Sustainability Of Public Schools In Oyo State A Non-Negotiable Obsession

"When planning for a year, sow corn
When planning for a decade, plant trees
When planning for a life, train and educate men."

The right to education has always been universally recognized by declarations, covenants and conventions , the world has acknowledged the inalienable right of the people to education. This right has materialized into a natural right and to achieve full realization of this right the world has recognized the need for free education which started with the universal declaration of human right. Today over seventy countries have made some progressive constitutional provision or other statutory enactment on the right to education.

The fast trending deceleration of the Oyo state government to privatise our public schools left us bewildered, the plan to eradicate free education at level is not only tragic but catastrophic as well, and should be recorded in the black bank of blemish of those who have the effrontery to make such retrogressive pronouncement in Nigeria 21st century. We contend education must be available to every man to the best of his natural ability to enable him be in the fittest possible state to produce to the utmost that he his capable of.

An arrangement under which some are privilege to education while some are not is inhuman, unjust and in the long run anti social. It gives the educated on unfair advantage in economic, political and other social activities over the uneducated fellow citizens, even though the later might have greater inborn talents and latent abilities over the former. It is absurd logic to conclude privatizing our public school because certain groups are bidding, without rethought of the helpless masses who could only train their wards through the public school program.

To the entire progressive minds throughout Nigeria and all over the world, sustainability of Public Schools Education in Oyo State as become an obsession that in not negotiable. The struggle for the achievement of this goal will continue even if our heads will be used breaking the coconut of the free education crusade.

Education is light, it banishes fear of ignorance. Any government that does not pursue and prosecute free education at all levels policy will be regarded as Nigeria's enemy number one because free education at all levels is the only remedy to the orientational confusion which our country is currently engulfed in.

Nothing must be allowed to plug the wheel of free education at all level in a Democratic Nigeria. We will ensure the anti free education protagonist keep their blaspheme to themselves if they have nothing to offer to Nigeria and Nigerian

Comrade Olugbode Damola
NAPS National PRO
(National Association of Polytechnic Students NAPS)