Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, discusses with IMOLEAYO OYEDEYI the key national issues affecting the education sector, with a focus on the reform policies rolled out by the present administration.
It’s been very fruitful and impactful. You know we have a President, Bola Tinubu, who believes so much in education. When he was going to make his cabinet reshuffle, it was clear to all that he knew the capabilities of all his ministers, and he would not give them any work that he believed they could not do. I think that months after that, the President was vindicated in the transformation we brought to the Nigerian education system with six clear high-priority areas that we have tackled in a concurrent manner, and we are beginning to see significant results.
The number one was to bring technical education and vocational training back to our schools, and we have been successful in this. First, we have revived the interest of Nigerian youths in technical and vocational education. We have let them know that this is the bedrock of society. We have been able to reawaken their conscience and interest in this key area.
We have launched a practical-based training initiative. We had about 250,000 students in the first cohort with the aim of enrolling one million within the next two to three years. The training is going so well. We are paying the participants monthly stipends. In the skill-training centre, we pay N45,000 per month for each student, and we are giving the students N22,500 as their monthly stipends. We are also paying the schools training them.
The second part of that agenda is to blend public funding with the private sector such that we will have lots of funds, and the private schools will also get a lot of money to put into rebuilding their workshops, buying state-of-the-art equipment and employing qualified teachers. Our overall aim is to get the students gainfully employed after school, basically through entrepreneurship.
What were the critical educational challenges you met, and what steps have you taken to address them?
We met significant infrastructural decay. Before we took over, there was the problem of strikes in our tertiary institutions. Our students were not having interest in technical and vocational education. There were also poor-quality teachers and examination fraud in both WAEC and NECO. But I can boldly say now that every one of these challenges has been effectively tackled. We have addressed the issue of examination fraud. WAEC will be Computer-Based Test from 2026. They piloted the CBT system in the last May/June exam. NECO will also be CBT. So, we have almost eliminated examination fraud.
Secondly, we have been successful in bringing back vocational and technical education.
In terms of infrastructural decay in our primary schools, we have rehabilitated almost 20,000 primary and junior secondary schools. We are also equipping them with modern facilities like solar electricity. We are also deploying technology in each school. In the area of teacher training, we are deploying digital content for our teachers to use. Strikes in the tertiary institutions have been eliminated, as there was none in the last academic session. All these are not coincidental.
But the biggest part is something we haven’t talked much about in public. President Tinubu promised Nigerians that university strikes were going to be a thing of the past. That has happened, and to seal it, we have negotiated the best salary increment for our university lecturers, the best to have happened in the history of this country. We have made that commitment. So, literally, all the challenges that we met, we have tackled head-on and we are moving strongly.
Obviously, we are going to build many more schools as we aim to increase the quality of literacy and numeracy of our students. Already, we have made our curriculum competence-based, focusing it on what matters, i.e., what the industry truly needs. We have also increased the number of students that can be admitted into our tertiary institutions. We have expanded that by 500,000. Before, our institutions were taking around 700,000 students, but we have increased that capacity to 1.2 million.
Before, we used to have compulsory credits in English and Mathematics. But we have changed that to credits in what matters. For instance, if your child is going for engineering or sciences, he or she needs to have credits in Mathematics and other subjects that matter. He doesn’t need credit in English. We have also doubled the number of students for admission into medical, dental and nursing schools. In a bid to improve the quality of our medical schools in the six geo-political zones, we have spent over N120bn in the last one year. We have built modern laboratories and additional hostels for them. So, we have made significant achievements in these areas.
A vital aspect of the educational burden is the brain drain syndrome. How have you been addressing this?
No doubt, we have tackled the brain-drain syndrome and I will tell you why. When I first came into the Ministry of Health, everybody was doing Japa Japa. But if you look closely in the last few months, there hasn’t been much talk of Japa. And what we have done is simple: we observed that we have a large population. So, we said, let’s open up the space and train more people. For instance, if you train 5,000 doctors and 50 per cent of them later leave, you will be left with nothing much. But if you graduate like 20,000 doctors a year, and some leave, you will still be having up to 15,000 on the ground. And that’s what we have done with nursing.
Before this government came into power, Nigeria was having about 28,000 people enrolled into nursing school yearly. When we came in, our target was to increase that number by at least 15,000. But I can tell you that we have surpassed that goal as we now enroll over 130,000 people into nursing school yearly. So, our headache is no longer on Japa as we now have nurses in excess. Mind you, we still have opportunities for our polytechnics to start doing nursing. If that happens, we will potentially be having about 50,000 new students joining the existing number, which will take us close to about 200,000.
Also, we have doubled the number of admitted students for medicine and pharmacy. So, Japa is no longer a problem. Before, TETFund was spending a lot of money sending faculty staff abroad for training. But we said no. We totally cancelled that, because when they sent them abroad like that, 90 per cent of them were not coming back home. So, we instead decided to create centres of excellence in our universities and polytechnics.
With that, those going abroad can simply be trained at home. In other words, we are domesticating the training. We also increased our welfare package for the institutions. You may have heard about our tertiary institution support trust fund through which we give our schools interest-free loans. We have also ensured that both the academic and non-academic staff get their earned allowances on time. So, we have really changed the environment. There is now peace and tranquility in our universities now.
Early last month, the Federal Government scrapped the national policy mandating the use of indigenous languages as the medium of instruction in Nigerian schools. Why was this decision taken?
We have clear data that when children learn in their mother tongue during the early stage of their life, they learn better. The mother tongue policy was made for children to learn in their local languages from Primary 1 to Primary 4. But that wasn’t being done. Now, four out of the six geo-political zones are not even doing it. South-West, South-South, South-East and North-Central are still using English as the language of general instruction.