It was on October 18, 2012, the time was 10.43am. I happened to be in Calabar, the Cross River State capital. I ran into an old classmate of mine and we decided to make an unscheduled visit to our alma mater, West African People’s Institute, Calabar. To my chagrin, the infrastructural situation in the highly revered school was better imagined than seen. From the scanty library to unkempt staff rooms, most of the classes visited were without standard blackboards, chairs and other learning materials. In fact, in one of the classes, I counted over 100 pupils with a sitting desk that can be counted with the fingers. The spirited effort put up by the school principal, Mrs. F. M. Odok, to defend this abnormality was taken with a pinch of salt. While states such as Akwa Ibom, Lagos, Ogun, Rivers, Oyo, Osun, Ekiti, Edo, Imo and many others have made education the livewire of their administration by declaring free education from primary-secondary level, sadly, the opposite is the case in Cross River State.
Unbelievable as these may be, I have no doubt that a sizable number of those eligible to sit the Senior Secondary Certificate Examinations may not be able to do so due to lack of funds. The story was the same when we visited other schools within the metropolis. It is saddening that while the Federal Government is working on the reduction of the rate of illiteracy in the country, Cross River State is fertilising it. There’s no better time than now for the government to put on its thinking cap and call for a stakeholders meeting to tackle the decline in the sector and increase access to free and quality education in the state.
Emmanuel Umohinyang,
5, Durojaiye Street, Palmgrove,
Lagos State,
+23480358005.