Unity Schools’ Facilities Upgrade To Gulp N98bn

A former National Universities Commission NUC Executive Secretary, Prof. Peter Okebukola, said that the 102 unity colleges in the country would require about N98 billion to elevate the quality of their facilities to world class standard.

Okebukola made the submission in an address entitled: “Re-Booting Secondary Education in Nigeria’’, which he delivered at the Speech and Prize Giving/Graduation ceremony of King’s College, Lagos.

He said that there was an urgent need to rid the system of the viruses in the form of poor quality buildings and teachers, as well as poor curriculum delivery.

“It is a delight that President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration is undertaking an assessment of the state of plants and machinery in all unity colleges along with assessment of their management.

“This is with a view to determining their needs. This would be followed by improvement of physical facilities in all the schools.

“I urge that we should proceed rapidly from the needs assessment to taking urgent steps towards remediation,” he said.

Citing King’s College, Lagos as an example, he said there was an urgent need for intervention to modernise many of the buildings, including classrooms, laboratories, hostels and other buildings erected over a century ago.

“With the privilege granted me by the principal of this college to be part of putting more details on its 2012-2015 King’s College Strategic Plans, I estimate this modernisation of facilities to cost about N920 million.

“I also conjecture that at the end of the assessment of all the other unity colleges by the panels commissioned to do so by the Federal Ministry of Education, our two hardworking honourable ministers would be confronted with a bill of not less than N98 billion.

“My faint suspicion is that the ministers, Chief Nyesom Wike and Prof. Ruquayyatu Rufa’i, may be intimidated by this supposedly high figure. “But I propose that they adopt the technique of the monkey that picks one banana at a time to avoid being caught by the farmer,” he said.

He also identified poor quality teachers, as well as education in federal schools as another virus that was threatening the standard of education in schools.

He said that the teachers should be subjected to comprehensive standardised tests and that the test should be based on knowledge of subject matter and ability to innovate and be creative in class among other criteria.

“All those, who fail such test should be weeded out of the classrooms and be weeded into other departments in the Federal Ministry of Education,” he said.

Earlier, the Principal of King’s College, Mr Oladele Olapeju, called on the Federal Ministry of Education to look into the timing of Post-Unified Tertiary Matriculations Examination (UTME) and other examinations.

Olapeju said that the timing of such examinations usually coincided with the time  final year students were saddled with the burden of several examinations that usually distracted them.