Over the weekend, the lawmaker representing Oyo Central in the National Assembly, Senator Yunus Akintunde, defended the Federal Government’s policy on infrastructural sustenance culture, saying the seeming rot in the education sector has nothing to do with Nigeria’s politics and governance.
He said there is no link between the decay of public facilities and politics, contending that “non-governmental participation and individual intervention in the nation’s educational sector must be encouraged to reverse the dilapidation of public utilities in the country.
However, an architectural expert, Mr Oladejo Olawoyin, blamed the challenges in the sustenance of public infrastructure on the dilapidation of the nation’s politics, saying the lack of commitment of successive Nigerian leaders at the governmental level and policy summersaults have stunted socioeconomic growth in Nigeria.
He stated, “We have done research and discovered that more than 300,000 schools in Nigeria have gone under in terms of dilapidation.
Dilapidation is a state of ruin—the destruction of infrastructure that is supposed to be maintained. When you don’t have a maintenance culture, it means you have misplaced your priorities.
Both Akintunde and Olawoyin spoke on the sidelines of Iroko Community Grammar School (ICGS), 1983 Set 40th Anniversary, at the Iroko community of Akinyele Local Government Area of Oyo State.
Akintunde, who is the chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, averred: “I strongly disagree with him.
The dilapidation of education infrastructure has nothing to do with our political structure. It’s purely a policy issue, and it’s not only educational infrastructure.
“These days, you see so many thousand polls of solar street lights on. Governments are putting them on now.
There is no provision for their maintenance, so in five years’ time, they will all be dead. If you remember former Governor Adebayo’s Akala’s era, that was the first time they put on a solar street light on Awolowo Road, old Bodija.
“After about one or two years, the whole thing went off because, while building up our contract, the provision for renovations, maintenance, and rehabilitation had never been part of it. Look at most of the buildings here; they were built tens of years ago,” he submitted.
Contrarily, Olawoyin insisted that “in the 1960s, a lot of these schools were founded by Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the South West. I can tell you that more than 90 per cent of these schools, except for the ones on major roads, have gone under.
“Look at the University of Ibadan. We are looking for ways to renovate some structures in the University College Hospital (UCH), and a doctor from the US said he was going to drop a million dollars.
So, we need the involvement of the alma mater. But first, it is not the buildings that are dilapidated; it is our politics. Our education is gone. That is what made me refer to Chief Obafemi Awolowo.
“Let us have a bottom-up solution. Let the school go back to the missionaries. Obviously, the government cannot handle them any more.
That is the strategy we should adopt around here, even all over Nigeria. Alma mater and endowment should be strong. President Bola Tinubu said to look for what you can do for the country, not what the country can do for you. The country is broke. That is the truth. We have to look inward. ”
“We did not put the right resources where we were supposed to put them. We actually forgot that education is what he’s going to push.
That was what he (Awolowo) was thinking in the 1960s. But we forgot for about five or six decades. Nobody touches these schools. The doors, roofs, and other components have fallen off.
“As an architect, I know that when you don’t have a roof, the building is gone. You can even see in some of them that trees are already coming out of their foundations.
The culture of maintenance is what we lack. We cannot come here every time, so after 15 years, we will be coming back again.
“I went to Harvard University, and I did my programme there for three years. I discovered that the school was established in 1636, almost four centuries ago, and today, Harvard has more than $50 billion in endowment funds, more than Nigeria’s budget.
Earlier in his speech, the chairman of the 40th-anniversary committee, Ambassador Bolaji Akinremi, posited: “In preparation for this celebration, we visited our Alma Malta and were saddened by the sorry state of the infrastructure of our once beautiful campus. So, we decided to raise N100 million to bring back our Alma Malta.”
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