Nigerians have very poor sense of history with profound retrograde amnesia. Its amazing reading some uninformed commentators expecting much from Malam Ibrahim Shekarau as a Minister of Education. For the record, Shekaraus tenure as a governor in Kano state saw the longest strike ever embarked by the teachers in tertiary institutions under the aegis of JCF. For almost a year, all the tertiary schools owned by Kano state govt were closed down. He literally crippled primary and secondary education in Kano, and nearly strangulated KUST (the only state university in Kano then) to the point of inevitable collapse. In his 8 years in office he built only a convocation square for KUST, but all other projects were financed by ETF. In his last 3 successive years while he held sway he failed to access UBE grant because he did not want to pay counterpart funding since UBE would demand that he retires the money at the end. He would rather abandon it because it could not be looted by his Handamiya cohort. In fact DFID report showed that there were at least 180 pupils per classroom at the time he handed over to his successor. And over 80% of the classes had no tables or chairs- pupils were almost all sitting on a bare floor. One of my colleagues was so angry when he visited the primary school he attended at Filin Mushe to have discovered that the classes had turned into a habitat for donkeys used for ferrying yashi/bulon kasa and a comfort zone for street urchins/goats and . To cap this off, Shekaraus tenure saw over 8000 ghost teachers on the states payroll. It was only when his government realized that they had lost in the governotorial election with barely 3 months to handover power that they brought out thousands of teaching job offers and went about selling each one at the rate of between 10K-20K to unsuspecting public, just to cover their dirty/filthy tracks. Unfortunately, you could see clearly on the offer that such staff had been working for almost three years in the civil service and you that just bought it, you are to just resume work as a fresher. How do you reconcile that? Is this the kind of man you should hinge your hope of restoring the quality of education on? Time will tell! Goodluck! Please hold your breath, I mean just that name Goodluck Jonathan.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 09:25:12 +0000
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