully implement it. ''Teachers should be properly trained in modern technologies to enable them educate students who would be expected to function effectively in a modern work environment, and to compete in the global market place,'' Dike said.
He argued that for the UBE to take off and run successfully, the government should make available well trained and computer-literate teachers, books, enough and modern classrooms, adequate funding to monitor and support the teaching-learning process in schools and adequate motivation for teachers.
''If we expect our teachers to properly train our youths, who are expected to function effectively in today's modern economy, we should empower faculty to achieve technology integration in their own classes. This, the society can achieve, by first integrating modern technology in the curriculum of teacher training programme in Nigeria. The teachers, in turn, would then integrate technology into their classroom curricula,'' Dike said.
For the laudable objectives of the UBE to be achieved, he stated, the training of teachers should involve integrating the use of modern instructional technologies, such as the computers, access to the Internet, audio-visual equipments, Video Conferencing, projectors, and traditional software used in today's business world.
UBE officials are also worried about the effect of funding. Painting a dismal picture of literacy level in Nigeria due to funding, the National Coordinator of the UBE scheme, Professor Gidado Tahir, said unless there is effective collaboration and cooperation between the UBE and state governments on the funding of Primary education, teaching and learning will not only be disrupted but the scheme will also be jeopardised.
According to Tahir, a research and monitoring exercise conducted by UBE in December 2001 showed that many pupils and even some teachers could not read effectively. Consequently, this has created an urgent need to train the affected teachers to acquire reading skills. ''With population roughly estimated at over 100 million, it is quite clear that more than 40 per cent of this number can not read and write as we enter the 21st century in which literacy could make the difference between prosperity and poverty''. ''If Nigeria is to move rapidly away from this crushing level of illiteracy, a massive injection of funds will have to be ensured.'' he added.
The Nigerian government has, however, announced that it will spend 20 billion naira (about US$1.5 billion) annually to finance the UBE programme. The amount will represent two per cent of the consolidated revenue fund of government. About one billion dollars was spent on the scheme in 2001 and 2002, according to officials.