EDUCATIONAL CORRUPTION

Education is the most sensitive sector of the livelihood of any nation. Education can be divided into two major aspects, viz: 

a. formal education

b. informal education

Formal education is saddled with the responsibility of taking care of the needs of the child within the four walls of a classroom and its environment, while informal education takes care of the needed duties of a person within his her domestic environment, such as a girl being trained on sweeping the veranda in the morning, a boy taught how to cultivate the farm land, among others.

In today’s society, formal educational seems to have overshadowed informal method of education. Most parents due to their tight working schedules cannot meet up with the hour to hour care of their children, thus, the neglect of the child home trainings. This is not the theme of this write up. The purpose is to access the hike in corruption indices in Nigeria’s educational system.

The educational sector is being run by the Federal Ministry of Education. This ministry is the most corrupt of all the educational agencies in Nigeria. Yet, it pretends to be the custodians of future leaders. We are going to focus more on corruption in secondary schools.

Secondary schools today, especially federal unity schools, have been exploited by corrupt individuals in the civil service and the federal ministry of education. Some of the causes of corruption in secondary schools include:

1.   QUEST FOR PROMOTION:  Promotion to a new grade level which should come as and when due is not longer the order of the day. People bribe their way into some of the grade level they are, courtesy of the officials at the federal ministry of education. 

2.   TRANSFER:  Teachers nowadays liaise with corrupt officials at the ministry of education and their transfers are worked to better places. They are no longer voluntarily summiting themselves to environment they were initially posted to.

3.   POSITIONS: It is very appalling about the amount that teachers pay, especially those at the level of Deputy Directors (DD) for them to be posted to  good school as principal. In fact, data shows that millions are bribed to officials at the ministry so that their posting letter would come faster and to a good place.

The Solutions to the problem of corruption especially in the unity colleges with vilification of the Federal Ministry of Education include:

1.   Making sure that those in the helm of affairs of the Ministry are persons of proven integrity.

2.   Making sure that any teacher, notwithstanding if the person is a deputy director or even a director, caught in the act of bribing any official in the federal ministry of Education should be disgrace from the civil service and dismissed.

3.   CCTV cameras should be installed in strategic offices, where transactions could be monitored effectively.

When these factors are put in place Nigeria becomes a corrupt free place. Every teacher as well as civil servants should see themselves as custodians of morality watchdog of integrity.