Now, of all the drainpipes in the form of offices where no one does anything but collects salaries at the end of the month, of all the federal agencies that duplicate functions, examination bodies most crucial to the younger generation who are the future of the nation are the outfits the committee hates to see.
Alright. One of these days, Nigerians may wake up to learn that a committee recommends the scrapping of the office of the President of the Federal Republic. That’s how far down the valley this latest joke from one of President Goodluck Jonathan’s innumerable committees has gone. Didn’t a committee, not long ago, recommend the scrapping of the office of a minister that had commissioned it? Yet, NECO is one body that had made a fellow examination body, WAEC, sit up and perform. The former was the first to take registration online, for instance. And it was the first to make pupils check their results online too, before WAEC copied. With those examples, the reader does not need to be told the benefits of competition. A reason the Vice-Chancellor of a university spoke in an interview and said he read of the committee’s recommendation in the newspapers, and he was upset. He should be. Every Nigerian should be upset in a system where nothing that works lasts, but what does not work endures.
There are several benefits to having more than one examination body. Yes, WAEC belongs to the West African sub-region, NECO is Nigeria’s. But WAEC in the late 1970’s had made a presentation calling for another examination body, that the load it had at the time was too much for it to shoulder. That was at a time the nation had a population of less than 100 million people. It took years before NECO did come on board. And it had provided internal and external pupils with alternatives, saved them the delay that lack of alternatives orchestrates. Multiple bodies conducting one examination have other benefits: They offer choices, they stimulate innovation in service delivery and product offer, and there is the fact that it can encourage the development of innovative syllabi. By the time NECO came on board, greater efforts were put into sanitising a system that had been a source of embarrassment such as leakages of examination papers and presence of fake candidates in examination halls. Release of results is more punctual, and a degree of integrity in conduct of examination has been noted. Add what NECO does, to the fact that it also conducts common entrance examinations into the Junior Secondary School of federal Unity Schools, and some private secondary schools that can pay as well as the certificate examination into Senior Secondary School, and the confusion the recommendation of Mr. President’s committee will create becomes clearer.
So, what were those men and women in the presidential committee thinking of when they said the only alternative examination body for secondary school level pupils should be scrapped? The committee had a term of reference from Mr. President, so they reflected the mood of the President: Streamline agencies of government and reduce the cost of governance. Note: Reduce the cost of governance. Every member of the committee was sure to remember that when they considered which agency to bury. Cutting cost was their foremost consideration, nothing to do with a strategic approach to understanding what benefits the nation’s education and what does not. It’s a profit and loss mentality, and no nation serious about its future considers its education sector from a profit and loss perspective.
One should assume the committee had worked with some modalities, an objective analysis that made it arrive at that piece of recommendation. But there are reasons to doubt. For here, motives come in different shades. This is one country where endeavours at making recommendations to the President had taken place in the past, and in the end it turned out that the recommendation had been to the benefit of a few individuals who wanted to cash in on one aspect of the recommendation or the other. This might even be the first step in series, meant to prepare the ground for someone to return later and sell the idea of privately-run examination bodies to the government. Someone should remember the scrapped toll plazas on federal highways. And no Nigerian needed to be reminded of the net of a presidential pardon that was cast across the country, but had had only one person in focus. Let the reader also recollect: There was a past administration that had set up a committee to consider the possibility of adopting polymer currency notes. Outside the committee’s membership at the time, some commentators had listed countries that adopted polymer currency. Such people who had mentioned names of countries to support their argument failed to add that the same countries later had to abandon polymer. Why? It doesn’t last. It fades faster, tears faster than the paper currency. A member of the said committee had since confided that he and other members did come under pressure to recommend polymer notes to the then president, but had refused. That administration went. Another came, and because those who had eyed the contract for the polymer currency notes did not give up, the new administration approved it. Now, Nigerians know it’s a matter of time before some officials told them that polymer currency notes needed to be jettisoned and return to paper currency, or billions of naira allocated to print more of them.
Beyond all that, education is not a sector any government should tamper with anyhow, without being discerning enough to see down the road. And education, especially an examination body, is not what Mr. President should have placed under a committee that he had ordered to think in terms of profit and loss, never in the manner Aliko Dangote would think when he considers setting up a new company. But this is what the President may end up doing, if he approves his committee’s recommendation. Such a step will amount to going back into the past, the same way the 6-3-3-4 system of education was adopted with so much funds pumped into it, only to be mouth-bashed later by some as the problem of the nation’s education. At this point in the nation’s history that the population is two times what it once was in the late 1970s when WAEC had called for the establishment of another examination body, the government should not consider scrapping NECO.
True, the Federal Government has said it has no plan to scrap it, that it has yet to adopt the recommendations of Mr. President’s committee. Here, however, is a system in which Nigerians are learning to shake their earlobes like a wet dog, and consider if what they hear men in Aso Villa say is what they do hear.
In any case, no matter what the government does in the end, it must be noted that Mr. President’s committee was the wrong body to consider the suitability of examination bodies such as NECO and JAMB for continued existence or otherwise. The committee, by its composition, could not have used the appropriate criteria before it decided examination bodies should be placed on a list of agencies to be whittled. In short, the committee, infested with government’s mood to cut cost, could not have been objective enough where examination bodies are concerned. This duty should have been specially given to a panel that is capable of carrying out an objective assessment in the light of the educational requirements of the nation, and from that standpoint make recommendations. In the end, Mr. President should see to it that he arrives at a decision on this matter that sends the nation into the future, rather than the past.
Source: Punch
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