The Minister of State for Education, Mr Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, during a meeting with the Senate Committee on Basic and Secondary Education on Tuesday, presented a detailed proposal on reopening of schools across the nation to the National Assembly.
Nwajiuba noted that the government had revealed that schools for some categories of students would be reopened soon. However, He refused to give details of the proposal, saying some public might misinterpret it as the ministry’s guidelines for schools reopening.
He said,
“Children are asymptomatic carriers. Nobody can prove whether they can infect each others. Not even the health experts. Everything we know about it is what we read. There is nothing we discovered on our own.”
“We said we are going to experiment with some people and these are children from exit classes”
“In the document we have provided, we have suggested how we can move our education sector forward in this pandemic period.
“We don’t want to make it (proposal) known at this period so that some people will not take our proposal for the guidelines for schools reopening.
“This is because people publish fake guidelines every day, which I always come on air to debunk.
“What we have now is a proposal.
“The documents were presented to you so that you can criticise and make inputs as major stakeholders”
The Minister, expressed concern over the decision of the Oyo State Government to reopen its primary and secondary schools despite the fact that they are currently battling with increase in cases of new coronavirus infection in the state.
He said:
“Why is Oyo State talking of reopening schools when it has just started recording increase cases of Coronavirus infection”
“Just beside Oyo is Ogun State, which was part of the three states under the FG’s lockdown since April,and it is not talking about schools reopening.”
“As we speak, Kogi and Cross River states are not on the same page with the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control on the issue of testing while all their neighbouring states are conducting tests”.
The Vice Chairperson of the panel, Senator Akon Eyakenyi, who presided over the meeting, expressed the fears that the academic calendar could be distorted in public schools where no visible arrangement was being made to teach the children at home unlike their counterparts in private schools who are undergoing online lessons.
Eyakenyi said public schools students were made to follow educational programmes on radio and television stations, however most people are not able to follow up and some other ones tune to cartoon stations whenever there is no adult guide.
Comments are closed.