IN this interview, the Chairman of the Delta State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Hon Samuel Mariere, reflects on the board’s achievements and ongoing efforts since his appointment in December 2023. He outlines the challenges faced in restoring the primary education sector and the strategies being implemented to enhance supervision, curb vandalism, and ensure quality education across the state. From engaging local communities in school management to addressing issues of ghost workers and teacher incentives, the Chairman provides insight into the board’s mission to revitalize education and secure the future for pupils in Delta. Excerpts…
Bring us up to speed on your achievements since your appointment as the Chairman of the Board.
We were appointed to this board sometime in December 2023 and immediately after the appointment, we met as a board to look at what is on the ground. Fortunately, we met a very solid board presided over by a very intelligent and competent Permanent Secretary, Sir Byron Unini. He did a fantastic job and we sat down to review what he has been doing. Having subjected it to analysis, we felt there were areas we could improve and make the primary education sector a better one in Delta State.
We drew out our program and we presented it to the Governor, telling him what we intend to do and how we intend to go about it and he graciously approved the programs that we have. One of the things we told the governor we wanted to look at is the vandalisation of school properties. The Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) and SUBEB are involved in a lot of renovation and building of schools across the states as well as the provision of other materials like desks, computers and the rest. To our greatest surprise, from the records we have, the level of stealing and vandalisation was too much. We also believed that bringing in the communities to help stem this tide will assist us a lot and this was one of the things we told the governor and he graciously approved.
From our board meeting and our analysis, we also believe that there are a lot of shortcomings currently in our primary education sector most especially in the area of supervision and quality assurance. From our investigation, we discovered that most of our teachers were not being properly supervised and this has posed a lot of problems. Like a general disease in Nigeria today, a lot of people have ‘japaed’; they go abroad and continue receiving salaries while they are not at their duty posts. You know, our system is such that when somebody is working with you and the person is doing the right thing, you feel that the person is being wicked. So at this level, we needed to take further steps to get things done.
We keyed into the national policy of getting communities to set up the School Based Management Committees (SBMC). These are committees set up by the communities where these schools are located and they are comprised of very eminent persons in the community who are interested in education. It is quite different from the Parents Teachers Association (PTA) which we know because you can only be a member of the PTA if you have a ward in that particular school. But in the SBMC, you do not need to have a child in that school. All you need is for the community to recognize you as a role model; you may have retired as a Permanent Secretary, a director in the civil service, a businessman or somebody who has an interest in the community. Such a person is picked. The woman leader of the community is also involved because women are the mothers. We also have the youth leader, the vigilante chairman and other stakeholders like faith-based organizations; churches, and mosques. They are involved in the committee. So, the SBMC becomes like the ‘Proprietors’ running the schools on behalf of the communities.
We also noticed that in communities, there are town halls and other public properties that are not vandalized but these vandals destroy government properties in communities because they do not see it as their own, they do not own it. So we realized that if these communities own these properties, they will not be vandalized. We also believe that the communities getting involved will also help to ensure that teachers are monitored because the children going to these schools are from the communities.
Again, there is no money anywhere today; the cost of feeding, fuel, and even housing has skyrocketed. In such a situation where there is no money, our citizens now have to look for extra money to send children to private schools that do not even have the facilities or qualified teachers. In a typical public school, the least-qualified teacher there is a holder of the Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) unlike in the private schools where secondary school dropouts become teachers. The difference people just see is the results. At the end of the term when they want to write exams, they (private schools) write results on the board for the children to copy and then they come out and say they have done well. But in the public schools, nobody encourages that.
What we are doing now is to ensure that once we can get it right, we can get our people to come in and that is why we decided to get the communities involved. Hence, we decided to see the traditional rulers and the vigilantes because this will also take care of the security of the properties and helping us to monitor our teachers which is our responsibility. However, I agree that we have failed in the past and so we need people to assist us because the system is not as good as we want it to be and it will take a lot to set it right. There were no records but we are now keeping proper records of teachers’ attendance. This is what the governor wants and that is what the board is doing.
We also agreed that we needed to talk to the head teachers. They are at the bottom of the command structure. When the governor instructs us as a board, we transmit it to the Local Education Authority (LEA) secretaries who also transmit it to the head teachers. Therefore, we needed to meet with them and make them buy into this reform; the MORE Agenda so that if the teachers who will execute these instructions are properly groomed, we will be able to get a lot of things done.
Yes, the problem of supervision is great but we have teachers who are on Level 15 being the highest they can go right now in the primary school teaching profession. They are supposed to be very experienced, they are supposed to have known everything there is about teaching but they do not want to leave the classrooms for others to come in; they want to retire from there. We refused and directed them to go to the office, making them what we call the School Support Officers. We intend that these school support officers, with their wealth of experience, will be the ones to go and help in the supervision of other head teachers in the schools. We will make provisions for them (school support officers) to do this.
We also have what we call the Quality Assurance Department both in SUBEB and the LEAs. They are supposed to be doing their jobs but in doing a job where there is no result, it means you have not done anything. There is this popular saying that you cannot keep doing something in the same way and expect a different result. So, we needed to do something different from what had been done before so that we could get a different result. Hence we are bringing the school support officers and asking the communities to join in the supervision because we have been able to identify that the difference between these public schools and their private counterparts is in the supervision. The teachers do not come to work and if you have a child in school and he/she comes back home not taught anything, you will not be happy.
These are some of the little things that have been neglected all this while and we have taken them to the governor who has also given his approval because he has been distraught. He is worried about the state of our schools. You will agree with me that primary school is the foundation of our education sector and once the foundation is bad, there is nothing anybody can do. You cannot build on nothing and expect it to stand. If the foundation of the primary school is bad, that of the secondary school too will be bad. Imagine a situation where children in primary schools are being introduced to ‘sorting’, giving money to lecturers to pass exams. That child will believe that the only way to pass exams is by giving money. The foundation is wrong already and that child will do the same thing in secondary school and university too and then when he becomes a doctor, he starts killing people. If he becomes an engineer, he starts building houses that are collapsing because, from the primary school, there was no proper training.
These are the things the governor is worried about because once these issues are not properly tacked, the effect will not be felt immediately today. Somehow, we are still lucky that our generation is still around but whether you like it or not, nobody stays forever. Very soon, in the next five or six years, those of our age would have retired and this generation would have gone from service.
So, these are the reasons why I said the governor is worried. We must go back to where we were before so that we can get things done properly. It is not about getting ‘As’ or First Class that does not have a substance. We need something substantial, something that society can benefit from.
We went around the 25 Local Government Areas and the people were excited because when you pass a message that is true and practical, people support it. We are already getting results of our movement. In the area of vandalisation, there are so many local governments where people have been caught and prosecuted. In Okpe, people were caught. In Ndokwa, Ukwuani, Ethiope-East, Isoko and other local government areas, people have been caught and the communities are now deeply involved. Vandalization has reduced and those are some of the results that we have gotten so far.
We will up our game in the area of supervision. As a board, we have planned the way we will supervise. We must go out every week. Our duty is not to sit in the office, it is not to sit and share contracts with people and then wait until another year when SUBEB jobs come. The board is not for SUBEB jobs (contracts). SUBEB’s job is just a small fraction of the constitutional and legal duties of this board. I can tell you that this board is serious and every member of the board is in the field doing supervision and scoping.
We just had a board meeting and discovered that there were too many complaints in the last transfers that we just did. There were complaints in every local government. What we did was to instruct the LEAs to do these transfers because the governor wants a situation where people who have been in the urban areas for a very long time are moved to the rural areas while those who have been in the rural areas for a very long time are moved to the urban areas. This is to allow for a balance and this is how transfers used to be done in those days.
But to our greatest surprise, the complaints we have now is that some people in the village were sent to more remote areas while those on the fringes of towns were sent to the heart of the cities. So, the board met and considered the current economic situation and decided that it would not be too proper to get the whole teaching staff of over 10,000 to start running around for accommodation.
Based on that, we have suspended the teacher transfer across the 25 local governments. All teachers should remain in the schools they were before. What we are going to do now is a balancing of the schools. Some schools have over 20 teachers while some have fewer. One of the things we experienced while going around is that there is not much shortage of teachers as people say. What we may have lacked is the proper balancing of the teachers where everybody wants to be in the urban areas and nobody is in the rural areas.
So, what we are doing now is to ensure that every school in the state should have at least six teachers and we can meet this target from the population we have. We have instructed the LEA secretaries and they will start working on it. Once we do the balancing now, we can begin to look at the transfers in the future when the economy improves because, with the current economic situation, the governor feels for the people and would not want to further burden the teachers.
There are pockets of allegations bordering on teachers extorting students, particularly during the last First School Leaving Certificate examinations. What is the board doing regarding curbing this trend?
As you know, it is a very big issue. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people resist transfer because they see it as a business that once you become a Head Teacher, it gives you a leeway to exploit parents. Of course, we are not magicians and you cannot just punish anybody on hearsay; you must have concrete evidence.
We have our intelligence because we have asked the communities to inform us. While we were going around the state, we were asking every community to let us know if this allegation was true. We dropped our contacts and that is why we are getting a lot of information today. This was how we got the information about a school in Oshimili North that was collecting N2000 from pupils to collect their results. We invited the school involved and they came. We discussed with them and they admitted the guilt. Thus, we followed the due process, suspended the teachers involved and set up a committee to do a proper investigation.
You know, the civil service is not a place where you just pick up a stone and throw it at people; you must follow the due process in line with the service rules. The committee will investigate and come out with its report which the board will deliberate on and take a final decision. This is the process we are following. But you know, stopping crime is not easy. What we have looked at is the causes why head teachers are collecting these monies for registration, printing of exam papers or any excuse at all.
I met with the commissioner for primary education and the commissioner for secondary education and they told me that the governor provides for the printing of question papers. There is also an arrangement between the ministries and the association of head teachers for the printing of question papers. Therefore, if the government has given them money as an association for the printing of question papers, why should they go and start extorting money from parents? Again, the government pays for the result sheets which are centrally printed. The government pays for it. The Oborevwori administration provides money so I cannot understand why these people are making the government look as if it is not living up to its responsibilities. They are spoiling the image of the government.
There was a time when the commissioner gave people money to go and try some head teachers and they fell for the bait and we disciplined them. The ministry and the board are very serious because the governor is very concerned. We have met with the CIEs, and the head teachers and pleaded with them that the governor does not want this to keep happening. Is it until we start dismissing people that they will know that we are serious? Then they will begin labelling us with bad names even when we pleaded with them earlier.
We have identified that one of the reasons that lead to this extortion is funding and there are laws in the primary school sector. We have pleaded with the local governments. They ought to bring 10 per cent of the total emoluments of the teachers’ salaries as the cost of funding the primary schools. We believe they will do something. Once they get that money, there will be no need for them (head teachers) to be stealing. The governor is ready to fund education.
Recently, you embarked on a campaign to provide exercise books to students across the state. What is your position on this considering the economic realities?
We are on it. Like I said, the governor approved money for us to print exercise books but of course, they are not enough. Our initial intention was to appeal but the governor felt it was not good for us to meet the public for them to bring money. However, the various local governments have keyed into it. I am aware that Sapele Local Government just delivered 10,000 copies to us.
Burutu Local Government promised about 10,000 copies, just as Aniocha South Local Government promised about 10,000 copies. Also, Oshimili North promised copies too. Isoko North Local Government has produced and even distributed some exercise books and many other local governments are getting involved. Ours will soon be ready.
The Board, under your leadership, is doing a lot to restore the lost glory of primary schools. In the course of your advocacy visit, were you able to find out if there are issues of ghost workers and what are you doing to nip it in the board?
First, we didn’t do a staff audit during our movement. What is worth doing is worth doing well. We are getting a lot of information about teachers who are not coming to work, who are not in the country, who connive with head teachers to miss work. We get this information. We are trying to see how we can set up a committee to look at it. We will get to the root of this.
There are a lot of things I am doing covertly and I would not want to say now because doing so will mean revealing my plans. However, I can assure you that it will be thorough. I am working on it but I do not want to reveal what we are doing about it. When we are done, the state will hear it.
We would like you to react to the number of out-of-school children in the state. Again, are there incentives to encourage teachers to be at their duty posts, particularly in rural areas?
In those days, our teachers all lived in the villages with us but today, when somebody is transferred to a village, he wants to live in town because he is doing some other business which is not good. A teacher, for instance, transferred to Akwukwu-Igbo will not want to live there but would prefer to stay in Asaba and then begin to complain about transportation costs.
I do not live in Asaba but when I was given this appointment, I had to come and live in Asaba because I cannot drive from Ughelli to Asaba every day. I had to come to Asaba and then rent an apartment to stay. When you are given a job, it entails your moving away from that particular place.
As a board, we have resolved to start building staff quarters and we are starting with three schools in the far-flung rural areas of the three senatorial districts. We are building quarters so that teachers can live in them. We also realized that some schools have excess classrooms because various stakeholders would go there to build classrooms for them and not all of these classrooms are used. We plan that going forward, we may have to convert some of those classrooms into living quarters for the staff. This has two effects.
If staff are living in the school, it will reduce vandalisation because there will be people around to watch over the facilities. Secondly, the staff will have a place to stay in the school to be able to do the job. We are working on these incentives. As a board, we have looked at it and agreed that we will do something about it.
In the area of having other incentives such as allowances for teachers in the rural areas, we are going to work it out with the local governments. The salaries of teachers are paid by the local governments. We have a meeting with the local government service commission and it is part of our plans to incentivise the teachers in the rural areas because it is one of the ways to stern this rural-urban drift. For me, it is cheaper to stay in the village than in the city.
On the issue of out-of-school children, we are working on it. We are working with the head teachers because they are the ones who will work with the communities. While we were going around, we pleaded with the communities to send their children to school. We are going to up our game in supervision. Again, we are fighting extortion. Education will be free.
As I said earlier, we have cancelled the teachers’ transfer and have opted for balancing. So, every school in Delta State will have a minimum of six teachers and we will make sure that the teachers teach. If we discover that a teacher is not on his or her duty post, we will go through the process to remove such a teacher and bring those who are ready to be there.
Is there any percentage for the out-of-school children in Delta State?
The truth is that we have problems with statistics and I must admit that. However, I can tell you that providing that statistics is not the duty of SUBEB alone. It is for the Bureau of Statistics because we do not even have the accurate population of the state. There is no good census. I can tell you the number of children we have in our schools.
Recently when I went to Abuja for a national meeting, I realized that some of the figures they were giving were fictitious. One state, for instance, said they have three million children in their school and I asked them what the entire population of the state is. People were just reeling out figures at that national summit and I questioned the veracity of such claims.
In Delta, we are honest with our figures. The number of pupils we have in our schools is about 300,000 and when I told them at the national summit, they felt Delta is small. What they do is that they will use that figure and then an estimated population of 200,000 pupils in private schools and then the estimated population of children of that age by the National Population Commission (NPC) to work out the estimated percentage of out-of-school children in the state.
But if I am a liar and I tell them we have one million children in our public schools, my level of out-of-school children will be low. But we should not lie about it. They said we are Number 10 but I do not believe we should be worried about those figures. What we should be worried about is that we are doing the right thing and that our schools are functioning. We are providing the best and that is exactly what the governor is doing. Once you do your best, you leave the rest to statisticians to go and do their work. I can assure you that, by the grace of God, our figures will be better than they used to be with what we have put in place. Even when they are lying in other states, Delta will not lie but we will get to a point where we will be Number One in Nigeria with what Governor Oborevwori has put in place.
Can you speak on the ongoing campaign for school enrollments in the 25 Local Government Areas of the state?
The registration campaign is ongoing. In all local governments, town criers are going around because we have an award for the teachers with the highest enrollments. So, everybody is working very hard. There is so much going on in the villages. In our advocacy meetings, we met with the traditional rulers, women leaders, youths, and every stakeholder. We believe that our enrollment this year will be explosive. The number of enrollments in our smart schools was overwhelming.
