In response to the growing hard times and difficulties that continue to define the Bio led regime, the once highly promoted first term regime’s flagship programme, the Free Quality Education (FQE) of the government of Sierra Leone has faced the chop.
The recent government shuffle aimed at saving the government billions of leones has also affected the poor performing education sector. Despite the huge 22 per cent of the government budget or NLe2.1 billion that was allocated to the sector, it continues to post disappointing returns.
Much as the first term focus on fighting corruption and plugging financial leakages that went belly up, the FQE has also hit a snag. In open admission of the failure of the FQE to produce the desired outcome, government for the first time since 2018 has cut budgetary allocation to the FQE.
After political interference into the prosecution of public servants in the Bio government complicit in corrupt behaviour and practices spelled the end of the anticorruption fight, lack of provision for those dispensing education, the teachers, was the death knell of the FQE programme. As a result, the FQE was not allowed to see the light of day and so reap the benefits of its vaunted and ambitious vision.
The high registration figures in government and government assisted schools also led to the drop in the standard of education, with poor teacher remuneration and retention also making significant contributions. The high student to teacher ratio at most schools made for an uneven distribution of time and focus from teachers who remain overwhelmed by the astronomical increase in public school registration. There were way too many students for teachers to cope and properly dispense their valuable commodity.
The high point in the failure of president Bio and his education technocrats to ensure the success of the FQE is poor teacher training. With only 42 per cent of qualified teachers in the sector, the lack of further training opportunities for teachers became a longstanding issue. Another pressing failure of the government has to do with the majority of teachers lacking government pin codes to be recognised and so receive salary from the consolidated revenue fund (CRF). Available funding was not properly utilised to provide training school projects for committed teachers desperate for an upgrade. This resulted to many teachers leaving the profession for private schools and job opportunities.
Meanwhile the failure for the FQE programme of the SLPP led government started taking shape at the very beneficiary school system as a result of the cutting down of the school administrators’ avenues to reaping a benefit from excited and parents willing to beat the system to get their kids placements at much demanded but numerically overstretched yet very popular schools.
As a result, payments for school activities that were supposed to have been paid for by the government or supposedly free had charges imposed by school administrators outside government remit.
A drop in teacher complement at government and government assisted schools also saw a boom in the provision of private lessons by school leaving teachers who find the sector much more lucrative and assured of regular pay from the parents of client students than from the government payroll. Students also find the private lessons by teachers more accommodating than the oversized classrooms in public schools.
But how and why the large public sum of 22 per cent or NLe2.1 billion of the budget was spent and on what remains outside the public domain.
Meanwhile many people have said the budgetary allocations for the anticorruption, financial leakage and FQE public causes mostly went to fund much pressing matters of governance including but not limited to the bloated government wage bill that continues to present an embarrassment for government not being able to foot such a high and taxing monthly demand of over Le400 billion from the CRF.
Questions have now been raised in the public as to how the death of the FQE will affect the second term focus on Human Capital Development which also requires a sound education boosted by the provision of healthcare and vocational training to impact our nation’s human resources capacity and capability.
It must be recalled that Julius Maada Bio government has been advised to cut down allocations to nonperforming and wasteful government programmes to bolster financial support for those that are performing. The education sector is one such sector that focus has shifted from owing to lack of political will to institute real and lasting changes to the sector that take into consideration the welfare of all stakeholders, the teachers and students, not just a focus on the latter.
Sierra Leone has a long and often publicised history in education. The “Athens of West Africa” has however fallen from its elevated position of the pre and early independence periods to where it is now in an appalling state. In the past the nation was responsible for producing the early administrative cadre for the British Africa colonial administration across the continent. Today the education received is not as valuable as the amount spent to acquire an education or professional qualification in Sierra Leone.
Today the country’s education sector that was once highly prized is not ranked among the best of the best on the continent. The rate of illiteracy instead of dropping keeps rising. Sierra Leone was one of the most literate societies on the continent, a distinction that now resides with Zimbabwe.
It does not come as a shock to education focused civil society activists and researchers that despite the large public sector allocation to the education sector, the government of president Julius Maada Bio has not been able to reap the benefits. The activists have speculated that the nation’s education sector will continue to take further budgetary cuts as the second term focus has now shifted to Feed Salone (that needs $2 billion to be actualised) and the Human Capital Development schemes.
Only time will tell on the outcomes of the latter shift in government focus whose founding tripod consists of education, vocational training, and improved healthcare for students.
Meanwhile the total budget allocation for fiscal year 2024 is NLe23.5 billion, with a projected revenue of NLe20.9 billion, resulting in an NLe2.6 billion deficit.
How the government plans on meeting its campaign promises remains to be seen in light of such poor returns.
