The Education Minister, Prof. Ruqqayattu Ahmed Rufai, is a teacher of teachers with a passion to change the nation's educational landscape. She wants a situation whereby all children are given formal education. She discloses, in this interview, that to implement the President's transformation agenda, she and her colleagues in the cabinet have to struggle against the frustrating attitude of bureaucrats. Excerpts:
By Emma Ujah, Abuja Bureau Chief
What constituted your challenges and your agenda when you were appointed to the ministry?
As Minister of Education, I realised that I would have to go through a roadmap to see how we can chart a new course for the Federal Ministry of Education. We found out that there have been challenges facing the sector for many years. So, looking at the roadmap, even though I was a former commissioner for education, I realised that the four critical areas that were the yardstick for developing the sector were not adequate. We looked at that as a team and added two more critical ones. The four critical areas we met were: access and equity; standard and quality assurance; technical education and training; and of course, funding, resource utilisation, and mobilisation. Of course, these key areas are critical and they will continue to be critical, but we realised that there were two other critical areas if the sector is to move forward in the next few years.
These two critical areas are teacher education and development. We realised the fact that if you don't look at the teacher or a lecturer in any institution of learning, then forget about whatever development you can bring in that sector. So, we added it as number five. And the kind of ministry I met, serving as a commissioner for education, and relating with the then minister of education at the federal level, I knew what I was going to face by becoming a minister, but what I saw was even beyond my own imagination in terms of strengthening the entire ministry.
I realised that the ministry is so complex with so many parastatals, about 22, and the number of institutions: universities, polytechnics, colleges of education, unity colleges, and, looking at the policy decisions and implementation for the entire nation when it comes to primary and secondary education, I noticed that we needed to add the issue of strengthening the entire system of education, because if we do not work as a team and coordinate between ourselves, then we can do nothing.
You may have a ministry where something is going on that is critical to you and you don't even know. So, we added the issue of strengthening the entire system of education by coordination among all the institutions, parastatals, and of course, have a regular meetings, and, discussions.
How did you expect to achieve results?
We developed a-one year mandate last year and the major problem we are facing, again, as a nation is the issue of implementation. We are very good at seminars, workshops, sensitization, training and capacity building, but when it comes to implementation, it is a herculean task. So, our plan has to go with the implementation plan side by side.
Really, we have an implementation plan. Not only the plan, we developed six strong teams that are overseeing it. Every month, they will look at the parastatals and institutions, among others, as part of their discussions. For example, if we look at the issue of access and equity, the team made a lot of efforts and, after three months, last year, there was a regular meeting for the entire teams because there was also the overall team that was coordinating that system. At the end, we realised what we needed to do.
We made a presentation of a full report of our mandate to Mr. President, represented by the Vice President. We forwarded all what we did in one year, and the major thing that came out of that one year also was the development of up-to-date statistics to take care of the sector from 2006 to 2010.
What was the situation like before then?
Prior to our assignment, we realized that even the data in the ministry was not there and, if you are in the Education Ministry without knowing the number of students or teachers or even facilities, it's difficult for you to say you are planning in accordance to budgetary provisions. We developed those six key areas and handed over all these documents to Mr. President.
The major report that was developed after the statistical data for the ministry was the issue of presidential summit that we had on education. Because of the decay and collapse that we have had in the sector, Mr. President himself was so concerned that he asked us to organise a two-day summit, which he presided over. Stakeholders told us things that we didn't even know, because it was a fact finding exercise that we wanted to hear directly from those involved at the grassroots.
So many things were uncovered and, as a result of that, Mr. President also formed a Presidential Task Team on Education, chaired by a renowned scholar, Professor Obayan. The team worked on the recommendations of the Presidential Summit on Education, they also sought memoranda from individuals that may not have participated in the summit.
Towards the end of our tenure, a presidential report was handed over to Mr. President, which he passed on to the ministry to work on all the recommendations for a kind of white paper which the president would consider. Thereafter, I quickly organised my team and then we started work, we were working towards getting approval for the presidential task team because some of the issues that were mentioned needed presidential attention.
We had the presidential approval to implement all the recommendations. So, we had about four – five documents to work with and there was no way we could have this mandate without developing another plan. Since the mandate from Mr. President was for four years, we used our roadmap, our one-year strategy, our presidential task team report and then formed a four-year strategy plan, which has just been developed. The plan accommodates all the inputs of the stakeholders and various categories of parties responsible, and it is now with Mr. President and will be published anytime from now.
With such ambitious programme, how easy have you found working civil servants in your ministry, in system that many believe is too slow?
I have to state categorically that when you are working with the civil servants, it is a very herculean task.
As I was working in the state, there were things you would want to do, but here, you have a project, you have a proposal, and you are the head and you are an expert, you want to do this and, because of this bureaucracy, if you are not careful, they will kill many of your initiatives. So anything you see us doing now, not only me, but I believe with my colleagues also, I do it out of real struggle because the system is one that you may not even understand.
And so, if you have a system in the service, it is something that should facilitate your achievement. And if you have a bureaucracy that is not working for you, then it means that you don't need it, but if you have a system that will help you deliver, especially for you now that we have a transformation agenda under this administration, you are okay. What that means is that in the four years of this new mandate, everything has to change, we have to revert to those good old days that always made Nigeria a point of reference.
At the time Nigerians are saying that the quality of education has gone down, our universities are mere secondary schools of the old days, Federal Government and private investors are establishing new universities. Can you say something about the quality of education and the quality of these universities?
When we say we are expanding in terms of development of schools, it is very difficult for people to conceptualise what you are doing when you still have challenges of quality. They will ask: why can't you stop expanding and concentrate on the issue of quality? That is a very good observation, but not in the Nigerian context. What I mean is that, first, we have millions of children that are out of school, so government will have to expand the junior and senior secondary schools so that these children will be enrolled. The Federal Government also realised that it has to work with state governments because primary and secondary schools are the responsibilities of the local and state governments. We have started the process of expansion by establishing universities, polytechnics and colleges of education. We have encouraged private individuals and corporate organizations to also develop such schools and we are really eager to address the issue of these youths that are roaming the streets.
To do this effectively, we have to change our curriculum and include entrepreneurial studies, which we have done, because we are graduating them to be self employed.
As soon as we had the approval of Mr. President and the Federal Executive Council, to establish nine universities, we realized that only 12 states out of the 36 did not have a federal university. Therefore, we proposed that all the states should have federal universities, but because of the pressing issues before government, we started with nine and six happened to come from the North, three from the South because only three states from the South do not have federal universities.
We also encouraged private individuals to establish universities. Within two years of this administration, we have established 18 universities-nine each by the Federal Government and private proprietors. And, of course, we have a number of state universities. And when you come to the issue of quality, you realize that our students do not answer their certificate. And they have so many problems there. Where are we even starting? Is it the students themselves, is it the teachers?
If you look at the quality of their degrees, you begin to wonder. So, is it the issue of teaching we are even battling with? Some of them do not even sit for their exams but they have results. So, sometimes, when we are looking at quality, we don't even know the aspect of quality we are talking about.
But what we are doing at the moment, we look at the current sector. We started to enhance the quality through, firstly, the curriculum, because we realised we have so many problems there. So we have to review the curriculum; also from the primary, secondary, to the and tertiary levels.
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