It Will Take the Grace of God For Buhari To Repair What PDP Has Destroyed For 16 Years – Ogbuagu

Dr. (Mrs.) Veronica Ogbuagu was a former Education Commissioner in Delta State during the Chief Onanefe Ibori Administration and the Proprietress of Chinkelly Group of Schools, Ekpan, Delta state. She is also a staunch APC cheiftain in Delta State. In this Interview with Francis Sadhere she talks about politics and how to revamp the educational sector in the country. Excerpt:

Madam please introduce yourself to us

My name is Dr. Mrs. Veronica Ogbuagu.

Please what is your comment on the performance of President Buhari so far?

I have been following papers and Ive been reading reactions here and there even starting from when he started appointing a few people. People were talking that he was appointing people from his area, and that it is nepotism and favoritism and so on and so forth. They said he is slow in action and anytime I read this in papers I get so angry because the people who say all these things are PDP people. They have not even given it a second thought about what they have done and how they have destroyed this country. Yet they still want to continue with their act. And I feel sad because everybody is expecting that at this point in time, the president would have locked all the Governors in a room, strip them from all they stole from the country and return these money to the respective states that are crying that they dont have money. They have the guts to say that the president is slow, yet they are the ones that stripped Nigeria naked. Like I always say, I want to compare Nigeria to a woman in a market square where a man comes and strip her naked taking her clothes and everything and run away. This is exactly what PDP has done to this country for 16 years and you know what it takes for that dignity to be restored. Buying her an already made cloth or probably sewing a new cloth for her will take time. We have so many problems in this country caused by PDP 16 years of misrule and corruption. The era of celebrating corruption has gone. This is the era of celebrating virtue. I want to call on Nigerians to be patient and be prayerful so that our president will do precisely what God wants him to do. He is not just there for fancy sake. He has a mission and I believe God has given him this mission and he will make the provision to complete his job.

The coming of Buhari and APC is like a second independence in Nigeria so we need to be patient. For about a month I have been working on education all the policies that the past Government has put in place that has destroyed education so that anybody that is sworn in as a minister or as anything can work with it by putting things right. They are suppose to be coming up with ideas and push it to president Buhari. Did they think he is sleeping or drinking? They shouldnt think that. The fact that he has not come up with his ministers tells you that this man is doing a lot of job that he did not want people to destroy him or even his mission for being the president of Nigeria. By the time he starts in earnest people will beginning to feel his office and what he is expected to do. If he hasnt gotten minister is that their business? Is the country in a standstill? Are things not going on? For instance, I was reading the papers of sometimes ago and people were talking about his coming in to rectify the power sector. He has made a lot of moves internationally. It is the same PDP that is making this noise and I think the next steps Buhari has to take, is to invite all the past Governors and everybody that has embezzled money and make them cough out all the monies they have stolen. When they coughed it out, then Buhari has to send these monies to their respective states so that the new Governors will have something to fall back on. By the time he catches them one after the other, they will learn to keep their mouth shut. There are two things I want to appeal to Nigerians to do. It is difficult to build anything that has been destroyed. This is a new country we are all going to experience now and with so much rot and fraud in the system, so much works is going to be done and this is when Nigerians should please sit back and think about how everybody could be an agent of change. Change is so important to be left in the hands of one man. You and I could be an agent of change. So this is where Nigerians has to come on board and push in ideas. APC is a party with so many ideas and they have intelligent people. So, whether they have problem recently in the house of assembly or not, it is a problem of their inability to manage their success. But that issue will be rectified in no distance time. The people that make up APC are very intelligent people and very creative not minding what is happening now at the Senate and House of Assembly. What they are experiencing is the inability for them to manage their success. That issue will be rectified sooner. People like Lai Mohammed are always defending the party with facts and figures. Nigerians should be patient and pray for this nation because we all are agents of change.

Away from politics now. Lets talk aboit education. Universities are not well funded in this country. Take FUPRE for example, it does not have any structures in place that befits an institution of its status. What is your comment on this?

Funding is one of the problems we are having in this country when it comes to education. We are yet to meet the UNESCO recommendation of 26 percent. Number two, is leadership. We do not put the right persons in leadership. We are always thinking of putting our person there even if he is a he-goat. We must move above this level of my person. Number three is corruption. There is serious corruption in the educational sector. So it is not only the governors that we must turn our searchlight on. The little money that is approved for project is not used judiciously. I have done a lot of research from the federal to the state level and I have discovered that there is huge corruption going on in the education sector. People just share money among themselves not minding what the repercussion is going to be. We will talk more on that when the time comes. FUPRE is a Federal University but with the intrigues inside and out where there is bickering over who becomes the Vice Chancellor or not, all these things are not supposed to be happening in the educational sector. President Buhari will look into all this issue and at the end of the day, there are going to be changes. With time the building you see there will be more than five. Though, you have to take note that it is not only the building that makes up education. You have to look at what the lecturers are doing and how good the students are if you compare them to other schools. You have to look at how good their certificate is. This is the same problem we are having with the teachers education. I am so pained when I look at the kind of teachers we have in this country for the past sixteen years because of faulty policies we have here and there. The teachers are no more illiterate than the child they teach. Could you imaging that at the end of six year in primary school, a child can still not read and write? This is criminal because it is a wasted life. When you ask a teacher, what do you do for a living? He will tell you, ‘I teaches’. I have so many application letters and if I show them to you, you will see the kind of teachers we produce. So we have to turn our searchlight to the institutions that produce these teachers. They will tell you that it is the kind of students that comes from the secondary school. So it is garbage in, garbage out. So we have a lot of problem in the sector.

You were commissioner of education in Delta State. In your time we were not seeing all these things we are seeing today. What were some of the challenges you faced during that period?

There were a lot of challenges. Starting from the ministry of education down to the school and the teachers and their teaching, down to the students and their parents who are no longer interested whether their children were learning or not. Some parents dont even know if their children are in school or not. There were a lot of challenges and as an educationist, I mapped out my strategies. And I will remain ever grateful to Chief James Onanefe Ibori. He is a man that when he gives you a job, he gives you the free hand to do your job. How I wish we have so many James Ibori in this country. He is a wonderful man who gave me the free will to revamp education in the state and I am grateful to God and to him. It was quite challenging but for the fact that I knew what was wrong and how to go about it, I was able to do something. Although I wrote about forty goals which when you achieve them, you will be able to beat your chest and say I have done well. But I will tell you that for the three years, it was just number five goals that we achieved. So this tells you the rot and dirt in the system. But then, we hope that the new commissioners that are being appointed, we hope that they will work harder. The work of an education commissioner is not in the office but in the field. You need to go and feel, see and know what is going on in the schools. It is not sitting in the office with the air conditioner blowing you. Take exam malpractice for example. We fought it to a standstill. But today, it is the most lucrative business in town. I just pity the children because they do not know what is happening to them. They think their teachers and their parents are helping them, but until they grow up and are unable to defend their certificates, then they will know the mess they are in.