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What with the cancers of teacher absenteeism, lack of teacher commitment, corruption and the misdirection of resources gnawing away at the public school system, one could very well do without such nonsensical and utterly pointless education, even if served on a platter of platinum. And yet bodies like Oxfam and the UNDP, working in concert with UNESCO, persist in financing these black holes with elaborate funding programmes, then sit back and fret over the vacuous expression of their brainchild.
The success story of private education bears from the existence of economic security in the system, thus making it simultaneously entrepreneurial and accountable. By demanding fees, the private school administrators ensure they have a ready source to meet the costs of operational expenditure, especially the emoluments of their employees, the teachers, who in turn feel vocationally secure and willing to conscientiously dispense their tutoring duties. On the part of the parents, they can justifiably demand qualitative education for their wards and petition the administrators for improvement in service if dissatisfied. This is clearly lacking in the government school system, where piece-meal salaries are withheld for months, sometimes years on end, and disgruntled teachers either neglect their responsibilities or ‘abandon ship’ for better prospects, most times private schools, where they are being paid better and on the regular.
As a domino effect, the students are left to their own devices, and parents cannot clamour for a resolution because they reason rightly that government would not feel obligated to ‘non-paying customers’, as it were. Ultimately, by supporting free primary education, UNESCO and its partners are advocating an education system which is not self-sustaining but self-depreciating and will eventually crumble under its own congenitally-enfeebled structures, churning out literacy-starved urchins with certificates hardly worth the paper they are printed on.
Apologists of the UN and its string of global betterment initiatives that ran awry have over the years been especially proficient at laying the onus of guilt on guest countries where these programmes were implemented - with good reason. Greed is an exaggerated sense of need, and nowhere else does it find better expression than the impoverished sovereignties of the Third World, where their leaders, suddenly thrust into a vantage position to allocate wealth, pursue increasingly inventive stratagems of graft and aggrandisement. Case-study scenarios are boundless, with the most infamous of late being the arrest of an African state governor at the British Isles, who performed a ‘Houdini’ act and conveniently escaped Her Majesty’s ‘hospitality’. Indeed, the Organisation finds the quandary of governance inadequacies grave enough to list it among the four foremost reasons for shortfalls in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, enumerating tell-tale signs to include public maladministration, debasement of the rule of law, disregard of political and social rights, an arrant shortage in sound economic policy and dereliction of civil society engagement[4]. These symptoms plague the majority of third-world states and present a near-implacable barrier to achieving the EFA’s laudable, if ambitious, objectives. That the UN, fully aware of their compromised condition, still channels the bulk of EFA outreaches through leaky state conduits is bewildering.
The tragedy of it all is the game-plan is entirely different on paper. According to the EFA brochure released by UNESCO, key drivers of the EFA Initiative are the host governments, civil society organisations and development partners, each delegated with clearly delineated roles to interactively propel the universal primary education programme to fruition. In turn, the participatory functions of the UN are the facilitation of partnership developments and coordination of partner actions. How it plays out in reality is almost laughable.
It appears the networking summits hosted by the UN are little more than glorified tea parties, mere fora of dialogue than events of real coordination. Directly afterwards contingents jet back to their constituencies, where they shelf the summit paraphernalia and apparently carry on with their respective agendas totally out of synch with each other. As a result, the funding agencies are stretched by distracted proposals to fund several unrelated pilot schemes, technical support from concerned agencies are dislocated from scaled-up EFA investment plans, and country-level deadlines of implementation are missed.
Inconsistencies like these make it possible for a country like Nigeria to contemplate investing heavily on such ill-advised projects like provisioning primary schools with hundred-dollar laptops[5], when its school libraries suffer a perennial paucity in comparatively more valuable, and considerably less expensive, books. What is more, the UN supports this misguided trajectory of activities.
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Writer Profile
Manny Maurice
Manny Maurice is a youth activist and Vice President of the Future Leaders Network, Nigeria. Also a petroleum engineering graduate, he enjoys penning down commentaries on burning socio-political questions, and runs a blog of his opinions at http://thepayzone.blogspot.com.
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Comments
Sandy Mae Gaspay | Apr 18th, 2007
This article is an eye opener for everyone. This just goes to show that achieving the millenium development goals requires a consolidated effort between the helpers and the "helped".
Zorica Vukovic | May 30th, 2007
Very resourseful and moving article!
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