‘Anambra will Guarantee Quality Assurance in Schools’

Against the backdrop of ensuring that schools are safe and conducive for students, the Anambra State Commissioner for Education, who is the second female professor of Mass Communication in Nigeria, Kate Azuka Omenugha, told Funmi Ogundare the efforts her

Since you came on board last year, how has it been?

We started in April last year but it’s been challenging, promising and fulfilling in a number of ways. What we met was a situation where there had been a lot of interventions in education by the previous administration. The onus lies on us to ensure that we continue to do well and do more things to better education in the state. An area that has been neglected for a long time is the special education and His Excellency said one of his strategic objectives in the state is that he wants to ensure that the learning needs of all is met through equitable distribution of resources. We know that we have to run an all-inclusive education and we had to strategise on how to run it. We started massive interventions in our special schools in our centres, starting with the reconstruction of our dilapidated structures, and inviting them severally to occasions and for those who have hearing impairment and for people who are skilled in sign language to do the sign language for them. We now have people who are better motivated and happier because they are not just relegated to the background, they are made to be a part of the society. We are also doing a lot of awareness about autistic children and we realise that our people hide children who have down syndrome and autistic challenges; they don’t want them to come out. When we started the campaign about autistic children, it was revealing what we found because in areas that we have been to, a lot of people confessed that they have one autistic child. We are designing strategies where we will actually use one of our centres to divide them into departments and bring in these children to give them attention. Before we came in, many of the children who were there kept repeating primary six because they could not go to a secondary school. We have now established a secondary school that is meant for them. That is a very big achievement for us. Another area is

in our technical colleges, we have 11 technical colleges and when we came in, none of them was accredited. We are now working to ensure the accreditation of the courses. We are doing a lot of capacity building for teachers and principals. We have done a lot of local trainings for them; we are taking them to Singapore after the election to experience what it is to run a Technical and Vocation Education (TVE) centre. This administration believes in the welfare of teachers and students. The way you can do these things is by ensuring that teachers have the capacity to drive the process that you intend. We have signed an MoU with Innoson Motors for vehicle maintenance for those who are in auto-mechanics. Out of the 11 technical colleges, we have auto-mechanics programme, so every day if you go to Innoson Motors, we are doing a programme aimed at bridging the gap between the schools and the industry. We are talking about education for life which can make you fit into the industry unlike having education without any practical experience. The MoU we signed is a kind of tripartite agreement with Federal Polytechnic, Oko and what they are doing is to ensure the capacity building of teachers and supervise them at Innoson factory. After the training we are taking the teachers to in Singapore, they will come back more reinvigorated. It is something we are doing to tackle unemployment problem in the state and make sure that the children can make use of their hands again. For the special education centre, what the governor has done is that he has removed tuition fee and the same thing he did for the technical schools.

What challenges did your administration encounter in setting up the special education centres?

It was quite challenging; my interest lies in the minority empowerment and people who are less privileged. The wife of the governor ensured we did the right thing. She sank a borehole at the centres and the governor has directed the works department to do the landscaping so as to turn the place into a first class special education centre. The commissioner for public utility had also been directed to make sure that there is uninterrupted power supply there. We are hoping that before December this year, we are trying to engage experts from the US who will help us raise funds so that we can continue the intervention. Funding is a major problem, there are challenges. The current administration gave 15 per cent of their basic salary to teachers who are working there as an incentive. With that kind of support we have from everybody, the challenge is minimal.

Anambra State last year, emerged the overall best in WAEC/SSCE, what are those steps your administration took to make it stand out from any other state in the country in the examination?

We invested in education and schools have been given computers. Certainly we have made a lot of investment in ICT, we have also done a lot of motivation for the teachers and we are still doing that. The salary of teachers was increased by 15 per cent this January. These are the things that are encouraging the teachers. We are boosting the morale of principals by giving them vehicles. We came first in a junior debate in the country last year, and they just wrote to us that the children will be going to Singapore to represent the country in another debate. It is the consciousness of teachers and giving them a lot of incentives and giving them a sense of belonging and energising them to work hard. When we went to the commissioning of the NUT House, the governor gave them N15 million and a 250 KVA generator that is aside the N450 million used in building the house. We believe so much in the teaching profession.

The state government is taking education to traders in the market, what brought about such initiative?

One of the strategic objectives of this administration is to make our state the lowest in illiteracy rate. You always hear about the high rate of male dropouts, we are giving more attention to the non-formal and formal education. It is true that we are building those schools. Any new market that we are building, we make sure we have a school there. This government is consciously making effort to build schools in the markets. Some of the adults and non-formal sector also have schools as adult centre within the market, but it is not like the conventional school system, it is run as adult and non-formal education centre. For those learning a trade and houseboys, their lessons will run from 1- 4pm. The reason we put it in the market is because of proximity for those who dropped out of school, and there are facilitators or volunteers who have been trained to teach them. We have done a lot of community dialogue and advocacy by going to the community to call people to come and study in those centres. We have 281 centres in the state. Some are in the town halls. The overall aim is to decrease the rate of illiteracy that we have.

How has your administration been empowering the tertiary institutions in the state considering the quality of graduates being churned out?

We are building on the primary and secondary schools at the moment; we believe that is the time there has to be proper training and formation because if you don’t get it right at the primary and secondary schools level, then you can talk of poor graduates. Education is about ideology, we are trying to make them understand what it is to be a true Anambra, and that is why we have started with our ‘shared values’ to our children with the objective of impacting on them so that they can be role models. What we have been able to do is to make them live out that life and ideology. It is what you give to the children that they are going to come out with. We are also internalising our Anambra anthem in them, we want to make the state to shine. What we have done in our tertiary education is that we have set up a visitation panel to Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, the governor believes in transparency and accountability. For more than five years, there had been no visitation panel to the institution. We want to know where they are, what they are doing and how they will progress. As soon as they submit their report, we will make sure we implement the submission of the panel made up of seasoned people from all walks of life. We have also pepped up the teachers’ salary of Nwafor Orizu College of Education and we have also organised its second memorial lecture because we believe in celebrating our people. We tried to instill a level of discipline

in the students who are our future teachers.

What are the steps your administration is taking to sustain all the programmes?

It is very easy; keep doing what you are doing. It’s about doing something and knowing what you intend to do. For instance, one of the things the governor has done is to have zero tolerance for criminality. Education in this country has zero tolerance for malpractice and we are already fighting that with every fibre of our being. Students no longer want to study; they want the easy way out. They go to schools where they can get aids from people who want to destroy the system. Any school that we find aiding malpractice, we close down. We are working closely with WAEC now. I received a letter about a particular school in the state; it has ceased to be a centre for WAEC. We are going to close that school down. Sometimes we go for on the spot check whether they over registered their students. If you register 400 students in your school, and I come and find only 50, if that is the case, I tell you, you are not going to register that large number. The students must be the school’s authentic students. We don’t want proliferation of students in a place and you don’t have the number and where they come from.

These are the efforts we are making and we are very structured. By next year, there will be more sanity. For the private schools, we are starting the re-accreditation of private schools; we found out that some of them are very substandard. We have a lot of schools that have not registered with the ministry, they have not made themselves open for our thorough investigation about them and we have started closing them down. We published their names in the newspapers and sent them letters of warning. Our area inspectorate division and the zonal inspectorate division visited them severally and we found out that they were not forthcoming. Many of them were very bad and we are ashamed that our parents are taking their children to such schools. If you get to some

schools, you find dust everywhere and some in uncompleted and makeshift buildings. We had to close those schools down. We can’t afford to risk the lives of our children. The governor recently gave N500,000 for sick bay for 166 primary schools and 254 secondary schools . We were being thorough in giving the money because we needed the private schools to conform. Some of them are very crafty in what they are doing, if you ask them for any document, they can’t produce it. We are trying to re-accredit them so that they can be in the line. We are producing a book to invite them to know actually what they want. Quality assurance is something that we insist on.

It does not mean that the commissioner must come to your school to assess you but you have to assess yourself and know that you are doing well. Do you have the sports, playing ground and sick bay, etc, to access yourself? Does the land belong to you? We make it imperative that for you to own a

school, the land has to belong to you because we don’t want a situation whereby children will just disappear and you don’t know their whereabouts again. There has to be enough commitment to show that you can take care of the children.