The rot in the primary and junior secondary schools in Kube, a rural community in the Karu area of Nasarawa State, mirrors the state of schools across the state
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Everyone hurried out of the classroom, joining other students and teachers darting out of the two other classrooms in the building. Apart from the three classrooms, the other room in the building is the principal’s office. The only other building in the school was a dilapidated examination hall barely covered by a tattered roof.
During an extensive investigation by PREMIUM TIMES that started in 2022, our reporter saw dilapidated buildings, including some with blown-off or leaky roofs, shortages, and, in some cases, an outright lack of classrooms and other facilities like furniture, toilets, and books, as well as poorly equipped or total lack of laboratories across different public schools in the rural parts of the state.
The sorry state of Government Senior Secondary School, Kube, is typical of many of the 2,178 public primary and secondary schools in Nasarawa State.Despite describing the state of the schools as “disturbing” at the time, the government has not invested in their repair. Each state gets intervention funds, comprising the state’s contributions plus the matching grant of the same value from UBEC. States that fail to contribute their part would not access the grants held by UBEC.
It also serves the Government Junior Secondary School, Kube. The junior secondary school’s over 1,000 students resume classes in the building in the afternoon after the primary school has closed. However, the project stopped halfway due to a funding problem. The project is a telltale sign of the school’s neglect and the community’s intention but insufficient capacity to rescue the situation.
“We are renting this place; the building belongs to the primary school. Junior secondary school doesn’t have a structure. We have not built any blocks since 2006, when the school was established,” Mr Danjuma said. “During the dry season, the students contend with the sun, and now in the rainy season, the students have nowhere to hide due to poor infrastructure development; the rain beats them as they go to school daily.”
Apart from the schools in Kube, others visited in Karu LGA by our reporter and seen in poor conditions are the Government Primary School in Bakin Kogi Kondoro, the primary school in Kukuri, Government Primary School, Kukuri , and Government Primary School, Shinkafa . “The students are not learning from the classroom because they are not comfortable. Whatever the teacher may have been teaching them at that period, they cannot learn,” said Oriyomi Ogunwale, the team lead of Eduplana, a not-for-profit organisation involved in the campaign for accountability and transparency in the education sector.
Lawan Bazza, a lecturer in the Department of Agricultural Education, Federal College of Education, Zuba, FCT, Abuja, also shared concerns about the future of the children receiving education in those schools. The letter noted that NSUBEB “is generally embarking on rehabilitation of these structures and provision of other infrastructures through Matching Grant Intervention Funds, cosponsored by the Universal Basic Education of Commission, Abuja and Nasarawa State government, taking into cognisance the even and geographical spread in the state.
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