Six years after President Olusegun Obasanjo launched the Universal Basic Education (UBE) project, more Nigerian children are going to school and the nation’s literacy rate has crept higher.

 

But the scheme has fallen well short of its ambitious target of getting every Nigerian child into primary school by 2006.

 

Huge sums of Federal Government money earmarked to finance the scheme have gone missing.  And billions of Naira allocated to key projects have yet to be spent.

 

Government leaders and officials differ in their estimates of how much money has been released to the Universal Basic Education Commission, which is charged with overseeing the programme. It is equally difficult to ascertain how much money the UBE Commission has in turn released to individual state governments to build new classrooms, train more teachers and buy text books.

 

Many teachers around Nigeria say they have yet to see the UBE scheme making any difference to the difficult conditions they face in their own schools.

 

Education experts meanwhile warn that falling standards are widening the gap in the quality of education provided by free government schools and fee-paying private schools.

 

The current controversy over government plans to privatize more than 100 federal government colleges known as Unity Schools has put a fresh spotlight on this issue.

 

The colleges were originally set up as model schools for gifted children from all over Nigeria, irrespective of creed, status or ethnic origin. Now the Federal Government wants to privatize 102 of these elite secondary shcools to arrest a steady decline in the quality of education they provide.

Adams Oshiomhole, the President of the Nigeria Labour Congress trade union movement, is one of the fiercest critics of this move.

“In the past, Unity Schools have enabled many gifted children of the poor to break out of the poverty cycle through quality and affordable public education.” Oshiomhole said.

But Education Minister Obiageli Ezekwesili insists that privatization is the only way to improve their performance. “Many of the schools are substandard with the absence of basic infrastructure and amenities and have become a sorry sight in the landscape of secondary education,” she said.

 

Even, so, the federal government colleges are still among Nigeria’s best performing state schools.

 

The UBE scheme appears to have brought about some improvements in primary education.

 

The alarming decline in Nigeria’s literacy rates experienced under military rule in the 1980s and 1990s has been reversed, according to a wide range of statistics and surveys published by the Nigerian government and international organizations, such as UNESCO and UNICEF.

 

The statistics differ from survey to survey. But the UBE Commission claims that the number of children enrolled in Nigerian schools has increased by 27 percent over the past five years. And everyone agrees that the enrolment of girls is still much lower than that of boys.

 

Perhaps the most optimistic figures come from the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). It concluded that by 2005 almost 90 percent of Nigeria’s population could read, write and understand a simple sentence.

 

However, such basic skills fall well short of full literacy.

 

Millions of Nigerian children do not yet go to school and education experts question how much many of those attending the most poorly equipped and under-staffed government schools are actually learning to read and write.

 

The UBE scheme, which by law claims two percent of all Federal Government revenues, is supposed to ensure that every Nigerian child receives nine years of free basic education by the age of 15.

 

It also aims to teach 5.4 million illiterate adults how to read and write; 150,000  in each state of the federation.

 

But Caroline Egwuatu, a class teacher at Central Primary School in Awka, the capital of Anambra state, says she and her colleagues have yet to derive any benefit from UBE since implementation of the scheme began five years ago.

 

“We have not seen any sign of UBE in this Anambra,” she told the Budget Monitoring Project. “As we are since (sic), so we are now.” she said.

 

No new classrooms have been built for her school, one of the largest in Anambra state, where about 22 teachers struggle to provide a decent education for approximately 1,500 pupils. Neither has the school received any new textbooks.

 

Adequate classroom accommodation is obviously a problem. The pupils sit jam-packed in halls, each of which contains several classes. There is hardly any partitioning between the different groups, so the process of teaching and learning is extremely difficult.

 

Egwuatu said the only new classroom to be built at Central Primary School in recent years was paid for by the Petroleum Trust Fund, but this is now used as a school office instead.

 

Researchers for the Budget Monitoring Project found similar situations repeated across Anambra and Cross River states. Teachers everywhere complained about a lack of school furniture, basic text books and other teaching aids.

 

Officials at the UBE Commission in Abuja, defended their organisation’s much criticized performance in Anambra state. They said 40 new classrooms were built with UBE funding in Anambra last year and new textbooks had been sent to the state’s primary schools.

 

However, these textbooks were not delivered directly to the schools. They were sent to the education secretary of each local government area. That may explain why none of the children in the schools visited by Budget Monitoring Project researchers had received any.

 

Tunde Ayodabo, an educationist with the Ajayi Crowther University in Oyo said that while the UBE scheme was good in principle, the government had so far been incapable of implementing it effectively.

 

“We have never had any problems with putting policy in place in the country’s education sector,” Ayodabo said. “The problem has always been with implementation and sustainability. We had free education in the South West in those days. What happened to it? Even the current 6-3-3-4 system is one of the best education policies in the world. It has failed because successive governments did not implement its provisions to the letter.”

 

Tayo Ajigbodo, a coordinator of The Language Institute (TLI), an outsourcing firm that specializes in the teaching of language skills in nursery and primary schools, put his finger on another problem. He pointed to the wide gap between the quality of education received in state primary schools and private elementary schools. Ajigbodo said that made it difficult for children from poorer families who had attended a free state school, to gain entry to a junior secondary.

 

When Obasanjo launched UBE in June 2000, the Federal Government said the  scheme would earmark 85 billion Naira of government revenue to pay for the education of 40 million Nigerians over a period of eight years.

 

Since then, government estimates of the amount of money needed to achieve this lofty aim have soared.

 

In September 2001, just one month after the implementation of UBE got under way, Bello Usman, the Education Minister at the time, told a Senate hearing that the project would need at least 500 billion Naira to succeed.

 

That is three times more than the government budgeted to spend on education in 2006.

 

Government leaders and officials can’t agree among themselves how much money Nigeria has actually spent on UBE to date.

 

Gidado Tahir, Executive Secretary of the UBE Commission said his organization had only received 24.8 billion Naira out of the 30 billion it had been allocated by the 2005 federal budget.

But apparently only half that money found its way into spending on UBE projects.

 

Press reports quoted President Obasanjo as saying the Federal Government only released 12.7 billion Naira to the states as UBE intervention funds in 2005.

 

The UBE Commission is now supposed to vet carefully each education project that it supports. And instead of providing 100 percent funding, as in the early days, it now only provides 50 percent of the money. The state government proposing each project has to put up the rest.

 

 However, many state governments complain that the counterpart funding pledged by the UBE Commission fails to arrive on time.

 

Akin Olasunkanmi, vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Education, said only six percent of one whack of N17 billion of Federal Government funding received by the UBE Commission last year was actually passed on to state governments.

 

. “The situation is perplexing,” he said.  “Despite government’s approval of huge sums for UBE, the state UBE boards don’t get it on time to execute their projects.”

 

Lagos is one state which has gone ahead with its own plans to expand primary education without waiting for the UBE counterpart funding to arrive.

 

Gbemiga Benson, the chairman of Lagos State UBE Board, said Lagos state government had spent N422 million on UBE projects over the past year, but it was still waiting of N281 million of counterpart funding from the UBE Commission to arrive.

 

In Anambra state, education officials told the Budget Monitoring Project that the UBE Commission was more than a year behind schedule in its disbursements to the state government.  They noted that by October 2006 Anambra state had only just received UBE payments due in the first and second quarters of 2005. 

 

Officials at the UBE Commission in Abuja said just over 18 billion Naira of UBE money had been disbursed for training teachers and building new classrooms across Nigeria since the scheme began.

 

But that is just a fraction of what should have been handed down if all the money earmarked for UBE had been properly spent.

 

So where has it all gone?

 

A special panel set up to probe the funding of the Kwara state’s primary education board in 2003, found that 400 million Naira allocated for spending on UBE projects by the administration of former Governor Mohammed Lawal had simply disappeared.

 

The Federal Government tried to clamp down on such abuse by introducing a rule in 2004 that state governments must provide 50 percent of the funding for each UBE project they wish to carry out.

 

 

They must also justify the need for such projects to the Federal Ministry of Finance and the UBE Commission before any funds are actually disbursed.

 

Nevertheless, the overall picture of achievement  is rather bleak,

 

Earlier this year, the House of Representatives Committee on UBE produced a less than flattering report on the scheme following a nationwide tour to view its implementation.

 

Uche Onyeagocha, an opposition member of the House committee from Imo state for the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), said basic education in many of the states visited was comatose. He told the Budget Monitoring Project that in some cases pupils were still sitting under trees to learn since there had been hardly any provision of basic infrastructure. 

 

In Lagos state teachers were owed up to four months of arrears on their salaries, Onyeagocha said. And throughout Nigeria, he added, there was an inadequate supply of text books.

 

The House committee found the situation was particularly bad in Akwa Ibom, Anambra, Cross River, Ondo and Taraba states.

 

Peter Obi, who became Governor of Anamabra State in March 2006, has acknowledged the poor level of implementation of UBE in his own state. But Obi, who like Onyeagocha belongs to the APGA, blames the problem on poor governance by his predecessors.

 

 

Despite the torrent of criticism directed at government for its failure to implement the UBE scheme in an effective and transparent manner, Tahir, the Executive Secretary of the UBE Commission, says he is optimistic that things will get better.

 

“Prior to 2004, we had to depend solely on the federal government for funding,” he said. “... But with the signing of the UBE act into law in 2004, things have changed. Now our funding comes directly from the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the federation.”

 

That means, he explained, that the UBE Commission is getting more money to meet its obligations with much less bureaucracy

.

The Federal Government continues to predict that UBE will soon transform education in Nigeria.

 

Education Minister Ezekwesili told an international conference of African head teachers in August 2006 that Nigeria currently had 23 million children enrolled in its primary schools and the UBE scheme would bring in 10 million more.

 

She also told journalists at around the same time that the Federal Government had earmarked 10 billion Naira of UBE money to provide in-service training for existing teachers, train 40,000 new teachers to National Certificate of Education (NCE) level and provide science kits for all primary schools.

 

But many people remain skeptical that the UBE scheme is using government money effectively.

 

Those with long memories recall President Obasanjo’s failure to achieve a lasting revolution in Nigerian education during his previous tenure as head of state from 1976 to 1979.

 

Then, as now, Nigeria was enjoying the fruits of a worldwide boom in oil prices.

Obasanjo, who was then a young general at the head of a military government, launched a Universal Primary Education (UPE) programme in 1976, with similar goals to today’s UBE.

 

But the UPE scheme became bogged down by corruption and inefficiency.  Obasanjo’s military government also found it was chronically short of qualified teachers to educate the millions of new pupils flooding into Nigeria’s primary schools.

 

Nevertheless, according to official figures, by 1982, 82 percent of Nigerian children were going to primary school.

 

Tragically, this success was not sustained.

 

Cutbacks in government spending on education under military rule meant that by 1999, the year before UBE was announced, Nigeria’s primary school enrolment rate had fallen to 55 percent.

 

As Obasanjo once more prepares to hand over power to an elected successor, what guarantees are there that UBE will produce more lasting fruits than his previous drive to throw truckloads of government money at improving public access to free education?

 

Obasanjo himself is cautiously optimistic. “The impact of the amount released thus far is unbelievable in states where it has been wisely used,” he said in July, singling out Katsina, Sokoto and Jigawa for special commendation.