I Want to Be a School Proprietor – By Arnold A. Alalibo

Posted by admin Arnold Alalibo, Articles, Columnists, NNP Columnists Sunday, November 11th, 2012

By Arnold A. Alalibo | NNP | Nov. 11, 2012 | A good friend of mine once said to me that If I wanted to make it fast in life, I should open a school or a church. But I quickly reminded him that I neither had the anointing nor a call from God to establish a church and perhaps pastor it. Initially, it did not make sense to me why he added school to the list of fortune – spinning institutions.

But later the suggestion became clearer to me. I now understand why my friend specifically mentioned church and school. These are the two major institutions in this country which proliferation is hardly regulated. Both institutions enjoy many things in common. The difference is that one is spiritual, while the other is mundane. Talk about church, it is found everywhere, even in the streets. So are schools, particularly privately owned schools.

But if churches are established to usher us into a healthy spiritual relationship with our maker and grant us good morals in return, what is the unregulated accretion of schools designed to achieve in our society? Cheap education quality? I think so.

This remains the albatross of the education sector in Rivers State. There are too many illegal private schools in the State, many of which simply offer illiteracy, not education. My pain is that the government does very little or nothing about the unfortunate situation.

These sub-standard schools emerge on daily basis, while the authorities (I mean the government) watch the trend helplessly. Because the owners of the schools operate in unregulated environment, they site the institutions at squalid or unsightly locations, which are unconducive to learning. They often refer to those locations as temporary. But the truth is that many of them spend longer time than necessary at such places. They eventually convert them to permanent sites.

Unfortunately, these so-called school sites are without space and playground. Some of them are glorified one room accommodation. During
break time, the children have nowhere to exercise themselves. For this reason, their teachers force them to remain in the class all the time.

Just imagine that kind of situation. Your child or ward goes to school at 7am or 8am as the case may be. And he remains on his seat till 4pm, which is the time many of the private schools close after having what they call lesson (another trick to extort money from parents).

Is that not the reason many of these children cry bitterly each morning they are woken up and prepared for school? Yes, they cry hard because they remember the several hours of confinement in the class. When they
recall how their teachers visit their frustration on them, especially in those
schools where caning holds sway, they give their parents or guardians literal fight each day before they depart for school.

Play is natural to children. I cannot imagine a school where children lack sufficient space to play. It tantamounts to suffocating them. But the question is who approves these schools? If they are unapproved, why has the government failed to clamp-down on their owners? Or even close down the schools outrightly? I think something must be wrong somewhere. Somebody must be making a quick deal with the registration or unregistration of schools in the State.

I don’t have to remind any one that Rivers State has clear legal provisions on how private schools should emerge in the State.

Section 1, sub-section (1) of Education (Private Schools) Law in the Laws of Rivers State of Nigeria 1999 is explicit on that. That section reads thus:

“No person shall establish, carry on, conduct or keep a private school or institution unless the school or institution has been duly registered under this law”.

It, therefore, beats my imagination why a clear legal provision on how privately owned schools should be established in the State is ignored by both school proprietors and the approving authorities. Is this not a
sufficient ground for the State Education Ministry to descend on these illegal school owners that dot every nook and cranny of the State?

Those who have discerning eyes don’t need to be told the reason for the inaction of the supervisory authorities. Illegal schools don’t thrive in the State without the conspiracy of some Ministry of Education officials. I have no doubt that these officials are compromised by desperate proprietors to overlook some of their lapses, particularly those which the law prescribes as mandatory before registration. That is why illegally operated private schools flourish.

I am sure if the State government is taken to task on how many private schools that operate in the State, we may get the shocker of our lives. The implication of this is that it is hard to determine the quality of
education they offer.

Owing to poor supervision by the government, some private schools have already become centres for examination malpractices and are commonly referred to as “miracle centres”. Parents are always willing to pay
any amount to these “centres” to ensure that their children obtain their
results at a sitting. Such is the level of decadence prevalent in some of these
schools.

Private schools in Rivers State are taking so much for granted. This is because the State Education Ministry is weak and has failed to live up to expectation. For instance, is it not the responsibility of the Ministry to ensure that school calendar is harmonised. Why has it left these schools to run the calendar the way they wish? Why has the ministry not done anything about the poor remuneration private schools owners pay their staff, particularly when it is understood that there is a nexus between remuneration and output?

May be I should open a school as my friend advised and stop agonising.

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