| Head teachers in some public schools in the Lagos Mainland local government have rejected the boreholes promised by the council. They would rather have functional toilets and constant electricity. The chairman of the council, Adekanye Oladele, recently announced plans to construct boreholes in the 25 public primary schools in the council. The generators that will power the pumping machines have been purchased and distributed to the schools. Investigations, however,revealed that most of the schools lack functional toilets. St. Jude’s Primary School, Ebute-Metta, founded in 1874,is one of the schools whose borehole project has been completed. The school’s toilets are disfigured with human faeces. Faeces leak from the rusted pipes, polluting the compound with a foul odour. Although, the staff said they were happy with the notebooks given to the school for distribution among the pupils, they said the council did not ask them what the immediate needs of the school were. The head teacher of the school, Mrs. A.O. Owolabi, said: “They ought to ask us what our pressing need is. The school needs renovation. Our major challenges are toilets, furniture for the classrooms, and power. There is no electricity here.” The borehole was sunk during the last vacation and functions irregularly. The school had a public tap before the borehole was constructed, though water supply through this source was not regular. “If we had been asked what we wanted, we would have mentioned the toilet. No soakaway. The excretion passes out of everywhere, from behind the blocks. It is too much to bear. You see that it is terrible,” Mrs. Owolabi said. “We appreciate what they have done for us, but we ask them to also put into consideration that we don’t have a good toilet. The smell is killing us,” she added. The school has one dilapidated three-storey building. Last year, the Universal Basic Education (UBE) refurbished classrooms on the first floor. Other floors were left untouched when money allocated for the project was reportedly exhausted. Classrooms on these floors have neither doors nor windows. The concrete ceilings are chipped, revealing the iron rods supporting the decks. Paint on the floors and the walls has peeled off from too many years of neglect. “Our school needs proper renovation. Did you see the ceilings? You can see that they are not in good condition at all. It is an eyesore,” said the head teacher. The classrooms seem to have many entrances, because the windows are set low. From the classrooms on the second and third floors, the surrounding buildings are in full view. Aside from the nursery section, with its colourful plastic chairs, and the classrooms,which were recently renovated by the UBE, the other classrooms have no furniture. The chairs in the nursery section were brought by the parents and are taken back once the kids leave the class. The school’s food shed collapsed in the presence of this reporter while some pupils were in it buying food, The food seller, Gbemisola Akerele, and the pupils escaped unhurt, as they left the shed while it was still creaking. “I am not happy because we could have been hurt. I have been complaining about this shed. I know that the borehole project is important, but this is also important too,” Mrs. Akerele said. When asked where she intends to go to continue with her business, she said that she would now be selling food under a nearby tree. “Well, we are not yet in the rainy season,” she said. At Ansar-u-deen Primary School, also in Ebute-Metta, the head teacher, Mrs. E.K. Adesiyakan, said the problem with her school is the lack of electricity. “The local government is doing their best. They gave us notebooks, a generator for pumping water, and constructed a borehole. But our main problem is that there has never been light here – at least, since I was posted here in 2005,” she said. “This is an institution, and we don’t make money. The money to buy fuel to power the generator before we can pump water will be too much.” Mrs. Adesiyakan said that the nursery school also needsfacilities. “The nursery school has no teaching aids, nothing. If there is no nursery class, there is nothing the primary school can do, because we absorb most of the students in the primary school from there,” she said. She expressed fear that many parents would withdraw their children from the school if they are not satisfied with what it had to offer, especially with the competition posed by private nursery schools. She said she bought some of the furniture in the nursery school, while the rest were donated by one Mr. Salami, an old student of the school. “He came here and asked for what we needed. He said that he schooled here before. When he saw that there was nothing here, he brought most of the furniture that you see here,” she said. Mr. Oladele said he was determined to “restore the golden age of the public primary school system.” “Even though Nigeria might have problems with the present generation of leaders, my administration intends to use the primary schools as a starting point to salvage the future generation,” he said. |
Jan222009