Is anybody listening to the Permanent Secretary, Department of Education?

 Jammeh & Education Minister Fatou L. Faye

Evidently, The Gambia Echo is so concerned about the quality of education in The Gambia that it dedicated a series of articles on the topic. In the last piece, your paper cautioned that the deteriorating state of the sector would persist if the imbalance between expenditure in hardware (bricks and mortar) and software (teacher education, school supplies, textbooks) were not balanced.  There is too much of bricks and mortar and classroom blocks and not enough of teachers, textbooks, teacher education and internal efficiency measures introduced in the first 15-year Education Policy under B.B.Dabo as Vice President and Minister of Education.

Mr. Babucarr Boye, Permanent Secretary at the Department of State for Education has echoed this serious dilemma or concern recently.  Mr. Boye has repeated his concern again last week when he stated and I quote “ unless and until the working condition of teachers is improved, at least to a reasonable limit, there will be no guarantee to a minimum acceptable levels of pupils achievement, to say the least.”

Teachers at the Lower Basic school levels are leaving in droves because of the lack of incentives including low pay and other amenities previously enjoyed by the teaching profession.  The Jammeh regime is usually credited with building school structures but this development is at the expense of quality education. 

Yahya Jammeh, convinced that massive investment in the education infrastructure is the shortest route to quality education and cheap popularity, embarked on a building program driven as much by the desire to improve education as by the gigantic appetite of the corrupt business associates of Yahya Jammeh who enriched themselves from construction contract awards.  The education sector infrastructure program thus became driven not by the needs and requirements of the education realities identified by a well-designed school mapping exercise but by the demands of Jammeh’s business associates like Amadou Samba, Botto Construction etc. Consequently, we now have a dysfunctional education system as a result of inappropriate budgetary expenditures.

It is about time that some body at the State House listens to the Permanent Secretary of the Department of Education so that urgent and remedial measures can be taken while there is still time to save the system from total collapse.

Meanwhile, we say that Yahya Jammeh has failed Gambian youth.  Therefore YAHYA JAMMEH MUST GO NOW.