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From Lateef Dada, Osogbo
The Academic Staff Union of Secondary Schools (ASUSS), has warned that the plan to merge the National Senior Secondary Education Commission (NSSEC) with the Federal Ministry of Education will limit the ability and capability to deliver the mandates effectively.
In a statement jointly signed by the ASUSS president, Comrade Samuel Omaji, and the Secretary-General, Sola Adigun, and made available to our correspondent in Osogbo, Osun state, the union posited that the plan to merge the commission with the Ministry of Education showed that the leaders have little regard for education.
“The recent proposal to merge NSSEC with an agency within the Federal Ministry of Education as suggested by Oransaye’s Report, is not just surprising, but a pointer to the low place education occupies in the heart of our leaders.
“Suffice it to say that Oransaye’s Committee was constituted in 2011 and submitted their report to President Goodluck Jonathan’s government, while the National Senior Secondary Education Commission was established by the government of President Muhammed Buhari in 2019, how did a Commission that was established in 2019, got into the Oransaye’s Report, but this is a question demanding a realistic answer.
“The fact that our Senior Secondary Education suffers poor funding, neglect, inadequate planning, decayed and dilapidated infrastructure, insufficient, and poor remuneration teachers is no news anywhere in Nigeria.
“National Senior Secondary Education Commission (NSSEC) came to address these inadequacies to enhance qualitative and functional education, returning it to the Ministry of Education is as good as returning it to a bureaucratic bottleneck that will slow down the process.
“Quality and functionality are crying for attention in our education system. The National Senior Secondary Education Commission has taken this as a direct responsibility by enforcing quality standards in the teaching and learning process, appropriate curriculum development, training, and retraining of teaching staff to keep them abreast with modern teaching techniques, especially in the new world of ICT.
“Scrapping NSSEC will retard developed results yielding collaboration set between stakeholders in education to enhance quality just like NBTE is doing and developing technical skills in Nigeria (e.g. IDEAS) Innovation Development Empowerment and the Acquisition of skills, through this project, technical teachers in technical colleges are being trained, infrastructures and facilities are being provided,” ASUSS posited.
