Aregbesola woos Ijeshas in Lagos over schools merger

Aregbesola woos Ijeshas in Lagos over
schools merger
on october 22, 2013 at 9:06 am in news
*Says reforms are painful but necessary
By  LEKE ADESERI, South West Regional Editor &
CHARLES KUMOLU
LAGOS—OSUN State governor, Ogbeni Rauf
Aregbesola has said that the recent reforms in the
education sector in Osun, were not meant to inflict
pains on the people, describing the policies as
necessary.
He also noted that the restructuring was informed
by the decay and dilapidation which the sector had
witnessed in the past.
Aregbesola, who said this at an event convened by
Ijesha community in Lagos, acknowledged that the
reforms are generating pains.
His words: ‘’On the surface, it looks as if we are
deliberately out to inflict pains with the reformation
of our school system. Nothing close to that is our
intention.
“Not at all! We saw the  hopeless situation of our
basic education system. Because of my experience
with the comatose educational system in the state
that we were about to inherit, even from the days of
my campaigns, long before we assumed office, I
made it very clear that we would carry out surgical
action on it during our campaigns.
“ We mentioned our intention to the whole world that
we will address the issue of poor and totally
dilapidated educational infrastructure of basic
education to aggressively solve the problem. But as
usual, people do not take politicians serious
because of their experience.
“Some of our policies are necessary but painful and
may not be well accepted now. We are, however,
convinced that surgery is not always pleasing and
soothing to those who need it but the joy of
recovery and healing afterwards more than
compensate for the temporary pain of going under
the knife.”
In addition, Aregbesola noted that the current
restructuring is a product of an education summit,
which was earlier convened in the state.
“Two months and 15 days after our inauguration,
we put together a world summit on education in
which all known experts on education in the world
were called to help us look at the hopeless
education state of our territory. They were there for
two days under the leadership of Professor Wole
Soyinka. Everything was dissected accordingly.
‘’But at that conference I addressed the gathering in
my opening remarks that, left for me what I would
have loved to do was to close down the schools for
a period of one year or two years so as to be able to
do what is necessary to education. This was my
position, but of course, my view was too radical.
The communique came with series of steps to be
taken to revamp the education system and we
have been at it since then.”
Continuing, he said: ‘’Rather than look at what we
are doing as the best form to revamp education and
ensure that our students have the best for our
limited resources and maximisation of our
resources for excellence and efficiency which has a
whole of our efforts, sentiment and primordial
issues were brought into it. The reformation of the
school feeding system has led to the spending of
N3.6 billion every year from primary 1 to 4 which
makes us the only state that does so in Nigeria.”