‘We Will Not Allow Nigerian Parents To Be Extorted’ – Tinubu’s Govt

The President Bola Tinubu‘s government, through the Ministry of Education, has vowed that Nigerian parents will no longer be exploited in any form.

Naijaonpoint reports that the Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, made this known during an interview on Arise News.

Alausa noted that the activities of some schools, including the extortions from parents through the sale of textbooks and nursery school graduation ceremonies, have been banned.

He said, “And now let me talk about the nursery school graduation. It might be fun for you, but sheer extortion of parents, it’s not acceptable.

“Why would you do graduation for one or two children? It’s just sheer extortion. We want to encourage these kids, but let’s give them proper milestones.

“When you finish primary school, do your graduation, when you finish JSS do your graduation, SSS, do your graduation. We give them something that leads to milestones, something that is more cogent, more tangible, not the way everything is being turned into extorting the parent.

“And part of all this extortion of the parents that we’ve stopped is that when I was growing up, I used my sister’s textbook. Our parents will tell us, please keep that book very well, your younger brother will use it. So it’s a way to save costs.

“Now they manipulated the entire process, you put the workbook as part of the textbook, so the student will now write on those books and they become useless. And next year, you tell the parents to buy another book.

“And also what publishers were doing was that they would not even change anything in the book. There won’t be any major content change. It might just be pagination or just a print of the new cover.

“They say, ‘Come and buy a new textbook’. We will not allow Nigerian parents to be extorted and that’s why we moved to stop that. And now we said the workbook must be completely separated from the core textbook itself.”

Alausa also announced the return of history to the curriculum, stating that there is no explaination to how people with their right minds would ban history from being taught in schools.

Recall that history was officially removed from the curricula of primary and junior secondary schools in 2007, with the government citing various reasons for the decision.

However, Alausa said the government of President Tinubu considered this wrong and instructed that the subject be reintegrated into the curricula.

He added, “Nigerian history is back in the curriculum. We did not ban it, but we felt it was wrong, and we moved swiftly to bring Nigerian history back.

“History wasn’t banned by this government. It was banned about 12 to 13 years ago, and you look at it now, our kids are so delinked with the history of the country. I don’t know who in their right mind banned history, and that’s why this President mandated us to do a pure curriculum review.

“Nigerian history is back as part of our curriculum. We instituted it. We started it so Nigerian history is back. We did not ban it, but we felt it was wrong, and we moved swiftly to bring Nigerian history back.”