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By Christopher Oji
Commissioner for Information, Science and Technology, Wemmy Jones, Kogi State, said Governor Yahaya Bello has been deliberate and consistent in the quest to place education on a solid foundation and taking it to enviable heights.
At the recent fourth Yahaya Bello Seminar for Political and Crime Correspondents, he described education as the best legacy responsible parents and governments could bestow on children. He said the reason the Bello administration overhauled the educational system to ensure higher standards, to the extent that “other states are now copying the Kogi State education template:
“Great men like Martin Luther King Jr., President Nelson Mandela, President Muhammadu Buhari and Governor Bello have variously described education as a case that drives towards development, illumination and liberation of the people.
“For that reason, when the governor came on board in 2016, there was the need to do an audit of the course of education. The result of that exercise, called the Education Road Map, was the State Education Summit. Two major findings came from it.
“One was that education in Kogi before the advent of Bello, basically had no plan. Things were just happening at the instance of people, referred to as the rule of form. They could just say, let’s do this today it’s done. Let’s do that tomorrow, it’s done. There was no question people did whatever they wanted to do.
“The second problem was insufficient funding. There was not enough budgetary allocation to take care of education. Government came up with an education sector plan, right up to 2030.
“Everything you see us do educationally, just as in other sectors, is not based on whether the governor wakes up on the right side or wrong side of bed and makes a decision. It is a carefully designed and crafted plan of where we want to be and to back up our plan, we need to know how much money would be required.
“After several back and forth, also bearing in mind that the state had operated a single-digit budgetary allocation to education, the governor allocated 30 per cent to education from the annual budget. That is what we have run our education with.
“It was discovered that there was no law to regulate the system. Anyone could just start a private school in one awkward corner; examination malpractice was the order of the day. Cultism, even in primary schools, was well pronounced.
“There was a law crafted to regulate education in the state. If I am not mistaken, Kogi remains the only state, especially in Northern Nigeria, that has a fully enlightened education law. This happened under Bello. Many states in the North, apart from Kogi, still operate and run their education with the 1964 Northern Nigeria Education Law.
“There was no data about the schools in the state. Therefore, a lot of money has been devoted for the conduct of annual school census, which is the requirement for consideration by any international donor in the area of education, such as UNICEF, UNDP and World Bank.
“We are in the process of automating our annual school census such that, from wherever I am, from wherever the governor is, he can pick up his phone and tell you the number of students in a particular local government secondary school in the farthest part of the state. That will help us in the new policy that the government is coming up with.
“We have gotten over 1,500 teachers. The beauty of it is that the process of bringing in the teachers is the way it is done in the private sector. Everyone who wanted to teach was asked to apply online. If you were shortlisted, you did computer-based examination and people who met the offer were invited for an oral interview, so that what happened in some states where a teacher could not read the statutory declaration of age that she submitted and the governor of that state sat with that person would not happen in our case.
“We ensured teachers had to come through the full process. The governor said he was not going to get involved in the process. He said he was not going to present any person for recruitment. Therefore, every other political office holder had no say in it.
“That has affected positively the results that we have come out with in WASSCE and NECO. Before the advent of this government, the state’s rating in WASSCE was 28 out of 36 states in Nigeria. We moved to number 14 due to the effort of this government.
“This government inherited one state university, the Prince Abubakar Audu University, Anyingba. We knew from our plan that there was a need for another state university not just because we wanted to start a university but because of the surfeit of our would-be applicants into the university.
“Kogi is regarded as ‘educationally advantaged,’ even though I don’t know what that really means. When a child of Kogi wants to go into the university and he scores so high. But because he is from Kogi, they would rather give that admission slot to somebody from another state who scored even less than half of what the Kogi person scored.
“Our children were suffering, they weren’t getting admission. Even if they got admission, they got courses that they never wanted to read. But because they wanted to be in the university, they didn’t have a choice.
“The governor said we were going to start another university, a specialised University of Science and Technology, for two things: To fill that void of our students not getting admission. Also, we are in a state that is very rich in natural resources, we needed to get our children and our population prepared to take the challenges ahead.
“I have heard various numbers. Some say out of the 32 mineral deposits, Kogi has 30 in commercial quantities, some say 50, 48. Whatever the figure is, it is clear Kogi has huge deposits of minerals under the ground.
“The governor said we needed to prepare our children to tap into the revolution that is happening very soon. He has been visionary. The university started in 2020. Another thing is that it started in the time of COVID-19, when the whole world hid under. COVID-19 was attacking everybody, but we treated it differently in Kogi. Our university has the record for the fastest university to be established.
“In 2023, we started yet another, Kogi
State University, Kabba. We thought we had a record with the University of Science and Technology, but we have a faster record with Kogi State University.
“Some may wonder, why the faervour for universities in Kogi? We have a population and people that are not educated. Some criticised the decision and asked how we are going to fund three state universities. The governor said, whatever you can conceive you can implement. Whatever your mind tells you to do, the only thing that is lacking is you.
“We’ve dreamt the dream and we are going to make it come to pass. We have appointed principal officers like the vice chancellor and they have assumed duties. Contractors are on site, we have gotten NUC approval. By the grace of God, we are going to admit students into the university before the end of October.
***”It is a general university, not specialised. The reason is, the one in Osara does not have the capacity to take some of the programmes our children are denied. The universities are adequately funded to the point that there is no programme in our universities that is not fully accredited by the regulatory agencies supervising those institutions.
“Our two universities that have been in existence are regulated by the National Universities Commission (NUC), all their programmes are fully accredited. Our polytechnic is regulated by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE).
“All the programmes of Kogi State University are fully accredited. We have two colleges of education in Kabba and Ankpa regulated by National Council for Colleges of Education (NCCE). All their programmes are accredited.
“The one in Kabba presented a number of programmes for accreditation. After the accreditation, the NCCE said it had enough capacity to do more than it was doing. NCCE gave enough accreditation in principle to commence two additional programmes. All these things didn’t happen by chance but by careful planning and sufficient funding.
“Anybody is free to come to study in Kogi because. Kogi’s tertiary institutions have not witnessed a single strike since the government came on board. Because of that, in the 2022 admission, despite the nine months’ strike that other universities experienced, there was an explosion of intakes in our university in Ankpa. It was the only university that didn’t close down.
“Against 6,000 spaces, we had 25,000
applications. Even our own children didn’t have admissions into programmes they wanted to study. The university kept jacking up so that they could admit more people as possible. That was one of the reasons we had to start another state university.
“If we have three universities, how do we then populate the universities with Kogi State’s children? They must be qualified and meet JAMB requirements to get admitted. We knew there was the need to do total turnaround in our secondary school system. We had to plan and have adequate funding to be sure that those schools move towards STEM philosophy, that is, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
“That gave birth to the GYB Model Science Secondary School concept. We have the schools springing up in the three senatorial districts. That model is coming up across the state so that our students that we want into the university would be adequately qualified and deserving to be admitted into our own universities as well as other universities across the world.
“Kogi is bordered by nine states plus Abuja, making 10. If we fail to take care of our secondary school system and we build first class universities and we do not make provision for our own children to graduate from secondary school into our universities, the universities would be populated by people from Ekiti, Ondo, Edo, Delta, Enugu, Anambra, Niger, Kwara Nasarawa and Benue states. It would be a disservice for this government, if we do not prepare our students in the secondary school system.
“We are a government constantly thinking. We are checking our philosophy of granting access to education to our people by declaring that from this new session, education from primary 1 to 6, JSS 1 to 3, SS 1 to 3, will be absolutely free and compulsory. The next thing would be how we are going to fund it. The governor said whatever you conceive you have the capacity to implement.
“We are also going to ensure the fees for WASSCE, JAMB, junior WASSCE, common entrance would be taken care of 100% for every child in every public school. This is a foundation that we must do everything possible to promote its sustenance. I am glad that we have everything to propagate it because ducation is not politics. We cannot quantify education. Education is our now, tomorrow and it’s our several years to come.”
