The sharp deline in standard and quality of education has continued to be a topic for national discuss since a couple of year, with academicians, educationists and off course all stake holders proffering several different solution to this issue which has caused and caring a great deal of embarrassment and sleepless nights to administrators of education, both at the states and national level even with little or nothing being done to take a look at the foundation. The comatose in the education sector, especially in public school, due to lack of adequate funding and the removal of welfare of teachers from the priority lists of government of various levels, resulted in the preference for privately owned schools across the nation. Parents and guardians were left with no choice than to withdraw there children and wards from the ailing public primary schools into private Nursery/Primary schools.

Not even the exorbitant fees charged by the private schools have been able to deter parents and guardians enlisting their children and wards, as they were prepared to bear the huge costs just is ensure a sound and quality education for their young ones. Some “very-rich” in the society even go as far as sending their kids into schools outside the country because they had already lost confidence in the Nigeria educational system. The rush and crave by parents to get their kids enrolled into privately owned schools eventually led to a complete over stretching of the few available private schools at the time. The establishment of more private schools became inevitable and necessary, this led to more business owners and individuals setting up schools and colleges, whether they knew and have what it really take to establish such schools or not.

A carefully conducted research and enquires within Ilorin, Kwara State has revealed the pathetic and unfortunate conditions that pupils are exposed to daily, all because some persons who should have no business establishing private schools where being given licenses to own and operate Nursery/Primary schools, probably because some people at the state ministry of education has refused to do their job or have been adequately bribed to acquire such licenses. This became evident because there are laid down rules, criterion and conditions that prospective school owners are supposed to meet before they can be given licenses to operate. These includes; availability of play grand for the pupils safety of the proposed school building and its environ, adequate space and classrooms in order to present overcrowding of pupils, provision of first aid health facilities, capacity to employ rightly qualified teachers, availability of adequate teaching aids e.t.c.

From my finding, more than 70 percent of Nursery/Primary schools are housed by rented uncompleted buildings which surroundings cannot be described as healthy enough for the young ones. Apart from the fact that some of these schools are located very closed to refuse-dump site public toilets and market places majority of them donot have a play ground. hence, pupils are left to roam the streets and play around during break times, without supervision, to the detriment of their health and safety. Out of the 21Nursery/Primary schools visited within the Ilorin metropolis, only two of them has a fruit aid kit, which is needed to tend to the pupils, in case of injury and minor health challenges. Transportation arrangement of many of the so-called "international" schools is a display insanity and human right abuse, as kids are being crated like stocked fishes in buses that aren't even fit to transport firewood from place to place.

The quality and qualification of teachers in many of the private schools calls for worry and great concern, as majority of the teachers being employed by school owners are school cert holders. Even though the minimum qualification of teachers at primary school level is holder of National Certificate of Education (NCE), school owners usually cut corners, by employing NCE holders as Head teachers and assistant Head teachers, the rest of the teaching staff are usually holders of SSCE/WASSCE, whom they can easily pay a token of between N5000 and N7000 in their despirate bid to maximize profit. Some of these teachers can’t even express themselves in simple English language so. A particular Nursery/Primary is located next to a bear parlour, I saw a school operating from a single lock-up shop, while another has only classrooms with no proper window cover. Head teachers of majority of the to called “international” Nursery/Primary schools visited do not even know what teaching-aids is all about, the funny part is that all of these schools are actually government approved and licensed by the relevant department of the state ministry of health.

If the basis and the supposed foundation of education can be so bastardised and handled with utmost levity at the states levels, then the whole efforts at restoring the lost glory of education in Nigeria would be an exercise in futility and “deed-on-arrival”. The universal basic education program at the states have been reduced to conduit-pipes through which the resources of government is being looted and siphoned by political administrative officials. We keep lamenting about the low and abysmal performance of our students in NECO and WAEC examinations, yet the foundation has been totally neglected and allowed to rot due to corruption, indiscipline and administration recklessness.

As is the case presently, majority of private Nursery/Primary schools aren’t any better than the public ones, this is because some persons sits in their offices at the state ministry of education and approve licenses to individuals to operate schools without making sure that some standard conditions are adequately adhered to. There you need for the officials of the state ministries of education to put measures in place to continually send out inspection teams to access and evaluate the conditions and viability of private Nursery/Primary schools with the aim of ensuring that rules and regulation, best practices and quality is maintained, if Nigeria’s crave to restore the glory days of education is to come to fruition.

Hussain Obaro writes from Ilorin