Who would think that things would turn out the way they were? Tina was just turned thirteen and she appeared to be in trouble with her teachers, her parents and of course the boyfriend who put her in the state she is suspected to be in. Tina attends a school not too far from her village under some three kilometers walk. She treks to the school daily walking nearly six kilometers each time.
The school’s administrative block is partly collapsed and is hardly fit for the purpose it was designed. The classroom blocks are an admixture of cement blocks and mud construction. The so-called chalkboards could well be notice boards covered with soot. When it rains the pupils have to suspend class work to huddle in a corner because of leakages that causes the rainwater to displace them from their seats.
Parts of the school compound have long been taken over by stubborn weeds and overgrown vegetation. The rainy season should be a blessing for farmers in this rural area but for the school kids it is a curse. Large pools of water take over any time it rains. Electricity is hardly available and water is drawn from a well for all the needs of the children during school hours. Broken desks and chairs litter the school corridors. Doors, where they exist, are hanging half way off the hinges. Since the school could not afford glass louver windows it had to settle for cheap wood versions that are already rotting from attacks by weevils.
Contributions by the pupils for sundry school requirements are routine and the poor parents of Tina always complained about the levies that were threatening their peace of mind. The school staff also always complained about being paid months in arrears and therefore could not expect to make ends meet and could not concentrate on the job they had been employed for.
At month’s end for nearly two weeks the head teacher is almost always resuming at the state headquarters (some 80 kilometres away) of the schools board trying to collect the cheque to cover wages for the teachers. When this happens the teachers take the liberty to run their own errands, teaching grinds to a virtual stop and the pupils are left to their own designs. It was during one of the many lulls in the teaching periods that got Tina mixing with boys who were older than her. In the end she claimed she had missed her monthly circle.
When her parents found out the boy and the girl were about to go to a quack pharmacist to procure drugs to terminate the perceived pregnancy. In fact it was because they could not afford the charge by the quack medic that the boy told his friends who in turn told other friends and it eventually got to the knowledge of the neighbours of Tina’s parents who then told them!
A wise old man in the village asked the parents to carry out a pregnancy test (they could ill-afford it and so they had to borrow with a pledge to pay sometime soon). To underscore how poor they were, the child had to put the required urine sample in a sterilized bottle for somebody else to go to the nearest town some thirty kilometers away as the transport fare for two people would only increase their misery further!
When we look at some statistics, say the percentage of low income group in a community, it might tells us a lot about trends and possibilities but the figures say nothing about the human misery, anguish, despair, hopes raised and dashed, melancholy and the desperation behind them. At the personal level those statistics pale into insignificance when you experience first-hand, the agony of real grinding poverty from, which no escape appears ready and possible.
Governance is about lessening the burden of life for the weaker members of the society, giving shelter to the homeless, health to the unsound, food to the hungry and education to the young and illiterate so that they can contribute meaningfully to the advancement of the entire society. Hence when government introduced the Education Tax (ETA) in 1993 it appeared education would not continue to suffer the neglect of the recent past. However my opening story to this piece happened in 2002 AD!
When the ETA was first introduced things had not deteriorated to the level they are today in the educational sector. The Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), like the ETA, was intended as an intervention fund outside government bureaucratic purview for easy access and distribution. However, please note how it was abused and it ended up not achieving half of what it had set out to do. Can the ETA escape a similar fate?
One of the arguments for the scrapping of the PTF (apart from the charges of corrupt enrichment by individuals within the fund) was that it represented a parallel arm of government duplicating exactly what others (ministries and agencies) were well equipped to do. Would the same argument not go for the ETA? Or has the Ministry of Education ceased to exist? However it really does not matter to me if we had 1, 5, 200 or 2000 agencies catering to the educational needs of the citizens of this country so long as the people are properly educated for the benefit of Nigeria. But if we had the same numbers and yet fail to achieve anything of significance then we should ask questions.
The 1993 Act gives the ratio of sharing the funds of ETA as 5:4:1 to higher education (universities, polytechnics and colleges of education), to primary education and secondary education respectively. Thus laying emphasis only on the formative years and the tertiary education of the child as if the secondary level is unimportant and therefore gets a meager 10% of the allocation. The neglect of the adolescent years will invariably reflect in the quality of intake at the university and polytechnic level.
Employers of labour have continued to complain incessantly about the drop in the level of quality of the average Nigerian university graduate in recent years. As the saying goes in computer language garbage-in, garbage-out (GIGO). If you construct a good foundation yet neglect the soundness of the middle floors and then go on to build a fantastic penthouse on a poorly constructed middle floor the penthouse would in no time suffer serious damage if not outright collapse.
The skills we impart on the child at the secondary level will last him for the rest of his years in life. It is at that level that we identify the vocations of each child and guide him accordingly rather than after university graduation. No wonder we have graduates of engineering ending up as accountants, graduates of sociology ending up as bankers and lawyers winding up as retail traders etc. The blame for this trend cannot be heaped on the ETA but on the designers and approving authority for the implementation of the fund. Tax is a developmental tool that can be used for the benefit of or for the oppression of a people. To use ETA to unleash the full potentials of Nigerians will not be achieved if the current lopsidedness in the allocation of funds persists in favour of university and primary education.
We would have primary school pupils who cannot seriously transform themselves to factors of production other than as raw materials for menial jobs and university graduates who are ill equipped to enter the labour market. The neglect secondary (particularly public) schools are being made to endure at the moment will, in the very near future, further compound our educational sector’s woes. The army of secondary school dropouts will continue to mount. We shall forever end up with unemployable youths who will lack even the basic skills to cope with existence.
We should not be deceived by the statistics from the annual University Matriculation Examinations (UME) that the numbers sitting the exams annually are increasing in geometric proportions. The truth is that the universities are unable to absorb those who passed in the previous years and they along with fresh SSCE candidates re-take/take the exams. This process gets repeated every year thus the alarming increases.
The ETA therefore needs some modification to redress the imbalance in the allocation of funds. The intervention by the fund in staff development and attendance at conferences as proposed by the Act is rather queer and will not help our education to make any meaningful progress.
When the results of Tina’s pregnancy test came it was negative. Tina is in a secondary school and just in the second year of enrolment. There are thousands of Tinas in our secondary schools today. Their plight is real and it will only get worse with the coming of further years of government neglect. The ETA can intervene positively if permitted to do so by the law setting it up. Please let us act today.
