1st October, 2013
Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the governor of the State of Osun, is one governor who has demonstrated uncommon interest in the area of providing social safety net to governance. This can be seen in all his programmes of transforming the state. In the area of education, he has the mission to ensure that there is a reversal of the educational fortunes of the students of Osun and I know within the next 10 years, the performance of the students in the state will be outstanding.
For example, looking at the structures, when we had education summit, we found out that we had very few teachers. There was pronounced infrastructure decay in the schools. We had children who were undernourished at a very young age. We had many things that could militate against quick and easy assimilation of knowledge. Then we decided to start the O-meal programme from the elementary school to be able to give them proper nourishment. We then did the school re-classification so that we could concentrate resources. The whole idea is to turn out a group of Nigerian future leaders who have very good education and who, along the way, will have the opportunity of mixing and can compete effectively anywhere in the world. At that point in time, no religious consideration came in. Our desire is to ensure that we turn out best students in the world.
There is a senator friend who lamented that in his area in Ora town, it is impossible for anybody to become a medical doctor because none of the schools there has laboratory. We must admit the fact that the state funds the teachers, equips schools, so the schools belong to the state. Thus, for administrative convenience, to be able to structure resource which they are deploying, we decided to group certain classes and age groups together and that is what the classification is all about. Ultimately, the impact of this programme will begin to be seen in the next few years.
In the area of re-classification, after the Baptist realised that the takeover of mission schools by government had become a reality, they went ahead and started their own private schools. But very few of them had thought of improving on their schools’ infrastructure for about 30 years. So, you have government paying the teachers, renovating the schools and in some situations, building more structures. We have carried out a lot of reforms.
We have created a better cadre called Tutor-General/ Permanent Secretary status to give teachers a sense of pride. Now we are letting teachers know that if they work very hard, there is a reward, and that is why we have Tutor-General/Permanent Secretary and they are on grade level with other permanent secretaries. The government is saying that as long as it funds schools, it can restructure them.
We had lots of consultation with those who opposed the idea before we started what we are doing now. Coming to the issue of Islamisation, and the fear that we may be building mosques in the schools, it is unfounded. Our intention is just to improve the schools and provide better amenities like toilets, water, sickbays and the like for them. My own appeal is that people should collectively support what the governor is doing. Ogbeni Aregbesola has tolerance for other religions. Ogbeni went to a Catholic primary school in Ikare, and an Anglican secondary school. He is a devout Muslim but he is not a fundamentalist.
– Femi Ifaturoti is the director of Bureau of Social Services