Safe School Initiative programme designed to fail – Senate President

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By Peter Usman://

Senate President, Dr. Ahmad Lawan yesterday declared in Abuja that the
Safe School Initiative programme in Nigeria was designed to fail.

Lawan spoke at an investigative hearing by the Senate joint Committee
on Education (Basic & Secondary), and Tertiary Institutions and
TETFUND on the utilisation of the funding proposed and budgeted for
the Safe Schools Initiative, including monies, supports and donations
received from foreign governments and agencies.

The Senate President made the remarks in response to the submissions
by the Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Education, Arch.
Sonny Echono that his ministry played no role in the funding or
application of funds meant for the programme.

Echono said the Federal Ministry of Finance, National Planning and
Budget had the control of the funding of the programme to the
exclusion of the Ministry of Education.

The Senate President, who declared open the investigative hearing,
said that the arrangement which did not factor in the role of the
Ministry of Education was not good enough.

Lawan said: “This programme, Safe School Initiative, was designed to
fail. What is the meaning of the Ministry of Finance handling this. It
was unnecessarily controlled by the Ministry of Finance.

“Ordinarily, I would have thought that the National Council on
Education, where the Federal Ministry of Education and all the States
Ministry of Education, would come up with a National Policy and
Strategy for Safe School Initiative.

“Rather than the Federal Ministry of Finance controlling it, the
Ministry of Finance is just to provide funds, appropriated or donated.

“So this programme was designed to fail….And this is why we are
where we are today.

“I believe at the end of the day, we should look at the possibility of
taking that programme from the Ministry of Finance and domicile it
where it rightly belongs. That is the Ministry of Education.”

The Senate President also felt disappointed that the beneficiaries of
the programme did not turn up for the hearing.

“I was thinking that those schools that benefitted from this
Initiative should have been here because they are supposed to give
testimony to what their schools got. But they are not here.

“If someone comes from the Finance ministry now and tells us this is
what they did, if we cannot corroborate that from those beneficiaries,
our work will still be half done.

“I believe the Federal Ministry of Education should lead this
initiative. So, probably the joint committee should look into the
implementation whether it should remain in the Ministry of Finance or
the Ministry of Education should be in charge of that.

“I do believe that there should be a National Safe School Initiative
committee that should bring together the Ministry of Education,
relevant security agencies and so on.

“Until we have a national strategy and policy, driven by a committee
that is given the responsibility, we cannot achieve anything,” Lawan
said.

The Senate President said the investigation was not to look for fault
“because it is not only limited and restricted to whether someone is
not applying all the funds but also to find out how the funds were
applied.”

Earlier, the Chairman of the joint committee, Senator Ibrahim Gaidam
said the essence of the investigative hearing was to receive factual
submissions, inputs and insights on the implementation of the
initiative from invited stakeholders.

Gaidam recalled that the Safe School Initiative was launched in 2014
during the World Economic Forum on Africa, WEFA by the Nigerian
government in collaboration with the United Nations in order to
rebuild, rehabilitate and restore normalcy in the education sector.

The initiative, he said, was to be implemented then in Adamawa, Borno
and Yobe States, expanded to other northern states and to cover the
entire country as a national initiative.