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Saturday, December 8, 2001
The Universal Basic Education (UBE) bill recently passed by the Senate, part of which provides free education for children between the ages of seven to 17, criminalizes failure of parents and guardians to send their children to school and free lunch for children for them in all primary schools and junior secondary school in the country is a very welcome one.
This aspect of the provision should be retained by the House, and the President should
assent and pass it into law. A more "school- friendly provision" should have included a free breakfast SNACK (eg milk + akara, etc.), especially useful for those who may have left home to come to school without any meal at all - but that may yet come as state and/or local government
contributions.
The free and compulsory education-for-all provisions are a vindication of past AG - UPN - SDP and present AD party positions.
It will also be interesting to see how the criminalization is implemented in the Northern part of our country, where especially the education of girl-children has been neglected for way too long. A concomittant legislation should be the elevation of the marriage age of the girl-child to above 17 uniformly everywhere in the country, again which will have a salutary effect on our Northern compatriots.
However there is a second provision of the UBE Bill which should be seriously revised: out of the total of 36 states in the country, it has now officially designated as many as 24 states + FCT as disadvantaged viz: Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Bayelsa, Benue, Borno,
Cross River, Ebonyi, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, Plateau, Rivers, Sokoto, Taraba, Yobe and Zamfara and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
The advantage of such a disadvantaged designation is the provision of additional 20% of funds. This is presumably 20% additional for EACH state than it would not have gotten otherwise, not 20% additional UBE funds to be distributed among all of the states.
Let us take the rosier alternative. Since on average most states have 10 - 20 local governments, this means that this additional resource corresponds to roughly 1 - 2% additional funds for each local government, where traditional primary and secondary school issues are to be handled.
With the kind of serious educational disadvantage that we are talking about, this will not amount to much, and inherent in the policy is an inadequate design which will ensure that it may fail.
So what should have been done?
First a little arithmetic.
Assume that we have a total of X Naira to spend on all 36 States, out of which D Naira will be spent on 25 disadvantaged states - ie on 69.4% of all states. Then we would be spending on average (X-D)/11 on the educationally advantaged states and D/25 Naira on the educationally
disadvantaged. We are now told that
Thus Thus this policy means that 73% of the whole UBE funds will be spent on the 25 disadvantaged states instead of 69.4% if it had been spent uniformly on all states. For the advantaged states, we would be spending 27% of total funds instead of 30.6%. Again, this does not translate into really a significant boost or resource deficit for any one state. What should have been done was to choose say 9 demonstration states: 2 per zone in the North (as a tip to it being a more disadvantaged region) and one state per zone in the South, and then fund them for a period of say 5 years at say DOUBLE the average it would otherwise have received at uniform funding. Each of our six political zones would be required to democratically decide which state is most disadvantaged in its own zone. It is likely that Zamfara, Sokoto, Benue, Nassarawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Osun, Bayelsa and Ebonyi may come out tops in this category. In the case of the more pragmatic double funding for disadvantaged states, we would have: Thus this revised policy would mean that 50% of the whole UBE funds will be spent on the 9 states instead of 25% if it had been spent uniformly on all states. For the advantaged states, we would be spending 50% of total funds instead of 75%. This would translate more into a significant boost for those states that get this increased funding, but again an average reduction of only 25%/27 or 1% for each of the advantaged states. That is a sacrifice that should not be too burdensome. On the whole, the expenditure on Education should be significantly increased for ALL the states before these designations of "disadvangeousness" are rendered, otherwise actions taken will be ineffective. I hope that between the House and the President, there will still be time to consider this alternative proposition.
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