How Buhari Answered our Prayers on Education

Contrary to what you may think, I wasn’t the one who
started the prayer. It was Prof. Ngozi Osarenren, Head, Department of Educational Foundations, Faculty of Education, University of Lagos (UNILAG).

A one-time Commissioner of Education in Edo State, according to her, she has, for a long time now, been worried that various Nigerian governments, had, in time past, done what amounts to putting a round peg in a square hole by appointing Ministers of Education from outside the education circle, Ministers who knew next to nothing about education, not because they were not highly educated themselves, but because education, like medicine, law, engineering, is not their field of study.

And, she said so, penultimate Tuesday, at a get-together for teachers put together by Mrs. Foluso Atilola, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Covenant Education Consultancy (CEC), the Lagos-based educational consulting firm that organizes refresher and development courses for teachers, among other education programmes, to celebrate teachers as part of the activities marking the World Teachers’ Day. Lamenting the evil practice whereby politicians who want to compensate their followers always find education the only befitting portfolio to give to them, whether they know A from B on it, or not, Prof. Osarenren wondered why they don’t do the same with ministries of health and justice.

Close your eyes, for a moment, and imagine yours sincerely being appointed Minister of Justice, or Health or Works. Disaster! That’s what you will get. Tower of Babel! Mere anarchy loosed upon the earth. You read me right! The falcon is not going to hear the falconer. Ah! Appoint me a Minister of Justice, and be ready to see some people spending up to 50 years on awaiting trial list, because, as one colonial master once said, justice is not enough to go round everybody. Appoint me Minister of Health, and you are ready to see Ebola which had long beaten a retreat through the ruthless morbid way it came restaging a forceful comeback simply because I am not be able to distinguish a malevolent virus from a benign one. Appoint me Minister of Works, and watch me do roads for you with palm kernel shells brought from my grandmother’s kitchen! That’s the kind of disaster you get when you appoint some funny characters like that to man ministry of education.

But I am happy that President Muhammadu Okechukwu Buhari has answered our prayers with the new list of nominees submitted to the Senate for screening. If you read this column, last Tuesday, you will remember me lamenting my inability to pick out somebody that fits the picture that Prof. Osarenren was trying to paint, to act as the Minister of Education, from the list of names already submitted to the Senate. It was so bad that I asked you to help after drawing blank, following one week of a self-appointed screening done by me as Head of Education Desk of your darling newspaper. I ask: did you do so?

I am happy to see on the new list names like Claudius Omoleye Daramola, a distinguished Professor of Sociology of Education, from the University of Ilorin and Anthony Anwuka, a seasoned Professor of Education Curriculum and, until recently, the Vice Chancellor, Imo State University. Hopefully, after successfully going through the Senate screening, one of them will be appointed Minister of Education, and the other, Minister of State for Education. I hear that they are all team players. Let’s see what two of them working together will make of our tattered, visionless education system, in the next three-and-a-half years.