By A’isha Biola Raji
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has said that decentralization of Nigeria’s education remains an antidote to the declining fortunes of the sector in the country, stressing that part of the solution is for federal schools to be given back to states to control.
The former vice president made the recommendation yesterday while delivering a keynote address at the rescheduled 2013 16th Annual Conference of the African Council for Communication Education (ACCE), hosted by the Department of Mass Communication of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
A statement from Atiku’s media office in Abuja said the former VP is of the view that over centralization of education has killed creativity and hampered scholarship in Nigeria’s education.
“We cannot significantly improve education in this country if we continue with the current overly centralized system with suffocating federal control. Federal schools should be handed over to the states in which they are located and the budgetary resources hitherto expended on them transferred to those state governments.
“The federal government should focus on setting up regulatory standards and enforcing those standards”, he said.
He noted further that the country’s education curriculum needs also to be diversified and retooled to make it more adaptive to the country’s current economic challenges like unemployment and lack of manufacturing capacity.
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