A vice-presidential candidate in the 2019 general elections, Khadijah Abdullahi-Iya has challenged governments at all levels to appoint competent hands to manage the education sector if it wants better results.
Abdullahi-Iya, a candidate of the Alliance for New Nigeria (ANN), said this in an interview with EduCeleb.com in Abuja on Friday, 15th November.
According to her, appointments should be based on track-record of what the personalities had achieved rather than other considerations.
In her words, “The Nigerian government needs to get people that are competent in education. One of the things I have noticed in Nigeria is that we put people where they are not supposed to be.”
“You have to put people who have antecedents, who care enough to do something about what is going wrong.”
“I am talking about a team of people that care enough for education.”
“If we lose in education and health, we are in trouble.”
She noted that the poor education quality was part of why graduates have to be retrained even
“The graduates that are churned out have to be reeducated. It is an eyesore for us. We need to like retrain them afresh. It is exhausting. We are not getting enough money but we still need to look for money to train them.”
She also suggested increasing budgetary allocations to education to up to 15% of the total estimate and ensuring accountability. The building of more public schools and training of teachers was equally important, according to her.
