By Raphael Okhiria
A popular governorship aspirant for the 2024 Edo State governorship election under the banners of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Hon. Anslem Ojezua, has disclosed that if elected governor of the state, that his administration would resuscitate the policy of bursary disbursement to students of tertiary institutions as a way of helping parents.
In addition to that, the PDP governorship aspirant stated that he would also tackle the problem of shortage of teachers in the state by reactivating the defunct Teachers Training College (TTC) system to fill the vacuum in the state’s educational system.
Ojezua, a onetime Commissioner for Information under the government of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, and immediate past State Chairman of the All Progressive Congress (APC), before following Governor Godwin Obaseki to join the PDP in 2020, stated these when he held an interactive sections with members of the Correspondents Chapel of the Edo State Council of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), at the Chapel’s secretariat on Ogbesasa Street, Sokponba Road, Benin City.
The PDP governorship aspirant, while noting that the Governor Obaseki administration had laid a solid foundation for the educational growth of the state, however, added that shortage of teachers in the state needed to be addressed so that the gains of the present administration in that sector could be sustained, saying that emphasis needed to be paid to the fundamental level of education.
He acknowledged that a lot of parents “now go through difficulties in paying school fees, especially at the tertiary level. I enjoyed bursary while in the university and I appreciate the relief bursary brings to students and parents alike. If elected, our administration will bring back bursaries and make it a policy to assist students and their parents in footing the bills in tertiary institutions.”
He posited that to address the problem, attention must shift to the issue of TTC which he lamented was abrogated with the introduction of the National Certificate on Education (NCE), as the basic requirement to teach at the primary school level.
Ojezua noted that the problem with the policy on NCE as against the old TTC, was that the NCE limited the number of subjects a teacher with that qualification could teach, “a teacher is trained to teach as many subjects as are offered in the class where he or she is the class teacher/”
“I am very concerned about education, particularly at the fundamental level, because we have enough schools, but not enough teachers. In most cases, it can be traced to the fact that it looks like the state does not have the capacity to pay for the number of teachers that are required, but we will have to look for a way to do it, that is, find a solution. How do we get more teachers at a lesser cost? How do we involve our communities, so that our children can have access to good education? Because without education a lot of us will not be sitting here, not you, not me. And with education, there is nothing we cannot achieve.
“We don’t have to inherit anything, because I believe that for a rich man’s son to sell an inherited house, there is a poor man’s son to buy. And the only reason he has to do so is because he has acquired education, and that education is the one creating wealth for him.
“So, education is one area I am passionate about. One way I will look at is that the government came up with a policy that you need a minimum of a National Certificate on Education (NCE) to be able to teach in government schools. And the way they interpreted it, it looks like an NCE teacher will only teach one subject, but growing up, we were used to teachers who taught all subjects. What stops a teacher, who has gone through NCE and was taught how to teach all subjects or who may not have gone to NCE to go and acquire an NCE and come and teach all subjects.
“That way, instead of 10 teachers, one teacher can just take all the subjects and reduce the bills. What makes it difficult I think is that in an attempt to implement that policy, they abrogated Teachers Training College (TTC) being the primary level to feed the college of education. Then, they used the regular secondary school to feed the colleges of education. And these things have made the teachers to lose the essential part of their training; learning how to teach, because in those days, we used to have all round classroom administrators, and teachers for special subjects like Mathematics and Physics going round, but each teacher is supposed to take care of his class, that is not the case anymore.
“I think that is an area we think we will revisit. If we do that, I think we will have enough teachers. I know there is a federal policy on that. But the most important thing is the education of our children no matter what they say in Abuja. I don’t think it is an offence to do things differently”, he emphasized.
The PDP governorship hopeful also lamented what he termed the “unbelievably high cost of access to health, saying that if that was not addressed adequately, it would spell doom for the majority of the people.
“The cost of access to health is unbelievably high. If those of us who consider ourselves privileged are beginning to bend under the cost of access to health, what about the man on the street, especially the elderly. Now, there is in place a health scheme, a lot of people don’t know about it. A lot don’t believe in it.
“Those that have access to it have a big challenge. The challenge is that medical personnel are depleting by the day. A lot of doctors and nurses are moving out every day to other countries because of the condition of service. If you go to our health facilities today, you will cry”, he bemoaned.
He assured that if elected governor next year, his administration would put in place policies that would not only improve on the present healthcare delivery system in the state, but that would make the sector attractive such that players therein would not want to leave the state to go abroad.
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