Date: 2014-06-20

A Former Minister of Sports and Chairman National Sports Commission, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, has called for a complete paradigm shift in the country’s tertiary education to enable the institutions to run on a business model.

Mallam Abdullahi, also suggested eradication of free education to ensure qualitative and standard education, stressing the need for government to take decisive step towards ensuring that resources are channeled and located to where results are mostly needed.

The Former Minister stated this on Thursday at a programme organised by Iqra Books Nigeria and Plat Technologies Limited to mark the International Day of the African Child, held at the Mandate Studio Hall of Radio Kwara.

Mallam Abdullahi, who is also a former Commissioner for Education in Kwara State, stressed that if government has the decision to develop public schools, it must adopt the accountability system of private schools, pointing out that quality education must start from basic school level, while the quality of teachers remained an important factor.

” Funding is perhaps the most important issue in any conversation about education in Nigeria.

"While those of us in government argue that government alone cannot effectively fund education, most stakeholders would insist that government is not doing enough to fund education, and they would quickly point out that the UNESCO standards for funding is 26% of national budget”

“We may not be spending enough on education, the greater challenge is how to ensure that we get value for what we are spending”, he said.

According to him, about four hundred billion naira has gone to States of the Federation as UBEC intervention fund alone between 2000 and 2006, saying that with this huge amount of money expended on education, evidence abounds that majority of the children who started and completed primary education in the same period cannot read and write.

Mallam Abdullahi who delivered his lecture on “Imperatives of Qualitative and Compulsory Education for Africa Children”, urged government to allow public schools to operate on financing model, setting standard for the schools and provide subvention based on the budget pursuant of each school.

He asked government to fund purposive higher education, by ensuring that every amount of money both government and parents spend on the children are framed as investment from which they can expect a reasonably returns directly or indirectly in future.

“I think Universities and polytechnics should be removed from the ministry of education. The National Universities Commission and the National Board for Technical Education should be agencies of a new Ministry of Industries and human resource development. We need a major step change that will connect our universities directly with the industries and our human resource needs”, Abdullahi said.

Mallam Abdullahi emphasised that attention must be turned to the teacher training institutions if the country must expect that the future teachers do not also constitute a burden on to the system.

The former Minister pointed out that government has been focusing on counting how many teachers have the requisite qualifications, not minding the wide gap between the paper qualifications held by teachers and their actual abilities.

Speaking at the programme, the Kwara State Commissioner for Information and Communications, Prince Tunji Morounfoye, said the state government plans to give all National Certificate in Education holders an automatic employment into the teaching service commission inorder to revamp the dwindling fortune of the education.

The Chairperson of the occassion and a lecturer in the department of Mass Communication, University of Ilorin, Doctor Saudat Abdulbaqi, urged both the federal and state government to invest more on the education of the children, imploring children to also inculcate the reading culture.

In his address of welcome, the Chairman of Plat Technologies Limited, Mallam Taofik AbdulKareem, said the aim of the programme is to inculcate the leadership skills on the children and to encourage and re-enact the culture of reading amongst the younger generation.