We’ve raised subventions at all levels of tertiary institutions — Oyo education commissioner

Oyo State Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology, Professor Joseph Adeniyi Olowofela, in this interview with MODUPE GEORGE, speaks about the achievements of the Schools Governing Boards initiative after a year as well as his achievements in office, among other issues. Excerpts:

The ‘School on Air’ is a landmark initiative during your tenure as commissioner for education. How has it fared?

Don’t let me ascribe ‘The School on Air’ to be my brainchild; I would rather say I’m an ardent supporter of School-on-Air. It is an educational video put in place by the Education Advancement Centre; and because of the versatility of the video, current syllabi and contents, we have decided to introduce it in all the secondary schools in the state. The advantage is that it is useful for everybody, especially those who are in the metropolitan or rural areas of the state. We do not have full complement of teachers in some cases, but the video has teachers on about 16 subjects; so about 16 subjects are covered. It is a tool that can help any student bridge the gap in his or hers studies. So, we have made all that available to all the students in the state.

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You inaugurated an Education Marshal last year. Can you say this innovation has been vibrant in its operations in curbing truancy, loitering, hooliganism, among other vices common among public secondary school students today?

Yes we did, but it has not yet reached the full status that we want for logistic reasons. Sometimes you experiment with some new things; you see how they (fare) before you escalate it. However, it has helped us identified some of the areas we need to concentrate on. When we talk about the issue of loitering, there are pockets of areas, which are not usually general. We have been able to identify those areas. We are tackling the issue of loitering already, both within and outside the school premises. We also have other units within the government and community relations are also assisting us.

The School Governing Boards (SGB) initiative was one of the popular policies this administration launched recently. Any testimonies yet, especially in terms of academic standard?

The School Governing Board policy is a magic wand in the sense that it has passively affected education in the state. It is a form of participatory approach to education, management of education, provision of infrastructure, content delivery, building of other facilities, laboratories, among others. The composition of the School Governing Boards is such that the chairman can either be an old student, a seasoned academic, a philanthropist as the case may be or a faith-based personality, depending on institutions. The secretaries of the SGBs are the principals of the schools because they are the primary custodians of information in their various schools. Then, the old students, PTAs, as well as the head boys or girls are also represented there on the boards. The education development levy of each school is also domiciled in the SGB. Therefore, all hands are now on the deck; everyone is now involved in the infrastructure development, supervision, content delivery, ICT, and others in each school. Even people who didn’t want to do anything in the time past also want to participate. So, as far as we are concerned in terms of infrastructure development and policy implementation, the SGB is working. Then, in terms of specifics, we can tell you that about 2.6 billion has been injected into infrastructure development from the School Governing Board in the last one year.

Despite the testimonies emanating from the School Governing Board Policy, there are different news about many pupilsstudents learning under poor conditions still in some areas of the state. Are you aware of this?

The issue is you have some infrastructures which had been in place since the time of Awolowo; they are structurally defective and are no longer functional, but some of them are still in the school premises. However, because some of them are still within the school premises, when detractors have access into some of these schools, they won’t capture the pictures of good structures, but only the old ones, forgetting that it is not the problem of this current administration. What we are doing right now as a government is that we have started pulling down some of those structures; especially those ones that are irreparable.

I also need to reiterate that until all the efforts of government have been fully implemented, we may still be seeing some things that we are not particularly happy with. What do I mean by that? Currently, the Oyo State government has awarded a contract of about N2.8 billion for the renovation of about 100 secondary schools in the state and for the primary schools about N3.7 billion to tackle infrastructural decay. I’m also aware that in the next six months, government would have injected close to another N10 billion into both the primary and secondary school systems.  By the time we do all these things, the paradigm would have shifted completely. But right now, we are still correcting the mistakes of about 50 or 60 years in terms of infrastructure.

In terms of policy, this part of the country, especially Oyo State, used to be the best in the country or the Western Region. Ibadan happened to be the capital of the Western Region. There were several policies that were brought into the system, which almost led to policy summersault. For instance, the issue of automatic promotion; it did not encourage students to reach their peak in terms of their potential, because whether they did well or not, they would be promoted to the next class. So, when we came on board, we had to stop it. This really generated a lot of pressure against the government that we should stop, and we did. We discovered that subsequently after implementing a new policy, we moved from 35.5 per cent to 54.4 per cent in West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), which happened to be the best in the last 19 years. Let me also emphasise that the government of Oyo State has also established what we call Oyo State Education Trust Fund. Strategically, the fund from the Oyo State Education Trust Fund would be used to solve problems in any sector of education. Currently, we are tackling technical schools; we are constructing new structures in technical schools. We are also equipping them to have state-of-the-art equipment, so that our young ones who are gifted in terms of using their hands will have the opportunity to educate themselves and acquire craft and technical skills. We believe strongly that Nigeria can have what is called silicon value; whereby we can catapult our technology, which is our basis for establishing a technical university. We have also introduced the ‘OYOMESI’- acronym for Oyo Model Education System Interventions, so that we can also compete globally.

Despite so much noise that has been made about the home-grown feeding programmes in schools in other states, it seems Oyo State is somewhat silent on the programme. What is the situation like in Oyo State?

We have equally started the home-grown feeding programme in Oyo State and it is also a success. One of the cardinal aims of establishing the programme is to increase school enrolment, which has increased; and it is also to have agric value chain; that is the aggregators who are supplying eggs or meat will increase. At the initial stage, when we started, there were teething problems in the sense that we did not have full complement of the vendors because some of them have BVN issues. However, as at today, I can say that you have about 95 per cent full complement of vendors. Initially, we had challenges with meat; it got to a time when we wanted to cancel supply of meat to the schools because the template the aggregator was using that time was not adequately good for the programme. But within the next few weeks, he was able to come up with a better template and ever since it has been working very well.

You have been referring only to primary and secondary schools. Are there no ways you are affecting the tertiary institutions in your programmes?

Our tertiary institutions have the opportunity of accessing the TETFund for some of the physical developments, and we are also giving them what we regard as subvention to support the tertiary institutions. However, the crash in the economy of the country has affected many things. We are no longer getting the kind of money we were getting before. We have to make adjustment with many things and part of that adjustment affected the subventions that were going to virtually all sectors. That also affected the subventions that were going to all the tertiary institutions. However, there have been changes now owing to the current efforts of the government. For instance in the last 18 months, we’ve been releasing about N12million to The Oke-Ogun Polytechnic, The Polytechnic, Ibarapa, Eruwa on a monthly basis, but it has even been changed to N27 million starting from June; ditto The Polytechnic, Ibadan, had been receiving N50 million per month almost in the last 18 months, that has also been increased to N80 million. The College of Agriculture had been receiving about N14 million before, which has also been increased to N37 million; ditto College of Education Lanlate, which has some challenges in terms of imbalance in the ratio of staff and students. We have also raised their subvention to over N30 million starting from June. If all of these are properly implemented, the issue of going on strike will soon be a thing of the past.

What effort has your office put in place to curb the prevalence of drugs in the school system today?

What we have done is that, apart from setting up anti-drug clubs in schools, we have also asked teachers to be vigilant. Also, we have what we call NAPTA – National Association of Parents/Teachers Association of Nigeria, where we are challenging parents to also be vigilant when it comes to raising up their children for guidance in taking care of their wards. We also have some NGOs that are also supporting us.

Are you aware of the near absence of guidance counsellors in the secondary schools today?

You are right; but what we have discovered is that there is imbalance in the system and the government is trying to do what we call optimisation of resources. There was a time we discovered that we had more teachers in primary schools than we required in the system, but we couldn’t sack them. The business of this government is not to sack anybody, but to optimise resources. So, what we did as at that time was to add some of them who are qualified to secondary school within the same local government not too far from where they were teaching in the primary schools. We have seen the need to engage the services of more guidance counsellors in our schools system, but right now, we are correcting the imbalances in the school system without perturbing it generally. If you add more weight to the existing load of the state, there may be problem. So, currently the principals and the vice-principals are doubling as the counsellors in most of the schools now.

What would you say is your greatest achievement as the Commissioner for Education in the state and what would you like to be remembered for?

I think its full implementation of government policies. I will like to be remembered as a great implementer as far as education is concerned.

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