Dele Olateju, principal, Kings College Lagos, in this interview with DANIEL OBI and KELECHI EWUZIE stresses the need for government to allow technocrats steer the ship of education sector among other issues. Excerpt:
How can we use education sector to leapfrog the economy?
We need to
isolate education away from current political influence. There is no way
Nigeria as a country can play politics with education. The best
ministers of education are not politicians but technocrats and they
don’t enjoy smooth transition.
Technocrats should be allowed to head the
education sector at all levels in order to engender proper planning,
development of policies and strategic implementation of such policies.
If we have a stable polity and follow the roadmap as it were faithfully
and religiously structure, we will be able to get used to education as a
vehicle to leapfrog the economy.
We are optimistic that things can get
better, we are desirous of using education for liberation of the masses,
for development of the citizens, for allowing insurgency in the north
east to abate.
If you are educating a group of people
and they have the proper values, they will not go for insurgency and
militancy. I am looking forward to seeing Nigeria using education to
leapfrog itself to the level of devloped countries in the comity of
nations. The league of nations that are developed got their development
through education.
If the new government appoints you minister of education, where do you start from?
I will first look at the existing roadmap
for education sector and see ways where I can strengthen the policies
and look at the current challenges and seek for ways to solve them.
Another key area of focus will be to look
at access to education. For primary education, we don’t have any reason
why 45million Nigerians are out of school. If we decide that in the
next 4 years, we are going to use NYSC graduates for effective literacy
campaign, it will be effective because they are focused.
Since we started using the NYSC people in
elections, we have had a better performance. I would enforce payment of
tuition in tertiary institutions. Nigeria’s population keeps increasing
and we keep having challenges of funding and we know the federal
government cannot do it alone. So, we expect partnerships and
collaborations between parents and governments that will assist move
education forward.
I will prefer to get a better quality
rather than pretending to get free institutions and you don’t get the
quality. They will have autonomy in terms of fixing the fees at a
moderate level. There is no absolute autonomy.
We now have a new curriculum that focuses
on the areas that we have neglected in the past. To see the effect of
the new curriculum is gradual and it takes time and it is not sudden.
In addition, entrepreneurship education
is now the in-thing and it is a major focal area in the new curriculum.
All schools now offer 20 subjects. These are skills that you acquire, so
that if you are going for the normal conventional economics and you are
not fit for it, you can now go for the other.
Education is on concurrent list, we have
not been able to compute what the federal, state and local government
are giving, There is one organisation that funds education and has been
doing well through taxes deducted from companies. It is not about
funding per say but about integrity of such funds.
It is about how you spend it. Throughout
last year, what I got from capital allocation is about N26m out of N100m
and the N26m has gone into infrastructures, to improve the facilities.
It is not so much about the money but the integrity and transparency of
the usage.
If there is anything we will commend the
outgoing administration for, it is that they have actually done much for
the unity schools. We don’t have that question of privatisation of the
unity schools any longer and it has improved. What we are expecting the
new government to do is to sustain the present state and do more.
How come Kings College has remained a top school?
The secret is that we are always proud to
sustain the heritage. This building is a national monument, erected in
1907, two years before the college was established and it is still
standing tall. Again, we are aware that over the years there have been
other schools that have been competing with us, so while those people
are crawling to meet us, we develop more wings to fly high above them
all.
What are the challenges the school has gone through over the years and how have you been able to manage it?
The first challenge is the
infrastructural upgrade. Some of the facilities have seen better days.
Our main campus here, in those days had about 300 students but today it
houses about 1,500 students. So, we have had to cope with the challenges
of widening access.
Kings College is an elite public
institution for the development and training of children from all works
of life, irrespective of the socio-economic background of the parents.
We see kings College as a level playing
field. Be you a child of a celebrity, a monarchy, a pauper; we are here
to learn under the same roof. When students are given the opportunity to
study under the same roof, those whom you think were formally dull,
will pick up and prove otherwise.
What are you doing on teachers’ training?
I came into the College in 2010 and I
know we needed to have a roadmap. We had a roadmap in September 2011 and
we came up with the fact that we have to do infrastructural upgrade and
teachers’ development so that we can train all our staff.
We do internal education and capacity
building, we invite experts outside to train our staff and we also send
them to other training avenues where they can increase their knowledge.
What is your relationship with your old boys?
They are formidable and rich and at the
time when we had challenges, when the school had gone under, they took
up the challenge and gave some funds to assist in infrastructures. They
also use their connections to help like in CBN, but we still expect more
from them.
They have to pay back, if they have been
favoured to receive an elite education in a public school like Kings
College, as a moral debt, it is only proper that they pay back to the
community, society and the school.
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