NAN-H-4
Girl-child
Lydia Ngwakwe
Lagos, Feb. 9, 2018 (NAN) A don, Prof. Oluremi Sonaiya, on Friday urged the three tiers of government to prioritise the education of girl-child to protect her against unwanted pregnancy and diseases.
Sonaiya of French Language and Applied Linguistics, Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, made the plea in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos.
She described education as the best protection for girl-child against all forms of communicable diseases and pregnancies.
According to her, an uneducated mind tends to be an uninformed mind.
“ Government at all levels should prioritise education by reviewing the curriculum at all levels and retraining teachers to deliver the 21st century knowledge.
“Education is the best protection for girls against things like communicable diseases and unwanted pregnancies.
“ When girls are in school and acquiring knowledge, most of them will seek to apply what they are learning in their personal lives.
“Also, the education of girl-child should involve presenting to them profiles of outstanding women who have achieved great things in order to inspire them and fire up their imagination,’’ Sonaiya said.
She said that in spite of various government policies and strategies since the early 1990s up till the MDGs, Nigeria was one of the countries rated with poor statistics in ensuring education of the girl-child.
Sonaiya said that there were still serious challenges of equal access to education for girls, especially in the northern part of the country, particularly the North-East.
She identified cultural and religious barriers as well as the activities of Boko Haram insurgents as some of the factors militating against the girl-child education.
The don urged the governments to give adequate attention to the matter.
She advised governments to allocate more funds to research in the nation’s tertiary institutions to help in finding solutions to the problems confronting the nation.
Sonaiya also urged governments to increase its budgetary allocation to education.
According to her, United Nations suggests that developing nations should spend 26 per cent of their budget on education, but Nigeria always budgets less than 10 per cent to education.
She said: “We do not realise that education is the way out of many of our many problems; an illiterate citizenry is a burden to the country.
“Our traditional politicians think it is better to keep people poor and illiterate so that they will not know how to demand for accountability from them.
“ It is better to educate our people so that we can become contributors to the world’s pool of knowledge.
“So that we too can have our own inventions and not only be consumers of other people’s innovations.’’
She also advised the governments to avoid constantly turning to foreign countries for help, saying “we too are intelligent; it is only that the needed infrastructure and equipment are lacking.
Sonaiya, therefore, called on the governments to create the right environment for its citizens at home to thrive.
She said that Nigerians going for medical treatment in India, South Africa and UK, were being treated by Nigerian doctors. (NAN)
LED/GOK
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Edited by Olagoke Olatoye