Covid-19 Pandemic: Advocacy on palliative for proprietors and teachers of private schools

By Rev C.O.S Fawenu
Saying that the Educational System has been worst hit by the effect of COVID-19 pandemic is to restate the obvious.
Presently, everything is on a standstill. Schooling has since stopped, exams that are supposed to be used to test the learning that had been previously impacted has become a subject of dilly dallying by the authority due to the fact that they are faced with the difficult choice of keeping the school children and their teachers alive or giving the children a livelihood.
Meanwhile, the means of livelihood of both the proprietors and their employees are already in a jeopardy.
Unfortunately, I am yet to see any deliberate policy discussion on their plight and the role the government can play to ameliorate the difficulties being faced by a sector that has been hitherto very helpful to address educational deficit of various governments at all levels. It is not an overstatement to say that but for private schools intervention both the malady of substandard quality and out of school children would have been a more pathetic story.
In that respect, it is needful that both the government and private social intervention agencies should begin to reason on how to salvage that critically desirable sector from total collapse.
As it is presently, the schools have not opened for almost two terms. The implication of that is that private schools have not receive any income to pay their teachers stipends (because that is what it is in most private schools) for an average total of four months.
Thus where there is sincerity of purpose on the part of the government to help the private schools to survive the COVID-19 pandemic effect is to find ways of bringing the proprietors and their employees into the beneficiary net of the social investment program of both the state and the federal government.
Rather than continue with the amorphous school feeding program when the kids are not in school, giving the teachers of the children a livelihood will be a more sincere and workable option.
The statistics of schools to benefit can be easily obtained from the official record of schools that are properly registered with the ministry of education and have been paying their dues to the government; While the statistics of specific teachers and other employees to benefit can be generated from the record of the internal revenue generation agency into which the schools have been remitting the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) tax of their staff.
From those records, while the pandemic last, the private school workers can be paid a regular stipend as palliative.
As things are today with the level of unemployment in the country and its attendant consequences, the private school sector collapse is better imagined than experienced.
On the probable argument of “what about other sector of the society”? While such argument is genuine and justifiable but if we agree that education is the bedrock of an egalitarian society, giving the sector such a special attention will not be too much a laudable priority to be embraced by all and sundry.
Fawenu, former State Secretary, CAN, Kwara State chapter