President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan, has said on Thursday,
that the Safe School Initiative programme in Nigeria was designed to fail.
Lawan spoke at an investigative hearing by the Senate joint
committee on education (Basic & Secondary) and Tertiary Institutions and
TETFUND on the utilisation of the funding proposed and budgeted for the Safe
Schools Initiative, including monies, supports and donations received from
foreign government and agencies.
The Senate President made the remarks in a response to the
submissions by the Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Education,
Arch. Sonny Echono that his ministry played no role in the funding or
application of funds meant for the programme.
Echono said the Federal Ministry of Finance had the control
of the funding of the programme to the exclusion of the Education ministry.
The Senate President who declared open the investigative
hearing said that arrangement which did not factor in the role of the Ministry
of Education was not good enough.
Lawan said: “This programme, Safe School Initiative was
designed to fail. What is the meaning of the Ministry of Finance handling this.
It was unnecessarily controlled by the Ministry of Finance.
“Ordinarily, I would have thought that the National Council
on Education where the Federal Ministry of Education and all the States Ministry
of Education, would come up with a National Policy and Strategy for Safe School
Initiative.
“Rather than Federal Ministry of Finance controlling it,
Ministry of Finance is just to provide fund, appropriated or donated.
“So this programme was designed to fail….And this is why we
are where we are today.
“I believe at the end of the day, we should look at the
possibility of taking that programme from the Ministry of Finance and domicile
it where it rightly belongs. That is the Ministry of Education.”
The Senate President also felt disappointed that the
beneficiaries of the programme did not turn up for the hearing.
“I was thinking that those schools that benefitted from this
Initiative should have been here because they are supposed to give testimony to
what their schools got. But they are not here.
“If someone comes from Finance ministry now and tells us
this is what they did, if we cannot corroborate that from those beneficiaries,
our work will still be half done.
“I believe the Federal Ministry of Education should lead
this initiative. So, probably the joint committee should look into the
implementation whether it should remain in the Ministry of Finance or the
Ministry of Education should be in charge of that.
“I do believe that there should be a National Safe School
Initiative committee that should bring together the Ministry of Education,
relevant security agencies and so on.
“Until we have a national strategy and policy, driven by a
committee that is given the responsibility, we cannot achieve anything,” Lawan
said.
The Senate President said the investigation was not to look
for fault “because it is not only limited and restricted to whether someone is
not applying all the funds but also to find out how the funds were applied.”
Earlier, the Chairman of the joint committee, Senator
Ibrahim Gaidam said the essence of the investigative hearing was to receive
factual submissions, inputs and insights on the implementation of the
initiative from invited stakeholders.
Gaidam recalled that the Safe School Initiative was launched
in 2014 during the World Economic Forum on Africa (WEFA) by the Nigerian
government in collaboration with the United Nations in order to rebuild,
rehabilitate and restore normalcy in the education sector.
The initiative, he said, was to be implemented then in
Adamawa, Borno and Yobe States, expanded to other northern states and to cover
the entire country as a National Initiative.
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