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By Emman Ovuakporie
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Hakeem Gbajabiamila has advocated that willing youth corpers should be accommodated as teachers.
To this end, the speaker seeks an amendment to the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC to accommodate willing corpers to be teachers.
The speaker made this advocacy at the ongoing special plenary for out of school children in Nigeria.
Full Text:
I welcome you all to this special plenary session of the House of Representatives, and I thank you for being here this morning.
2.We have come here today to consider the matter of the millions of children in our country who are out of school, and who as a result are denied their fundamental right to receive the training and skills acquisition opportunities that will allow them to have better lives than their parents before them, and provide a better future for their offspring.
3.We are here to consider the failures of policy development and implementation, the vagaries of culture and religion that have contributed to the plight of these young people. We are here to advance solutions to this problem.
4.We are here to act in the best interests of our people by ensuring that the solutions presented here today are formulated into actionable policy plans to be implemented diligently, with haste. This is a commitment that we made in our Legislative Agenda, and we will live up to this and all other commitments which we have freely made before God and the Nigerian people who have chosen us to represent them here in this hallowed chamber.
5.Over the last twenty years, the government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has committed to a programme of educational reform that has resulted in the allocation of significant sums of money to fund basic education access in our country. These reforms have been intended mostly to address the availability gap by building new schools and providing teachers in previously underserved areas.
These investments have not yielded the desired outcomes.
6.In too many parts of the country, the school attendance rates have not improved, and the quality of education being received by those who enrol and attend still falls far short of our most fundamental expectations. We must consider that perhaps the time for a massive course correction has come.
7.That process of course correction must begin first with
a critical assessment of everything we have done so far, so that we can objectively determine for ourselves what works and what doesn’t, what can be learned from reform efforts and what is necessary to ensure that no Nigerian child, born in this age will ever be denied the benefits of an empowering education.
8.Let no one be left in any doubt, we will not eradicate poverty from our land or meet the challenges of insecurity, we cannot defeat ignorance and strife or attract foreign investment in significant numbers to make a substantial economic difference until we have ensured for all our people access to a modern education that empowers them to participate fully in the 21st-century knowledge economy.
9.We have spent the past two decades building schools. It has not been enough. Now is the time to lift our ambitions to the consideration of bigger things and begin to build capacity for the future survival of our nation. The complex interconnectivity of modern life means that we cannot be satisfied with merely shoving more children into failing and failed school systems just so we can maintain the appearance of education access. We must aim for better.
10.An enlightened education gives hope and the confidence that through the studied application of the human mind and human ability, individuals can remake their existence and make their world better.
11.Education excellence calls for ongoing curriculum reform, and a broad embrace of technology in our schools. At the earliest possible stage of their education, we must begin to equip.