Banji's Lamentation (2)

*Barack Obama (right), America's president-elect, sitting in front of a thatched house during a visit to Africa. Many rural areas in Africa where the greater number of children live have thatched houses.

Banji’s Lamentation 2
By Azubike Aliche

On Wednesday, November 5, 2008, Banji Adisa, on the pages of Nigeria’s The Guardian newspaper, wrote a second lamentation. This time, the title of the piece was “A Dangerous Signal from Cross River (State).” Cross River State is one of Nigeria’s 36 states. He was lamenting about two specific actions that the Cross River State government purportedly took, which Banji believed were inimical to the development of the education sector in the state and Nigeria. Banji groused over a report that the Cross River State government had barred holders of the National Certificate of Education (NCE) from teaching in secondary (high) schools. He also quarreled about a second report that the same state government had banned colleges in the state from offering admission to holders of high school diplomas issued by the National Examinations Council, NECO.

The National Examinations Council was set up in the last 10 years when I had already left Nigeria to conduct high school leaving examinations. It was supposed to replace the West African Examinations Council, which has been doing the job for four West African countries, including Nigeria. However, the NECO appears to be dogged by credibility problems, to the extent that its certificates still suffer a crisis of confidence. We shall not dwell much on this or on Banji’s opinion of the action of the Cross River State government on NECO certificates. On its part, the National Certificate of Education is awarded after three years of post-primary education study at an accredited tertiary education institution. I obtained the NCE certificate in 1985 from the Federal College of Education (Technical), Akoka, Yaba, with a major in accounting education. So, I consider myself qualified to comment on what can and should be done with the NCE.

It is important to state, at this juncture, that Professor Offiong Offiong, the commissioner for education in Cross River State, did join issues with Banji on his position on the policies of the state government towards NCE and NECO certificate holders. On Wednesday, November 26, The Guardian published a rejoinder from Offiong, entitled “Education in Cross River State.” In that piece, the commissioner wrote, among others, that: “The issue of making NCE a minimum qualification for teaching in the school system in Nigeria is a national education policy. The policy stipulates that the minimum graduation for teaching in the primary school is the National Certificate on Education (NCE). It is, therefore, surprising that there should be much ado about this.”

Indeed, Nigeria’s National Policy on Education, enunciated in 1997, made the NCE the minimum qualification for teaching in Nigeria’s primary schools. On its face value, therefore, the Cross River State government is right to seek to enforce that policy and should be commended, not criticized. The only problem with implementing the policy now is that many schools (including secondary schools), particularly in rural areas, lack qualified teachers. In some cases, even trained teachers are unemployed, as governments plead lack of money to employ more teachers. In such an environment, it makes sense for the Cross River State government to embark on an accelerated training and employment of teachers before it can successfully bar NCE holders from teaching in secondary schools. At the primary school level, insufficient number of qualified teachers is said to be hindering the implementation of the universal basic education program in Nigeria. In 2006, for example, of the 534, 824 teachers in the school system, 255,889 were said to be unqualified. To be considered unqualified, a teacher would not have attained the Grade Two Teacher’s Certificate, which is currently considered the minimum qualification, pending the implementation of the 1997 national policy. I obtained the Grade Two teachers certification in 1980 after attending the Macgregor Teachers College, Afikpo. Apart from inadequate number of teachers, Nigeria’s primary schools need 7,638,291 student’s furniture, 33,727 libraries and 809,444 toilets.

The problem of unqualified teachers in Nigeria’s school system is even more acute in pre-primary education, in which the government does not invest. Many of the people employed in pre-primary schools, by private proprietors, are neither trained to teach nor do they know how to handle or relate to children. The danger is that unqualified teachers may end up making the children under their care lose interest in education, due to poor presentation of learning experiences to the kids. It takes a trained and motivated teacher to create a stimulating environment for learning for children. To make things worse, there’s hardly any teacher training institution at any level that has elaborate program for the training of specialist teachers in early childhood education. This is due, in part, to the fact that there’s hardly demand for such teachers, as neither the federal nor state governments have established any nursery or pre-primary schools where graduates of such programs can be employed. It is important to state that private proprietors who dominate the provision of early childhood education in Nigeria are, usually, not able to pay such specialist teachers and still make sufficient profit. So, work in private pre-primary schools will have no attraction for such specialist teachers, because of low wages and job insecurity prevalent in private nursery schools. And where the private proprietors are able to employ qualified teachers and remunerate them well, the school fees charged is usually beyond the reach of poor children, particularly those in rural areas!

It is interesting to note that, for the year 2004, Nigeria had a projected 25,748,536 children under the age of six, a larger percentage of which needs early childhood education. For these, the importance of the existence of professionally qualified and dedicated teachers cannot be overemphasized. So also is the existence of instructional materials, teaching aides and a conducive learning environment. We, at Power Education Foundation, are committed to working to ensure that Africa’s children have access to these, as well as basic health and nutrition services. Please, visit our website at www.powereducationfoundation.com to see what we are doing and how your small donation can help create educational opportunities for Africa’s children.

Quote of the Week!

“The ultimate aim in the provision of early childhood care and development is to provide care for the child while the parents are at work and to prepare the child for further education. The Nigerian child suffers deprivation from lack of social services in terms of poor nutrition, health care and access to safe water, sanitation and protection. Data show that care and support received by a child in terms of good health, nutrition, and psycho-social care and protection are crucial in the formation and development of intelligence, personality and social behavior.”

- Dr. Robert Limlim, UNICEF official in Nigeria, published in the Guardian newspaper of Friday, October 12, 2007.

Banji's Lamentation (1)

• This cartoon by my friend, Joel Pett, editorial cartoonist at the Lexington Herald-Leader reflect how Africa presents to the rest of the world; so, I decided to publish it. There's no question that Africa is the poorest continent in the world and that it needs all the help that it can get, to "get well." Published with permission. All rights reserved.

Banji’s Lamentation (1)

Banji Adisa was already working at The Guardian in Lagos, Nigeria when I walked in there in July 1989 to start my very first job in journalism, as production sub-editor. He still remains there, after series of career twists and turns for me. So, when on Wednesday, October 29 2008, The Guardian published an article, entitled “Students and WAEC Exams: Hope Deferred,” and credited it to Banji Adisa, I not only cried for the Nigerian child, I also made a mental picture of the man behind that piece. As I write this, I still see Banji in my mind’s eyes. For those who do not know, WAEC is the acronym for the West African Examinations Council, a body that conducts high school diploma examinations for four English-speaking West African countries of Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Banji’s lamentation was warranted by the results of the 2007 examination that WAEC conducted in Nigeria. That result showed that only 25 percent of the over one million candidates who sat for the exams passed five subjects, including English and Mathematics, the minimum entry requirement for admission to a college or university in Nigeria. For the information of my readers, it is interesting to note that since Banji’s article appeared, WAEC has released the result of the 2008 version of its exam, conducted in May-June of this year. Of the 1.2 million candidates in Nigeria who sat the exams, only 188,000 or 13.7 percent scored this minimum requirement to be admitted into college.
Back to Banji’s lamentation! After an exhaustive x-ray of the problem with Nigeria’s education system, Banji came up with the following recommendations, among others:
· Government should jettison its inconsistent policies for the education sector, right from the primary school level where the rot begins.
· Government should, adequately, fund education from the primary school level, including payment of teachers’ salaries, as and when due.
· Government should embark of massive rehabilitation of school infrastructure
· Parents should wake up to their responsibility to their children and redirect them from the path of self-destruction.
It is instructive that Tell magazine, one of Nigeria’s best newsmagazines, had in a lead article on its November 3, 2008 edition, entitled “Monument of Decay,” decried the state of education in Nigeria. The newsmagazine identified the sources of this decay as inadequate funding; poor state or supply of infrastructure, libraries, laboratories, workshops and computers; examination malpractices, and frequent changes in education policies.
The crisis in Nigeria’s public education system is manifesting itself in many ways. One of these is in the number of school-age children who are out of school. In May this year, Dr. Igwe Aja Nwachukwu, the erstwhile Nigeria’s education minister, while at a press conference to inaugurate the 2008 Education for All Week had stated that 11 million Nigerian children of school age were not enrolled in school. Worldwide, the number of out-of-school children is 80 million. At the secondary school level, examination malpractice is the face of the crisis in education in Nigeria, and this takes many forms. In one case, a nursing mother was killed in the northern city of Gombe, as she tried to stop students from cheating in an examination that she was supervising. In another case, this May, some WAEC staff who were in custody of English Language exam paper were attacked, apparently by armed students, and dispossessed of the exam papers. At the university level, teachers who insist on doing the right thing and asking same of their students have had to suffer many indignities in the hands of their students. Some female professors have been raped, some strict professors killed by their own students and the presence of violent gangs or cults in campuses is now the order of the day.
Anyone who remains in doubt about the decadent state of education in Nigeria should see the UNESCO-sponsored EFA Global Monitoring Report 2008 and what it says about Nigeria’s public education system. In 2000, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, organized a “World Education Forum” in Dakar, Senegal. In the forum, representatives of 180 governments from poor and rich nations, including Nigeria, adopted a “Framework of Action” that focused on the achievement of six Education for All (EFA) goals, by 2015. These goals included:
· Expansion of early childhood care and education
· Achievement of universal primary education (UPE).
· Development of learning opportunities for youths and adults.
· Spread of literacy.
· Gender parity and gender equality in education.
· Improvements in education quality.
The EFA Global Monitoring Report 2008 was a mid-term report on how each of the signatory nations has performed in meeting the goals set for 2015. For Nigeria and many other sub-Saharan African countries, the report has sobering news! The Education for All Development Index (EDI) calculated for 129 countries showed that 25 are far from achieving the EFA goals. Incidentally, two-thirds of these, which includes Nigeria, are in Sub-Saharan Africa! In fact, the report shows that Nigeria is among four countries considered to be too slow and moving away from any hope of achieving the EFA goals. The other countries are Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire), Namibia and Rwanda. The report is not all bad news for Africa. It says that Tanzania, Sao Tome and Principe and Seychelles have already met the targets, seven years ahead of 2015. The report further said that Benin Republic, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi and Zambia have a high chance of achieving the goals by 2015, given that they are making steady progress.
Giving insight into why some African countries are having a hard time meeting the EFA goals, the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2008 cited poverty as an obstacle. It said that children from poor families face the prospects of not enrolling in school or not completing them when enrolled. It noted that, in Nigeria, 75 percent of the population live below the poverty line of one US dollar (1 USD) per day. It says that his may be partly responsible for the slow progress with attaining EFA goals.
I strongly believe that fixing the crisis in the educational sector in Nigeria, on a long term, will require serious work in early childhood education and development. Consequently, I’ve partnered with like-minded people to establish the Power Education Foundation, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit, to raise funds to promote school readiness in Nigeria and Africa, through early childhood education. In particularly, the PEF is interested in measures to reach the poorest, most vulnerable and disadvantaged children in the rural areas of Africa to provide them with early childhood learning opportunities. The governments in Nigeria have left this sub-sector to private entrepreneurs who are motivated by profit making. Please, visit our website at www.powereducationfoundation.com, to see how you can contribute to this cause.

Azubike Aliche

Portrait of the African Child

• A school child in my native Abia State of Nigeria standing behind a delapidated classroom building.
  

Portrait of the African Child
I had originally planned to devote the entire article painting a portrait of the African child, the way I know it. However, when I stumbled on the report of an organization called the African Child Policy Forum, released last month, I couldn’t pass it up. I’ll return to that report, later in the commentary, if only to use it as background information for my essay. For now, it is important to state that, in that report which rated 52 African countries in terms of their child-friendliness, my native Nigeria placed 22nd, despite that the country is the sixth largest exporter of crude oil in the world.
The concept of the African child should not be perceived as monolithic, but in terms of typology. This commentary will focus on the typical African child. For the purpose of analysis, the typical African child is often found in the rural areas, while the atypical African child usually resides in the urban areas. In broad terms, the socio-economic circumstance of the atypical African child is often better than that of the typical Africa child. In some cases, the African child in large metropolitan cities such as Lagos and Abuja, in Nigeria, fares as well as other kids in developed economies. Of course, there are kids in the slums within these large cities that live about the same standard of living as those in rural areas.
I grew up, in the 1960s, in a rural area in the present day Abia State of Nigeria and lived in country decades after. My kids are growing up in the United States. The contrasting circumstances are poignant. When I reflect on my days growing up in Nigeria, it’s hard to tell if anything has changed, fundamentally, for the typical Nigerian child, over the years. Poverty, for instance, which is the nemesis of the typical African child, remains a menace. For many a typical African child, the entire household lives on less that one dollar, a day. In almost every case, if a child’s parents are poor, the unaffordable school fees will ensure that the child will not enroll in school, enroll later than her peers, or attend inferior schools that are poorly staffed and funded. Poverty may mean that the child will have to drop out of school, at certain point, irrespective of her intellectual endowment. In my own case, high school was not an option for me in the early 1970s when I completed primary school. I had to work as a house boy in the nearest urban city of Aba from late 1972 to May 1973 before I managed to find my way back into the school system. House boys do all the menial jobs in the house and run the errands, while the children of their well-to-do masters go to school.
The typical African child lives in a house that is not plumbed or electrified. In that case, time that should have been spent studying at home, after school, is spent on the streets in search of water or firewood. In school, the typical African child is often seen studying in unroofed and/or dilapidated buildings, with the consequent exposure to the elements. In many cases, her school lacks the basic facilities, supplies and equipment for effective teaching and learning. In war-torn countries (and there are many in Africa) the typical African child may be seen at the battle field, rather than in school. Cases abound in which the typical African child is forced into marriage, used as cheap or unpaid labor, forced to beg on the streets, and recruited into prostitution in the urban areas. It is not uncommon to see a typical African child subjected to physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Many a typical African female child suffers from gender-based discrimination, particularly when it comes to the decision as to who should go to school. Malnutrition and disease are often the lot of the typical African child, as the rural areas, unlike many of the urban areas, lack basic healthcare facilities and infrastructure.

Glimpses from the African Report on Child Wellbeing 2008
The report from the African Child Policy Forum has some, otherwise, startling findings, such as that: “The ground-breaking report, which scores and ranks 52 African countries using an index of more than 40 indicators, finds that some of the poorest nations are the most child-friendly because they have put in place appropriate laws and policies to protect child rights and effectively target their limited resources to provide basic needs for their children. Some wealthier African nations languish at the bottom of the league for failing to protect their children against exploitation and harmful traditional practices and because their minimum ages – particularly for marriage and criminal responsibility – are too low and in some cases also discriminatory.”

Of the least child-friendly countries, the report said: “The “least child-friendly” governments are Guinea Bissau, Eritrea, Central African Republic, Gambia, Sao Tome and Principe, Liberia, Chad, Swaziland, Comoros and Guinea. Many of these countries have not ratified the relevant child rights treaties; do not have adequate legal provisions to protect children against abuse and harmful traditional practices like early marriage; do not have juvenile justice systems, do not prohibit corporal punishment and do not exert the maximum effort to provide for children’s basic needs.”

Please, note what the focus of the report is:
“The child-friendliness index shows how committed individual governments are to child wellbeing, by assessing their performance in the protection of children through laws and policies; their budget allocation and their achievement of good outcomes for children through health, education, etc.
“For the first time we can assess the behavior and performance of African governments systematically and transparently, using the child-friendly index and, by so doing, hold these governments more accountable for their children’s wellbeing. We will be able to monitor progress and failings more easily using this powerful instrument which is the first of its kind in Africa and, to our knowledge, the first of its kind anywhere. I am confident that our methodology will be adapted and used in other regions of the world,” says Dr Assefa Bequele, Executive Director of ACPF.”

Of all the indices studied, the report on child protection is worth reproducing:
“On child protection, the report finds:
• 10 out of 51 countries had not ratified the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC) as of June 2007
• A third did not have legal provisions for protection against child trafficking
• A quarter had no legislation prohibiting harmful traditional practices such as female genital cutting
• Some10 countries had a minimum age of criminal responsibility of just seven years, and 8 out of 52 countries had between 8 and 10 years (lower than the recommended minimum of 12)
• More than half of the 52 countries reviewed have not yet banned corporal punishment in schools or in the penal system.
• Less than half the governments had policies that provided for free primary education
• Twenty of the 52 countries have not set up specialized juvenile courts, so children’s cases are dealt with in adult courts.”

Welcome to my World!

I was born and raised in Nigeria. I lived there for more than three decades before coming to live in the United States. My heart remains there and I pay close attention to events over there. And, a lot of the goings-on there give me sleepless nights, particularly if it has to do with the conditions of the child in the rural arears where I was born and raised.

The Unicef-published 2007 Global Monitoring Report on Education for All has bad news for Nigeria, and Africa at large. The report said that Nigeria was No. 1 among countries with the highest out-of-school children. The report added that 60 percent of school age children in Nigeria fail to complete primary education. Unicef estimates that, for the year 2000, only 4.6 million, out of Nigeria's 23 million children under the age of six, were enrolled in pre-primary education. That's just 24.7 percent.

I'm determined to work for the millions of Africa's children who need to but lack access to early childhood education. Please, visit my website at www.powereducationfoundation.com to see what I'm doing or planning to do to provide access to much needed early learning opportunities for kids. I do it because I'm motivated and inspired by my own experience when I took my very first job, as classroom teacher, 28 years ago. More importantly, though, I do it in memory of my late father, Jonah Chiehika Aliche, who braced all odds to ensure that his own children and others got, at least, primary education. At old age my dad attended adult school in the evenings and learnt how, at least, to write his name!

Every week, or as often as I can, I'll draw attention to one issue or the other that is working against preparing Nigeria's, nay, Africa's youngest children for school. I'll ask you to join me in my school readiness business. So, welcome to my world!