Right of Reply Standing Facts on their Head By Yusuph Olaniyonu Reading through Steve Oliyide’s reaction to my article published in some national newspapers on July 12 and 13, gave me an initial feeling that at last, Nigerians will enjoy a good debate on issues affecting Ogun State as we approach the 2015 elections. However, if the outright falsehood and misrepresentation which dotted the response from beginning to end is the nature of exchange that our people will be subjected to, then the expected debate may not be worth the name. In any case, I still feel that I owe our people the duty to further reinforce the points I earlier made in the article entitled ‘ Bisi Onabanjo on My Mind’. First, the Special Assistant to ex-Governor Gbenga Daniel noted that my article must have been informed by the need to respond to a claim made by his principal and also that the results of the Ekiti election must have compelled me to want to inform the public about our education policy. This is surprising, as the Ekiti election only held on June 19 whereas I had already written several articles between 2012 and now to inform Nigerians of our administration’s policies, projects and programmes. Before the one under focus, I wrote an article titled ‘Before We Forget’ published in many national newspapers on June 8, 2014, 13 days before the Ekiti polls. In that piece, I chronicled how the Otunba Gbenga Daniel administration inflicted violence, impunity and fear on our people and how the Amosun government has since restored peace and normalcy. Nobody in that administration has written a rejoinder to that piece. Maybe because there was no Ekiti election result to serve as inspiration for them or more appropriately, they have no answers to the details of atrocities contained in the article. Secondly, now that we are being told that ‘the love of the people’ formed the philosophical underpinning of the education policy in Ogun State between 2003 to 2011 and that the aim was to create ‘model teachers’, we can as well examine the logic of that claim. In an administration with so much ‘love for the people’, parents had to pay huge sums of money to enrol their wards in public secondary schools, construct chairs and desks to be used by the students in school, pay building or development levies, buy textbooks and registration materials. The ‘people-oriented’ policy of the past administration was manifested in its inability to pay the WAEC fees which it had promised to pay. At a time, WAEC withheld the results of students from Ogun State. In 2010 when the results were withheld by WAEC, I had to write about it in my column on the back page of THISDAY newspaper. In that article, I revealed how the Commissioner for Education told the House of Assembly that he had advised against the policy so that the government would not start what it could not sustain. Even then, the Amosun administration since May 2011 had to pay some backlog of WAEC fees that it inherited from the past government and has paid for the just concluded 2014 examinations. If Oliyide remembers my 2010 intervention which forced the Daniel administration to quickly pay some money to WAEC and pleaded for the release of the results, he will not make the false claim that I was probably far from home when the administration was misgoverning Ogun State. I have been following and commenting on developments in the state for more than two decades. The former governor is very well aware of this fact. I know for sure that Chiefs Obafemi Awolowo and Bisi Onabanjo would be happy that while replicating their free education policy which translates to abolition of tuition fees, provision of infrastructural facilities in schools, supply of text books and instructional materials, the Amosun administration also introduced Unified Exams in all state-owned primary and secondary schools. This is paid for by the government and it ensures that teachers strive to cover their syllabus and that the same standard is set across all our schools. When we talk about increased enrolment in schools, this is a direct result of the high standard of education available at no cost to students. The migration to public schools from private is because very few rational human beings would pay for what they can get at no cost. Again, Ogun State has 1,436 primary schools and 345 secondary schools (173 JSS, 172 SSS and 129 combined schools). So, how can the enrolment figure be the same at both levels? This disparity in number of primary and secondary schools necessitated the need for construction of new model schools which members of the Daniel administration seem incensed about. I will address the issue of model schools later. Also, the last administration that created ‘model teachers’ , according to its propagandists, owed teachers salary of up to 19 months as at May 28, 2011. Deductions made from their salaries were not remitted to their co-operative societies. This therefore stifled their access to loans which usually provide financial succour to this category of workers. Their unions were polarized so as to enervate and prevent them from taking organised action against government. The vocal ones among them were suppressed, intimidated and whipped to toe the line or face grave consequence. Yet, the administration that subjected them to all these unsavoury experiences wanted to make them ‘model teachers’, as we are now being told. There has been so much noise about TASUED as the number one university wholly devoted to producing teachers. However, that claim remained only on paper. The TASUED that the Amosun administration inherited was one in which all manners of non education related courses were created and students admitted arbitrarily with the sole aim
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 21:11:46 +0000
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