Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has said that decentralisation of the country’s education remained an antidote to its declining fortunes.
He made the call yesterday, while delivering a keynote address at the rescheduled 2013 16th Annual Conference of the African Council for Communication Education (ACCE), hosted by the Department of Mass Communication of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The title of the paper was “Media, youth and Nigeria’s Development Challenges.”
He noted that the over centralisation of education had killed creativity and hampered scholarship in the nation’s education, stressing that an important solution to reversing the backward trend was to allow the federating units in the federal system to take autonomous control in the development of education.
He said: “We cannot significantly improve education in this country if we continue with the current overly centralized system with suffocating federal control. Federal schools should be handed over to the states in which they are located and the budgetary resources hitherto expended on them transferred to those state governments.
“The federal government should focus on setting up regulatory standards and enforcing those standards. It will be easier for authorities at the UNN to show the officials in Enugu what life at UNN is really like than officials in Abuja. And it will be easier for those officials at Enugu to hold the leaders of UNN accountable. It will also be easier for the students and the UNN community to demand accountability from their school leaders as they too can easily reach the officials at Enugu.”
He added: “In addition to decentralication and geographical diversification we must also diversify our curriculum and educational programmes. The current one-size-fits-all approach will not help us.”
