Katsina basic, secondary education in shambles

In Katsina State, north-western Nigeria, government funded primary and secondary schools were established to meet the educational needs of the local population consisting of 2,948,279 males and 2,853,305 females (2006 Population and Housing Census).
Public-funded education was meant to provide a level-playing field for students across the state but it appeared there was little or no oversight of the thousands of schools already established. Decades of deferred maintenance, corruption and insufficient funding have taken a toll on school buildings. As a result, most of the schools lack teaching facilities and the instruction provided almost wholly substandard thereby letting the academics to fall by the wayside to the detriment of the students.
According the Statistical Digest of Teachers in Nigeria, a publication of the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria, there were 13,850 registered primary school teachers in the state out of which 9,881 representing 71.343%, were males. The remaining 3,969 (28.657%) were females. There were 5,097 secondary school teachers of which 3,203 (62.841%) were males while 1,894 (37.159%) were females.
Education authorities have yet to lay emphasis on boosting the students’ academic skills and school buildings especially in the rural communities were left to rot.
Daily Trust reporters carried out an investigation into the poor condition of work in public schools in the state. It was found out that students’ achievements were low due to poor learning circumstances while teacher absenteeism was prevalent in the local communities. Some areas do not have enough schools and pupils had to walk long distances to get to schools without safety concerns. There were schools that have inadequate sanitary facilities while many others experienced shortages of safe drinking water.
To address the myriad of challenges facing schools, about N22.7 billion amounting to 20 per cent of the 2016 budget of state was allocated to the education sector, the highest in recent years.
The 34 local government areas of the state will contribute the sum of N9 billion for the provision of primary schools infrastructure and teaching aids out of the money while the state government is to spend N2 billion on rehabilitation of secondary schools in addition to recruitment of 2,802 teachers.




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