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The Senate and the Universal Basic Education Bill By Burtonsville, MD, 20866
INTRODUCTION ------------ The Universal Basic Education (UBE) bill recently passed by the Senate, part of which (i) provides free education for children between the ages of seven to 17; (ii) criminalizes failure of parents and guardians to send their children to school; and (iii) grants free lunch for children in all primary schools and junior secondary school in the country; is a very welcome one. This aspect of the provision should be retained by the House, and the President should assent and pass it into law. A more "school-friendly" provision should have included a free breakfast snack (e.g milk + akara, etc.), especially useful for those who may have left home to come to school without any meal at all - but that may yet come as state and/or local government contributions.
The free and compulsory education-for-all provisions are also happy vindication of past AG - UPN - SDP and present AD party positions.
It will be most interesting to see how the criminalization aspect is implemented in the Northern part of our country, where especially the education of girl-children has been neglected for way too long. A concomitant legislation should be the elevation of the marriage age of the girl-child to above 17 uniformly everywhere in the country, a move which would again have a salutary effect particularly on some of our Northern compatriots.
EDUCATIONALLY-DISADVANTAGED STATES ---------------------------------- However there is a second provision of the UBE Bill which should be seriously revised: out of the total of 36 states in the country, it has now officially designated 24 states + FCT as disadvantaged viz: Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Bayelsa, Benue, Borno, Cross River, Ebonyi, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, Plateau, Rivers, Sokoto, Taraba, Yobe and Zamfara and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. Thus ALL the 19 Northern states and 5 Southern states plus Abuja have the advantage of a disadvantaged designation which provides additional 20% of funds. This is presumably 20% additional for EACH state than it would not have gotten otherwise, not 20% additional UBE funds to be distributed among all of the states.
Let us take the rosier alternative. Since on average most states have about 20 local governments (i.e 774 total LGs /36 states), this means that this additional resource corresponds to roughly 1% additional funds for each local government, where traditional primary and secondary school issues should be left to be handled. For a state like Kano with 44 local governments, a 20% increase corresponds to less than 0.5% increase per local government.
With the kind of serious educational disadvantage that we are talking about, this will not amount to much, and inherent in the policy is an inadequate design which will ensure that it may fail.
Let us do a little arithmetic to see the fiscal implications of this particular policy.
Assume that we have a total of X billion Naira to spend on all 36 States, out of which D billion Naira will be spent on 25 disadvantaged states - i.e on 69.4% of all states. Then we would be spending on average (X-D)/11 on the educationally advantaged states and D/25 billion Naira on the educationally disadvantaged. We are now told that: D/25 = 1.2 (X-D)/11 or D = 0.73X
Thus this policy means that 73% of the whole UBE funds will be spent on the 25 disadvantaged states instead of 69.4% if it had been spent uniformly on all states. For the advantaged states, we would be spending 27% of total funds instead of 30.6%. Again, this does not translate into really a significant boost or resource deficit for any one state, and we are spreading the increased resources too thinly.
PROPOSED POLICY REVISION ------------------------ So what should have been done? What should have been done was to choose say 9 demonstration states, that is one state per zone in the South and two per zone in the North as a tip to it being a more disadvantaged region. We would then fund them for a period of say 5 years at (say) DOUBLE the average it would otherwise have received at uniform funding. After the 5 years, and after assessing progress via established and credible outcome-based performance measures, we would re-visit the designation process. Each of our six political zones could be required to democratically decide which state is most educationally disadvantaged in its own zone. It is likely that Zamfara, Sokoto, Benue, Nassarawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Osun, Bayelsa and Ebonyi may come out tops in this category, but that should be left to the zones to decide. In the case of this more pragmatic double funding for disadvantaged states, we would have: D/9 = (X/36)*2 or D = 0.50X
Thus this revised policy would mean that 50% of the whole UBE funds will be spent on the 9 states instead of 25% if it had been spent uniformly on all states. For the advantaged states, we would be spending 50% of total funds instead of 75%. This would translate more into a significant boost for those states that get this increased funding, but with only an average reduction of only 25%/27 or 1% for each of the advantaged states. That is a sacrifice that should not be too burdensome, because the imbalance of education between the North and South represents one of the most serious threats to our national unity.
EPILOGUE -------- On the whole, the national expenditure on Education in our annual budgets should be significantly increased for ALL the states and monitored closely even before these designations of "disadvantageousness" are made, otherwise actions taken will be ineffective. One hopes that the House of Representatives and the President (who launched the UBE scheme itself in Sokoto back in September 1999) will consider this alternative policy proposition before it becomes law. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bibiliography ------------- Senate Passes Universal Basic Education Bill http://hub.allafrica.com/stories/200112060450.html Quarrels Over UBE http://hub.allafrica.com/stories/200011010113.html Deadlock Over Basic Education http://hub.allafrica.com/stories/200010160400.html Universal Basic Education Programme Would Reposition Nigeria - Provost http://hub.allafrica.com/stories/200010180129.html Obasanjo Hailed Over UBE http://hub.allafrica.com/stories/199910120154.html December 2001
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