The reappointment by Muhammadu Buhari of Adamu Adamu as minister for education has been greeted with mixed reactions and counter arguments, as some education stakeholders described his performance in the last four years as being pedestrian.
Others opine that he has done his best to maintain the statutes quo considering that he is a non-educationist in a specialised ministry.
They observed that his approach to issues concerning the education sector in his first term leaves much to be desired adding that the minister failed to think deep for solutions to the plethora of challenges bedevilling the sector.
A cross-section of industry professionals in the education space who spoke to BusinessDay express concerns that during his first term as minister, he was slow to recognise the need to strengthen proactive programmes and activities that enhance quality education and offer knowledge, skill and values for Nigerian citizens to enable them to compete with any economy in the world.
Tolu Odugbemi, a former vice-chancellor, university of Lagos told BusinessDay that Adamu Adamu in his first term as the minister of education scored low in his ability to define the problems of the educational sector in relation to the needs of the economy and society and promote innovations and partnerships that will help to fulfill these needs.
Odugbemi affirms that the ideas of achieving free and quality education lies hugely on government’s ability to acknowledge the role of education in the development, this he believes the newly reappointed minister of education can buy in order to jump-start, the revival of the educational sector in the country.
I strongly believe that only what is required from government and the minister of education is to make available resources that can be used for the development of human capital so we can have good governance for our citizens says Babatunde Oguntona, a professor at federal university of Agriculture Abeokuta.
The greatest investment education according to the university don that Adamu Adamu as the minister can give Nigerians with his reappointment as a minister is to encourage human capital development.
Oguntona further called on Adamu to reverse the trend where academics no longer go back to classes or universities, no thanks to poor motivation, a situation that has seen first-class brains being lost to other sectors like banks, Oil and gas, telecom and others.
There appear to be no major achievements in the education sector during Adamu Adamu first tenure and we do not have records of any new initiative in education during the era. Olusola Oyewole, former Vice-Chancellor, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta said.
Oyewole while speaking on the commenting on the reappointment of the minister observed that during his first term, he succeeded in maintaining the functions of the ministry and attending to occasional stupor arising from union’s demands during the period.
According to him, the education sector cannot perform beyond the existing politics of the nation’s maintenance of statutes quo and don’t shake the table”.
On what the major pressing education challenges that Adamu Adamu as minister of education must address, Oyewole task him to tackle quality of Education; Access to education; Unstable academic calendar in tertiary institutions; Emerging confusion with JAMB examination; Quality of Teachers and Teachers; welfare and Development of a Research Granting Mechanisms for Nigeria.
For Peter Okebukola, distinguished professor of Science and Computer Education, Lagos State University, Adamu Adamu achieved a lot in the education sector without making much noise in his first term.
According to Okebukola, “Adamu Adamu was clear-headed about the directions and heights he wanted to take education and he enshrined these in the 2016-2019 Ministerial Strategic Plan”.
“The plan rests on ten pillars and by 2019 by objective assessments aggregated from the Federal Ministry of Education and its parastatals, he has achieved about 70 percent of the goals”.
On what to expect from the minister of education with his reappointment, Okebukola urge him to address the challenges of depressed quality of products at all levels of the educational system, poor teacher quality, funding inadequacies, constricted access to higher education and instability of academic calendar.
Isaac Adeyemi, former vice-chancellor, Bells University of science and technology, Otta, Ogun State told BusinessDay that the education sector still struggle with policy gaps and implementation backlog adding that these issues remain unresolved not because the education minister doesn’t have ideas as to how to approach the outstanding issues, but because there have not been consensus, the realism and even the courage to confront the challenges.
Adeyemi expects Adamu Adamu with his reappointment as the minister of education to address the situation in the education sector with gravity instead of the kid gloves he has used to attend to the mountainous problems in his first term.
KELECHI EWUZIE
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