By Steve Osuji
The school died. It was the school of my childhood. My nativity and the place of my renaissance. It was here I lost my mental virginity; where I had my first gruelling encounter with the concept of one plus one being two. But I could never conceptualise it until two unripe oranges were brought to my rescue as they were placed side by side. Yet the arcane universe of strange numerals has not stopped to stump me to this day.
Much unlike the alphabets conjugated into fine words – two-letter primas at first, then uncountable bejeweled entities of words, the numerals on the other hand, progressed into the surreal realms of trigonometry and stalwart quadratic equations.
Ibeme Community School (ICS) was my next community after home. My very first encounter with school, teachers, a collective of fellow tots, black board, desks, playing field and sweet-tooth snacks. School was a stretch from home, but the walk in rain or shine was part of the gradual loss of innocence and early test of boyhood! You either loved the experience or hated it. You were either dragged to school or you gamboled joyfully to your newfound haven.
Ibeme Community School was my prima and new Jerusalem where I cracked the hymen of pedagogy and buried my umbilicus of the mind.
Ibeme Community School was a child of pre-independence communal effort led by the early bourgeoisie of the town. It was thereabouts 1940s when the elites of that age based in Port Harcourt and led by Chief Stephen Ihekire mobilised communal energy to establish ICS. It was the biggest and best school in Ugiri-Mbano axis at the time. Moreso, it was the only school that ran classes up to Standard Six in those days.
Anyone who had primary education during the 40s and 50s in the Ugiri-Mbano axis must have schooled in ICS. It was so well managed in those days by a community management board that it almost was converted to a high school – Enitona High School – in honour of one of the school’s benefactors in Port-Harcourt.
It was this school that laid the foundation of my life in the mid 60s. As the Nigerian civil war raged, one was catching a whiff of crude early learning nurturing. The state government was to take over ICS sometime in the 70s and so began its troubles. The Local Councils were to supervise primary schools initially but as governance space shrunk, nobody really is in charge today. LGAs barely managed to pay salaries. While State governments have practically stopped paying attention to schools’ structures.
So it is that schools facilities and infrastructure at all levels across the country have been left to rot since the 80s. Successive governments merely take ad hoc measures at managing schools. Most schools structures in Nigeria have remained at various levels of delapidation. Repairs of schools and building of new blocks are now jobs for settling political lackeys and party members. They are often executed in most shoddy manners or not at all.
There had been all sorts of skirmishes on the copious compounds of ICS in the last decade. One vain governor installed a wonky story building about five years ago and it has never been put to use for fear that it might collapse. At the front left corner of the school, the sitting governor ordered another block but it has been abandoned at the foundation level in the last two years.
But among the foundation blocks of the 1940s collapsed last March under the gale of the first rain of this year. Of course nobody cares. There’s no chance that it would get any attention ever. Most primary schools in Nigeria are suffering the same fate. The Executive Secretary of the Universal Basuc Education Commission, UBEC, Prof. Hamid Boboyi recently lamented that about 50 per cent of pupils in Nigeria sit on the floor to take lessons. UBEC, a huge fund set up as a solution to primary education has become a honey pot for politicians.
An Osun State House of Assembly member, Mr. Femi Oluwasanmi, recently lamented that most of the schools in rural Nigeria are collapsing and suffering brain drain. The famous Government College Ibadan was recently handed over to a trustee of the old students to run. This is a 93-year-old, once very prestigious school. In other climes, such school would be a flagship school, a veritable institution that preserves the legacies of a society.
My collapsed and dead community school is a metaphor for the state of education in Nigeria. In a world in which education has become the numero uno and main anchor for development, governments in Nigeria are lackadaisical and unconcerned about it.
Going forward, we urge our governors especially to snap out of their slumber and quickly rethink the education system in their various states.
There’s a an urgent need for serious reforms in our educational system. States must restructure, rethink and revamp the system so that educational facilities, personnel, curricula and learning experience are brought up to speed the way they are in most other countries today.
In order words, public schools must become better than private establishments in all ramifications. When parents do not have to take their wards to private schools or abroad is when we shall have reformed our education system. That’s the ideal to aim for.
Meanwhile, would anyone be kind to repair IBEME COMMUNITY SCHOOL or should we convert it to a museum?
▪︎Osuji is a newspaper columnist and public affairs analyst.