In the last two weeks, His Excellency, the Bauchi State Governor, Senator Bala Abdulkadir Mohammed, has been approving for me a number of memos that will have a tremendous impact on education delivery in Bauchi State – on WAEC, food monitors, fingerprint terminal, sundry schools’ expenditure, N700 school charge, etc. I received every approval with so much delight just as they returned from the Governor who praised them variously in his executive red ink as “excellent, ingenious and revolutionary”.
As far as my blueprint is concerned, for this academic session, I need only two more approvals and I am done – The Merit Schools and 3Rs memos that are the most important policy strategies of my tenure as Commissioner of Education. Pardon me; I will be sharing these approvals with you in this space, one at a time. Let us start today with the one on school charges.
N700 School Charge
Today, I will discuss the uniform N700 school charge in the State. Before now, the Ministry of Education (MoE) has for years approved only N750 as total charges that a parent would pay for his child who attends any secondary school in the state. However, over the time, this rate was abandoned by almost all principals because government itself, according to the principals, failed to meet some basic needs of schools. Reasonable as it sounds, the argument carried a fundamental flaw. The principals would have required the Ministry to either review the charge or request the government to carry out its responsibility. Neither was sought.
Instead, principals resorted to unilateral, arbitrary, lucrative, detrimental and under-the-table charges. As they stand before now, the charges had a negative effect on children’s access to education especially among the majority poor. With fees of N3,000 or more every term, in addition to many other requirements which the child must meet at the school gate before he is allowed in, many principals have turned Upper Basic and Senior Secondary Schools in Bauchi State into private schools. This is not to mention hiked NECO and WAEC charges.
Parents from the state can testify to this. I have visited and heard of many schools that do not issue receipts for these payments nor deposit the cash in their official accounts. If a day school has 1,500 children, as many do, then N4.5m is made by the head teacher, each term. Some principals rake more than that. Some boarding schools are just something else. That does not exempt students from tendering chalk, antiseptics and other things that the school charges would have ordinarily paid for, especially if the students are found violating one school rule or another. And the rules are many.
How can the majority of parents, who are poor, cope up with this demand, especially given the multiplicity of their children as a result of their willing nocturnal compliance with the procreative directive of nature? The inevitable choice, especially in rural areas, is to keep the child away from the school. It is not surprising, therefore, that for this and other reasons, Bauchi State is adjudged the winner of the highest number of out-of-school children medal in Nigeria.
Solution
The solution lies in removing any obstacle that blocks the child from access to education. Government has built schools and employed teachers whom it pays monthly to teach. Nothing should prevent that child from going into that school, meet with his teacher and learn. Anything that prevents this is detrimental to society because it undermines the fundamental objective of public policy and interest. It breeds criminals like the kidnappers that we have today. With the exception of a few, every kidnapper interviewed so far says he did not go to any school in spite of the nomadic and conventional schools built by government. Bauchi State alone has over 450 nomadic primary schools.
The Ministry decided that while it will not prevent parents from contributing to the education of their wards, both government and principals must meet somewhere in the middle. Government must wake up while principals must come down or close shop altogether. Their intersection at a point affordable to parents is the solution.
The coordinates of that intersection, the Ministry calculated, is N700 per child per year, paid by parents at once or in instalments, direct into a TSA account, which will be released to each school according to its needs with the approval of the Ministry. The essence of TSA is not to prevent but to regulate expenditure and monitor revenue.
The Ministry thus sought and got the approval of the Governor on this. Precisely, he approved that
i. Primary Education is free of all charges.
ii. A uniform single annual charge of seven hundred naira (N700.00) only is the approved total of charges to be collected by all schools at both junior secondary schools (including Upper Basic) and Senior Secondary Schools.
iii. All payments will be made by parents directly into Treasury Single Account (TSA). Payment could be staggered by parents during the school session.
iv. Orphans and vulnerable children are exempted from the charges.
v. In order to curtail the phenomenon of out of school children, schools are banned from preventing their students access to lessons as a result of inability of the child to pay the charges.
vi. Any violation of this directive will attract appropriate sanctions by the Ministry.
Implementation
Officials of agencies under the Ministry like SUBEB, BASANE, BASEME were briefed on the development where details of implementation were discussed before the circular was issued to them.
The Ministry has, in a separate memo, sought and got from the Governor permission to use for meeting sundry requirements of schools the savings it is now making by plugging the ongoing leakages on its monthly mandatory expenditure – like over-invoicing and padded student population figures in direct feeding. Along this line, it has already requested its principals to submit lists of their casual workers – cooks, watchmen, part time teachers – for monthly settlement of those charges. It has also decided to add some token on cost of perishables as contribution to purchase of sundry items like chalk, duster and minor repairs. Proceeds from the N700 charge will take care of the rest.
Given that the TSA may take some time to regularise in the state, this week an approval will be given to schools to issue tellers to parents for paying the charge into their respective school accounts. No cash collections from or on behalf of parents by schools or teachers. The schools can then request for approval from the Ministry to use amounts from that money for purposes of school maintenance that they find necessary. Not a kobo will be used by the Ministry or government.
The Winner
The MoE is ready to sanction any principal who will again attempt to block the access of children to education. It knows that though the majority of principals are complying, as with any regulation in this country there will always be many who will not ready to close shop. Well, if the latter cannot suppress the desire to extort parents and children, the Ministry too will not resist the will to sanction the insubordinate officials it appointed.
When the dust of the “school fees” battle settles, the winner will neither be the Ministry nor the principals. It is someone outside the arena, small, perhaps unnoticed: The child. His road to classroom is now made unfettered. On no condition should he be stopped by any principal or headmaster. Parents, not children, carry the burden of paying the N700 charge. So schools must devise means of extracting the sweet juice of money from the rock-hard pockets of parents even if it means employing the intervention of PTA, district head, Imam and police (yes, police! You rightly heard me) but never by the lazy, disingenuous and detrimental norm of sending children away from school.
To those young and innocent souls– the winners – we say, “Oh Children of Bauchi! Go ye forth and learn, for ye are now free.”
Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde
Commissioner,
Ministry of Education
Bauchi
Wikki Memes 