Nigeria Content Online

With the redeployment of the permanent secretary in the ministry
of education, Oladapo Afolabi as the Head of Service of the federation, staff
of the ministry have been apprehensive over who takes over his job.

Their concern took on a new dimension when they recently met for
prayers to seek divine help for a competent hand to be deployed to the
ministry.

One of the participants at the prayer meeting, who did not want
to be named, said they gathered to pray as soon as the government announced the
appointment of Tunji Olaopa, former coordinator of the Education Sector
Analysis of the ministry as a permanent secretary. Before his appointment, he
was the Director of Programmes at the Bureau for Public Sector Reform, BPSR.

Some staff of the ministry express confidence in the ability of
Mr Olaopa to drive the ongoing reforms in the sector. “He has been there all
along and I was working in the publication unit of the ministry at that time,”
one of the praying staff said.

“He was driving the Education Sector Analysis process and he
drove it well, nurtured the project to a stable level before he left. Some of
the outcome of the project is what you see all over. Talking about quality
assurance, it was an offshoot of ESA, institutionalization of school based
management in all the schools was part of, it even UBE as it is being operated
now is a spin off. Before they started talking about reform, he had started
it.”

The prayer group said it was of the opinion that Nigerian
education sector needs to be pioneered by reformers who will ensure the
implementation of quality initiative. Not long after the Jomtien Conference,
Nigeria took specific measures aimed at translating the declaration on
Education For All into reality.

The activities embarked upon included a sensitization drive
mounted through the agency of the two national advisory bodies on education
policy, namely, the Joint Consultative Council on Education which brings
together various officials in Federal and State Ministries of Education, and
the National Council of Education which is composed of State Commissioners of
Education and the Minister.

The education subsector had glorious time between the fifties
and early seventies. However, by the nineties, twenty years after the national
policy on education, the sector has receded into a dark age characterized by
brain drain, campus cultism and examination malpractice.