A former Minister of Education, Mrs Chinwe Obaji, has thrown her weight behind the Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, on the need for Nigeria to embrace e-learning in the face of COVID-19 that necessitated the closedown of schools at all levels in the country.
Obaji has also commended the Registrar and Chief Executive of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Professor Ishaq Oloyede on the smooth and successful conduct of the 2020 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), she noted was an improvement over the previous years.
She said: “Nigeria has no choice other than to embrace e-learning as it is done in other climes.
“The challenges of the country is experiencing in her bid to render quality education to her teeming youth population would have been overcome if the ‘One Laptop Per Child Initiative’ was not jettisoned midway.
“The wonderful initiative was conceived in 2005 when I held sway as the Minister of Education,” Obaji was quoted to have said in an interview published in JAMB Weekly Bulletin obtained by Tribune Online, on Sunday, in Abuja.
She also noted that some of thee initiatives she introduced were abandoned citing the School Feeding Programme which she launched as a Minister in 2005 at Kuje, a suburb of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT),
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The ex-Minister, however, commended the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration for reviving the laudable initiative.
She charged all stakeholders to give due attention to the needs of education as the Federal Government could not do it alone, declaring that all hands must be on deck to turn around the fortunes of the sector.
Obaji said the country should adopt the zeal and vigour at which she contained the Ebola virus and the current efforts aimed at containing the COVID-19 pandemic to tackle the various challenges bedevilling the educational sector in the country.
She said: “If we had sustained the ‘One Laptop Per Child Initiative’, by now virtual learning would have been integrated into the curriculum and students and teachers would have been adequately grounded in e-learning.”
The Initiative involved deployment of laptops to all JSS 1 students across the country. At that time, the laptops were being offered to the government at the rate of $100 each and at the exchange rate of N120 to one dollar, indicating that each laptop would have been procured at N12,000.
While joining other Nigerians to give accolade the JAMB Registrar for the successful conduct of the 2020 UTME, Obaji described Oloyede as “gift to the nation” and called on well-meaning Nigerians to support him in the bid to transform the education sector as whole.
The former Minister who was part of the monitoring teams of the just concluded 2020 UTME, said the exercise witnessed tremendous improvement when compared to previous years.
According to her, the success recorded was as a result of series of innovations put in place by the Board such as the conclusion of the exercise within the space of one week devoid of serious technical hitches, thorough supervision, the negligible cases of examination infractions, the prompt release of results as well as the optimal use of technology among others.
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