Evolve better way to fund basic education —APC Spokesman

The National Publicity Secretary of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, has harped on the need for stakeholders in the education sector to evolve a better way of funding basic education in the country.

He lamented that the basic education, which is the most important aspect of a child’s education, is being left in the hands of the local government, which is the weakest of the three tiers of government in Nigeria.

He said that as the debate heightened on granting the local government autonomy, the stakeholders must begin to brainstorm on where funding of the basic education should be placed.

Speaking with journalists after he delivered a lecture organised by the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) on basic education in Nigeria in Ilorin on Thursday, the APC spokeman said the nation must priotise the funding of education so as to bring about the desired development in the country.

Abdullahi, who said that basic education was the only way to measure standard of education, added that once the basic education was faulty, all other steps could be wrong.

“The message is this. Nigeria has to rethink its entire education system if we want to get a kind of result that we believe can put us in same pedestal with the rest of the world. And we have to start by acknowledging that much of what we are doing at the moment is not working. And that’s not just about funding even as important as that is.

“The entire education architecture needs to be overhauled and  that’s right from basic education. And one key thing that I said that struck even me is that we cannot continue to leave the most important tier of our education in the weakest tier of government and that’s basic education in the hands of local government. So, as we begin to consider the autonomy of the local government, it’s important for us to begin to ask what implication that would have for basic education,” he said.

The former Minister of Sports and Youth Development, who said that Nigerians should ask what the money meant for basic education had been spent on so far, added that they should also care to know who had been doing the spending.