By Akeeb Adekunle Alabi
Seven years in to the Ogbeni Rauf AREGBESOLA administration and our students and pupils are being blessed with monumental failures.
One doesn’t have to be an educationist to know that Opon Imo would beget failure. And our Governor spent over N8 billion on the Opon Imo (tablets) project. The project was designed to fail, ab initio. He never consulted school administrators before he embarked on the said mission.
TheGovernor promised to manufacture 150,000 tablets. But when the tablets were out, they could not go round for more than 50,000 students (first batch in 2012). This suggested that less than 50,000 tablets were actually manufactured and not 150,000.
What baffles one is: why did the State Government prefer electronic form of book to the age long textbooks ? How easy will it be for students using electronic book machine? Your guess is as good as mine.
In the last seven years, the government refused to procure textbooks for schools.
Government prefers to build mega schools at the expense of teachers’ general welfare. Since 2015, teachers and civil servants alike are being paid half salaries. This suggests that teachers are left to teach their students with ‘half stomach’. Garbage in, garbage out, you may say.
To compound workers’ predicaments, the government refuses to promote its staff since 2012. And their annual increments had been stopped long ago. This State Government doesn’t believe in staff motivation.
Soon as Ogbeni Aregbesola was sworn-in as Governor on November 27, 2010, the new Governor outlawed the engagement of PTA teachers by the school authorities.
Subsequently, school principals disengaged PTA teachers. The former PTA teachers were recruited to make up for the shortage of government staff (teachers). Yet, the Governor only hired less than 5,000 workers to fill the void that arose from the retirement over 12,000 teachers in 2012.
Coming back to the suspension of five principals of the Baptist High School, Iwo. It is uncalled for, to say the least, or is the government blaming the head teachers for its own failure to embark on workers/students’ welfare ?
It is high time the government starts to reverse its bad policies on education. It must concern itself with staff motivation.
It must procure necessary educational materials and textbooks for teachers and students. The government should stop further construction of mega schools. It needs to renovate all schools in the state. The truth is that mega schools cannot go round.
