Obaseki's Vision, Political Will Are Responsible For Transforming Edo Education Sector, Says Commissioner

Joan Oviawe, suave, surefooted about her turf and committed to serving her people, she is one of the few experts that started with the administration of Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State. She came in early 2017 as the Special Adviser to the Governor on Basic Education.

Later she became the Chairman of the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) and finally, Commissioner of Education, where besides nurturing the EdoBest project, that is globally recongised and has won the state a lot of accolades from across the world, she is entrenched in ensuring the smooth running of the state education sector and institutionalising the reforms and transformation policies of the state governor.

She speaks on her tour of duty.

Excerpts:

WHAT WAS THE STATE OF EDO EDUCATION SECTOR LIKE WHEN YOU WERE FIRST APPOINTED IN 2017 AS SPECIAL ADVISER TO THE GOVERNOR ON BASIC EDUCATION?

The governor was sworn-in in November 2016 and then by February 2017 I was invited. I was just visiting the country to deliver a paper at the Basic Education Workshop. It was at that workshop that I was able to also give my opinion on education, particularly the focus of my research agenda at that time which was ‘creating or developing a symbiotic relationship between the curriculum, classroom and community.’

In fact, prior to that I was trying to work with public schools in Edo and that was how I got to know about our special schools, for special needs students and in one particular school, I saw that the name of the school is MR School.

I remembered asking somebody then at the Ministry of Education, what is the meaning of MR? They couldn't really tell me and I just assumed that maybe it was an initial for somebody's name. Then I got to the school and I was told MR stood for Mentally Retarded and so that was very jarring for me. So when I went to that workshop that was my opening comment. I said, Your Excellency, I find it very incredible or incredulous in 2017 in Edo State in our public school system, we are still referring to special needs children as Mentally Retarded.

Immediately, he directed the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education to change the name. So that was when I knew that he's really serious, he's somebody that has compassion for the people, for the downtrodden, and somebody that has the right kind of values as the leader.

WHAT WAS YOUR MANDATE AS COMMISSIONER FOR EDUCATION?

As Commissioner of Education, my foremost mandate is to implement and oversee the implementation of EdoBest, our EdoBest education reform across all the other levels of our education system. So it's important to note that when EdoBest was launched on April 19, 2018, it was called the Edo Basic Education Sector Transformation.

It was solely focused on basic education, because at the time the governor had said if he has N100, he would spend N40 on basic education because basic education is the foundation. And so when in 2021 the governor decided that we had done considerable work at the basic level and these children that are going through a reformed basic education system are coming up to Junior and Senior secondary and if those levels of education are still in decay, then all the efforts done on basic would have gone to waste.

So in June 2021 EdoBest 2.0 was launched, EdoBest 2.0 is not an acronym, it is an aspiration that Edo wants to be the best at every level of education, whether basic secondary, technical, vocational or tertiary.

HOW FAR HAVE YOU GONE WITH YOUR MANDATES IN TERMS OF SUCCESSES RECORDED?

We've been at this now for less than two years and we've had remarkable successes, particularly at the secondary and TIVET levels. We've been able to strengthen our education delivery system. The government gave us approval to create three new parastatals; one is the Directorate of Higher Education, the Directorate of Educational Quality and Accountability, which will essentially do monitoring of both public and private schools in the state and then the Agency for Mass Education.

The Directorate of Educational Quality and Accountability, in addition to quality assurance, also manages our private school. While the agency for Mass Education, in addition to supporting adult education and non-formal education, also manages our lecture centres across the state.

WHILE THE DIRECTORATE OF HIGHER EDUCATION IS MEANT TO HELP US DRIVE A MORE PURPOSIVE AND RELEVANT TERTIARY EDUCATION SYSTEM. WHAT WERE THE FACTORS THAT BIRTHED EDOBEST AND RESPONSIBLE FOR ITS SUCCESS STORY?

I think, number one, is the governor and leadership. The governor had the vision and then had the political will. From the very beginning, he said to me, look, always tell the truth, always tell the people the truth, what is working, what is not working, and I have stood by those ethos.

That's why I'm very comfortable and very confident in our records so far, even though detractors may misrepresent it as being arrogant, it's not. We know where we were, we know what we met on ground and we know how far we've come.

IN TERMS OF FUNDING FOR THE EDOBEST PROGRAMME, HOW WAS THIS ACHIEVED?

Unlike in the northern part of Nigeria and some other parts of southern Nigeria, where you have a lot of development partners like USAID, FCDO, Bill and Melinda Gates and all these other organisations, UNICEF funding them, giving them free money to improve their education system, in the case of Edo nobody, in the beginning, nobody looked at us, they just felt that we are not one of the worst of cases.

However, nobody was making the link between education and human trafficking but thankfully from 2016 Governor Obaseki was very clear that he wants to tackle the high rates of human trafficking in Edo as well as irregular migration and so to do that, he prioritised education.

The government provided the funding in the beginning and also we were able to go far because there we were able to successfully block all the wastages. Oftentimes in government it's almost like corruption and financial wastage goes together.

However, sometimes the system might not be corrupt, but just completely wasteful and duplicating efforts. So from the very beginning, we were quite focused on how can we do a lot with very little and we succeeded.

Then the World Bank didn't start funding us through the P4R programme until 2022. We started 2017, so they came in 2022, so between 2017 and 2022, who was funding?

Is it not the Edo State government?

HOW DID THE WORLD BANK BECOME AWARE OF THE EDOBEST PROGRAMME?

I think the World Bank people in Washington DC, not even Abuja, were hearing about EdoBest. In fact, there was a conference in Washington DC that we took some of our teachers to attend, and these were teachers from rural and urban schools, so it was very diverse and they were the people in the audience, and our teachers were on the panel.

They heard them talk about the transformation that they were getting through the EdoBest programme and even things like some of the teachers said that their diction was improving, the way they pronounce, the way they speak.

People in Washington DC started asking about what is this EdoBest programme? So, I'm sure their office in Abuja got to hear about it and then they reached out to us that there is a programme called P4R Programme for Development.

So, the P4R programme, I believe Edo is the first state that the World Bank was giving that facility to.

Typically, World Bank does not lend directly to state, they lend to federal, but they were so confident in the abilities of Governor Obaseki, they were so impressed.

With what we were doing before they even said they were going to do the P4R programme. They had come several times to visit our schools, not just in the urban areas. When they come, what happens is you give them a list of all your EdoBest schools, where they are located and they pick.

WHAT ARE THE BASIC ELEMENTS FOR THIS P4R PROGRAMME THAT WILL QUALIFY FOR THE FUNDING?

The key components of the P4R programme is what are called the Disbursement Linked Indicators and the Disbursement Linked Results. Basically, before you are given the money, you will agree with the bank that these are the metrics you are going to be measured on. If you get it, you get this set amount of money, if you don't get it, you won't get anything.

So, for us, the total value is like $75 million, because they gave us $70 million, we also now got $5 million. That is, grant, that's free money, to Edo State government to improve education.

Then there were eight Disbursement Linked Indicators that were attached to the World Bank P4R funds and it went from basic education to pre-service teacher training, which is our College of Education and then to skills, which is Edojobs.

After the period that you're supposed to have done it, somebody will now come, an independent verifier, guess what, who is the independent verifier for EdoBest? It’s PWC, so PWC is a global firm, so it's not even a firm you can say let's do man, know man, kind of a thing.

They come in, you show them these are the evidences, we have pre-agreed with the World Bank to show that EdoBest is now in 80% of schools, these are the sets of evidences that they are going to require and they don't just come and sit in the SUBEB office in Benin City, no, they go across the state, they talk to different people, parents, teachers, everybody.

So for such a large ecosystem as ours it's very difficult and when you know evidence is being sought in a random manner, it's very difficult to forge things because there is always a disgruntled person somewhere who is more than happy to say no, no, this thing is not working, but we've not had that.

Even those that are not happy with the system for one reason or the other they cannot say that what is happening is not happening. So again, in a nutshell, the P4R programme does not cover infrastructure, World Bank does not put money in infrastructure. It covers quality assurance, basic education management, information system called BEMIS, Edojobs in terms of technology, skilling young people.

THE TEACHERS CERTAINLY PLAY A MAJOR ROLE IN YOUR SUCCESS STORY, HOW WELL DID THE SYSTEM COMPENSATED THEM?

Governor Obaseki has done fantastically when it comes to teachers’ welfare. That's why in Nigeria today Edo educators, if they are not the highest paid, they are among the highest paid, probably top two in the country and that says a lot.

Every government employee, their salary is calculated off of a base scale of the minimum wage. So, in 2016 the minimum wage in Edo at that time was N25,000 for every government worker except teachers. The minimum wage for teachers was N18,000 and the reason was because then the thinking in government was because teachers are more, they are four or five times the size of the civil service.

Because they are more if you are calculating their salary on a base scale of N25,000, it's going to cost you a lot. Well, guess what, Governor Obaseki increased it to N25,000 minimum wage base scale and then by 2019 he again increased it to N30,000 and then by 2022 he increased it to N40,000.

I didn't know the impact was going to be so significant, until I heard some of the teachers talk about it, some their salary increased in a month from N20, 000 to N30, 000 and that's why you find now level eight depending on the step they earn up to N100, 000.

While levels 14, 15 are earning close to N200, 000 a month as salary. It’s not just that only as there's what is called the Teachers Special Allowance (TSA), so every month teachers get a special allowance, which is why teachers earn more than civil servants.

A Level Nine primary school teacher earns more than a Level Nine civil engineer in the civil service. TSA was stopped in 2012, but Governor Obaseki restored TSA. There is also what is called LTG, Leave Transport Grant, every teacher gets LTG on the anniversary of their employment into service and that was also stopped but Governor Obaseki restored it.

Also, the last time primary school teachers were promoted in Edo State was in 2013 and part of the reason was because when you promote them, their salary will increase. So, the administration at the time, I guess they couldn't figure out how to cover the expense so they didn't promote them.

But the governor came in and promoted them, so we now had the situation that in four years, teachers were promoted six times. Guess what? Because of all these promotions and all the restoration of allowances, the wage bill for primary school teachers alone per month became N2 billion.

What is the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of Edo State? The monthly IGR of Edo State if you get N2bn you are happy, but primary school teachers alone is N2bn, so you can imagine secondary school teachers. You can imagine TIVETs, you can imagine the subvention to the tertiary institutions. We have about seven or so state owned tertiary institutions in Edo.

You have not talked about infrastructure, you've not talked about instructional materials, you've not talked about furniture and it's just one sector. Health, in fact, roads and bridges are there, so sometimes when people criticise the government, you just wonder at the level of ignorance, willful ignorance, to really appreciate what we are doing.

WHAT INFORMED THE INTRODUCTION OF EDOSTAR POLICY AND HAS IT ACHIEVED ITS AIMS?

EdoStar stands for Edo Supporting Teachers to Achieve Results (EdoStar), so when we started EdoBest, we thought we need to also have something for the teachers and so EdoStar came about, we looked at one of the challenges we've always had and we still have, unfortunately, is teachers’ distribution.

A lot of teachers want to be in the urban areas, understandably and many don't want to go to the rural areas. So even when you transfer them to the rural area, they’ll work their way back but with Governor Obaseki, it became impossible to work your way back because the governor from the very beginning was very no nonsense about it.

When we saw that there was a strong desire for teachers to be in the urban areas, we also were realistic enough to know that a teacher that is not happy is not going to be able to focus, morale will be low.

That was how we now started the EdoStar Teaching Fellowship programme, which the first phase focused really on the rural areas. So, we had to work with the then local government council chairmen, we started actually in 2019 but COVID-19 slowed us down, so the local government chairmen, traditional rulers, traditional leaders in the 18 local government areas, were involved to say nominate your indigenes who are living in your communities for the EdoStar fellowship.

The rationale is once we have hired you in that rural community, you will begin and end your career there, you are not coming to Benin. The other reason why we call it a Fellowship was that we wanted a two to three-year period where we really observe them to see how competent are they, what is the level of mastery of subject matter, because we are also trying to entrench a new culture, a new work ethics, a new ethos. We want to bury this very atavistic mind-set of “government work na shoulder them they put am,” to say, no, if you are a teacher, a teacher is a vocation, you have to put it on your head, you must carry it on your head.

That's why we said EdoStar Teaching Fellowship and by this December, we're going to be rolling out performance management. Those who do well will be permanent there, those who are struggling will be given a space to improve but if they cannot improve, they have to go, and we’ll bring in new people. We have a database of over 30,000 applicants waiting to be pulled into the system.

HOW WELL HAS THE GOVERNOR ADDRESSED THE ISSUE OF INFRASTRUCTURE DEFICIT IN THE EDUCATION SECTOR?

Speaking as with regards to the level of infrastructural deficits in the education sector, people would want to know the steps that have been taken to eliminate those deficits, the facts and the figures about the schools that have been renovated or remodeled. When we came in, we met the red roof revolution on ground, the red roof, essentially meant that the schools that were renovated by the previous administration, the colour of the roof was red. Some people then advised us that it's a new administration that we should use a different colour, but the governor did not buy that, I also didn't buy it.

There should be some continuity and so we adopted the red roof, but latter some of our detractors, especially the opposition, are now saying that all the red roofs were done by the previous administration. So if there's anything I would say I regret is that all the schools we did, we didn't commission them because at the time Mr. Governor was not into commissioning projects.

The other thing the governor wanted us to do was have amenities, so every school must have a playground, sporting facility and so forth. As at the time I was leaving SUBEB, we had intervened in up to 400 schools.

In fact, in 2019, we launched, ‘No child on the floor’ and by the time I was leaving, we had covered that furniture gap by up to 85%. Before we even started infrastructure in 2017, we did a census of all schools, so we knew the number of schools that had toilet and those that didn't have toilet or water.

The other thing we did was when we came in, we put in place a policy that no more pit latrines in our schools. So, all the pit latrines were now being converted to water systems. When we also came in, we discovered that even when water system was built in schools it was not connected to water which was very odd.

Then the other thing was mud buildings, any school that was built with mud, we did not renovate but we demolished and built from scratch and so that became a policy, no more mud buildings.

So that was why in 2019, based on the report we had submitted to the governor, he gave a directive that all dilapidated and inhabitable schools should be demolished. We sent our education secretaries; these are the people heading basic education at the local government level.

At the basic level, we have over 1300 schools, just basic alone. So even if we've done 700 it still feels like we haven't done anything. Then we have 297 secondary schools that we are yet to start working on and beyond basic and secondary, governor has been working heavily in tertiary schools. College of Agriculture Iguoriakhi they had to completely demolish and build from scratch, go and look at it today.

Also, in College of Education, Abudu they had to do massive renovation and reconstruction. Edo State University, Uzairue where the previous administration left off, this administration has continued. They now have a medical school, we had to build the facilities, in Ambrose Alli University (AAU), it was the same thing.

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE STATE GOVERNMENT AND PRIVATE SCHOOL OPERATORS?

When we came in, again, you see, a lot of things had gone on, over time, things have gotten progressively bad and people just became so used to doing things the wrong way. We came in and we said for private schools, it can't be business as usual. You must meet minimum standards; your teachers must be qualified. You can't have secondary school graduates teaching; it doesn't make sense, in some of these schools you have it and I've seen some myself.

Issues of the quality of the learning, the quality of the school environment and we said we need to make a distinction, what is a four flat for residential living and what is a school? For educating young people you cannot be in a boys’ quarters and say you have a school, it doesn't make sense.

So, for private school proprietors, in a nutshell, we want to work with them, we want them to succeed and we want them to also deliver quality education.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CHALLENGES ENCOUNTERED?

Challenges abound, fixed mind-set, people wanting status quo to remain. When I came into education, education had become heavily monetised. So far by the grace of God with the strong support of His Excellency, Governor Obaseki and the commitment of some very good civil and public servants, we are making progress.

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