EDUCATION stakeholders have urged the Federal Government to arrest the slide in the sector and save the future of the country.
The stakeholders, including educationists and parents, made the appeal on Saturday during the Showers International High School, Port Harcourt, first graduation.The Medical Director of Rehoboth Specialist Hospital, Dr. Aniekan Ekere, noted that the slide needed to be halted if the country must take its pride of place in the comity of nations.
Ekere recalled that best students studied in Nigerian tertiary institutions in the past while others sought admission overseas.
He added that the situation had changed as the country’s brilliant lecturers and students were currently seeking education and greener pastures overseas.
He said, “Now, our best is abroad. The best lecturers you will meet abroad are Nigerians, but they can no longer come back.”
The medical expert, who frowned on the high number of illiterate persons in Nigeria, described the development as a slap on the face of an oil producing nation.
He added, “Everything within the country’s education system has collapsed. The thing going steadily is strike in schools. Right now, the Academic Staff Union of Universities is on strike and nobody knows when the lecturers will call off the action because nobody seems to care.”
According to him, the incessant strikes in schools have distorted education system in such a way that students no longer know how many years their academic programmes will run.
He pointed that the Federal Government must act quickly, lamenting that 99 per cent of Nigeria’s wealth was in the hands of a few persons.
The founder of Showers International High School, Mrs. Emilia Akpan, also expressed regret over the neglect of the sector.
Akpan, who is also the Chairman of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, Rivers/Bayelsa states, added that the government’s support was needed for a successful private sector intervention in education.
