Hon Emmanuel Bello from Adamawa State presented a bill to the House of Representatives to prohibit the children and wards of public officials from attending schools outside Nigeria. Hon Bello point is simple, If YarAdua’s kid was in the University of Katsina, ASUU would not be on strike.
Can forcing the decision makers to sleep in the bed they make improve the bed? If we banned generators would NEPA work? If we banned jeeps, would we have good roads? If all the big men from Anambra had their kids in Anambra and didn’t have police escorts, would we still hear of kidnapping in Anambra? I suspect that this banning could work ooh.
I know of a school in Jos that was founded in 1980, it was a dream; the school was not only free but paid the students an allowance. The school had modern laboratories, sports facilities and lodgings. The students were pampered with swimming, equestrian, and map reading lessons. The uniforms, books, excursion, medical care and food was free, the students travelled to Lome to study French, and even air transportation to Jos was provided free of charge! Now this is clearly unbelievable but trust me, the school exists, (now it has fallen somewhat, students now pay fees and there is no free air transport) I have a theory that the promoters of this school, who were “big men” seeing their wards were in this very school, showered all the perks imaginable on it, because they had a vested interest in the school.
On the flip side we saw the senators in Abuja cut the education and health budget to build a 10 lane expressway in Abuja. One of the reasons the senators arguing for the “viament” as it is called was that the Senators spend hours in traffic going to their home states, but this makes sense, they don’t use the school or hospitals but they use the road, so it had to be fixed. Heaven forbid a Senator has to spend hours in his A/c convoy negotiating a two lane expressway.(one senator could not take the punishment anymore and simply bought a plane to fly him home).
There is a clear correlation between the increase in Nigerian kids schooling offshore and the standard of government education in Nigeria, as more UK schools come over to Nigeria to do school fairs, the failure rate in the WASC keeps increasing. The current pass rate in WASC is put at 20% i.e. only 2 in 10 students have 5 credits! The Punch newspapers carried a story that N137billion was spent on tuition in two years for about 50,000 Nigerian students in the UK and US alone , the total education budget for the same period was put at N459billion for almost 100m students in Nigeria do the maths. I could stake my lunch money that no Minister has his kids in a Nigerian federal, state or Local govt school, thats astonishing, It’s like saying no Toyota top Exec drives a Toyota.
It does seem that Hon Bello is clearly unto something.
I know for a fact that if the Ministers had to send their sons to queue for 9 hours by 4am to buy 4 litres of fuel, there would be no fuel scarcity; I also know that if generators were banned, we would be talking of 60,000 mw, not 6,000mw. So it does follow if we banned foreign medical trips, the National Hospital in Abuja would rival John Hopkins, if we banned Jeeps, Lagos to Calaber road would look like a German autobahn, and hence if we banned public officials sending their kids offshore, then University of Markudi will rival Harvard. It’s so simple to fix Nigeria abi?
However you do not need to be grounded in politics in Nigeria to know this bill will not even pass first reading in the House Hon Bello belongs to, it will be killed off like the FOI and Electoral reform bills…… that why it’s so hard to fix Nigeria.
Sign!
It’s our problem, we will fix
(Photo credit Zazzle.co.nz)
