Don’t Blame H.E. President Weah for Bring 6,000 Nigerians?
The political troposphere in Liberia has been debited from time immemorial with an abysmal consequence that the Liberian educational system is beyond admonishment. Even one of Liberia’s most acclaimed educator’s former president Sirleaf stigmatized the Liberian educational system that it was: “clutter” and it requires a complete fiddle. The former president made the assertion a day after 25,000 high school Liberian students who sat the then state university (UL) entrance exams failed miserably”. The former President further bewailed: “The students’ failure did not come from the university, but rather from the schools that prepared them.
It is elusive that Liberian students graduating from high school to pass UL exam was arduous if not impossible. Hon. Nelson Sahwolo, vice-president for student affairs once stated: “We had set a passing mark for English at 70, while we set the passing grade for mathematics at 50. No one could get those marks” The student affairs VP once noted that the “University of Liberia, was eventually forced to lower the pass grade to allow some 1,600 students to be admitted” He later puts the blame squarely on the 16-years Liberian civil wars when he pointed out that the: “Primary and secondary schools, like many of the country’s institutions, collapsed during Liberia’s intermittent 14-year civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people.”
Additionally, other horrific problems such as Liberian girls trading their precious masculinity for grades; teachers impregnating girls who subsequently dropped out of school; students used as farm workers just to obtain academic grades in schools. Students are also traded as slave laborers in exchanged for graduation. There are deep-seated academic compromises in most if not all academic circles. The system has identified the poor quality of education, lack of qualified teachers, high school teachers are teaching high school student. University graduates are teaching other prospective graduates. Those who earned their Master degrees go on to teach in graduate schools. There are no thorough background checks on professors’ credentials. Most students graduate on the basis of political interests and Liberians with the most money sit home and run their classes on their private telephones according to one graduate from the Arthur Grime School of Law. Romelle Horten, former Deputy Minister for Instruction, Ministry of Education one’s said” “the issue of Sexual Gender Based Violence (SGBV) is deeply engraved within the fabric of the Liberian society which needs immediate action to address the issue.”
Some students do not appear in a classroom for over three years; they simply report on graduation day, wear their gowns and receive their degrees. There are most Liberian students who had no pre-school, elementary or high school nitty-gritty, yet, they gained quick admission at UL with no further background check regarding their early childhood education and soon graduate after two or three years later. Corroborative sources from the Ministry of Education’s Commission on Higher Education the body that regulate the higher education sector state that the personnel of the commission is often in the business of receiving bribes to certificate Colleges and Private Universities for accreditations, some of which might not have certification of a higher educational status to function as a University or College in Liberia, which is vividly some of the feeble requirement of the Commission of Higher Education. It was, in fact, a shameful narrative when the Director of Liberia’s Commission on Higher Education, Dr. Michael Slawon was once “under investigation by the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission for receiving three checks valued at over half million United States dollar in 2012”. This is how corrupt the Liberian educational system has been.
H.E. President Weah is, therefore, acting in despondency for conferring with the Nigerian Government to have 6000 of their teachers assist the Liberian Educational System. H.E. President cannot even be confounded on this inherited and or a rotten educational system after the 16-years of brutal civil wars, but H.E. President Weah could have even invited the entire membership of “BOGOHARAM and the deadly A QAEDA rebels/terrorists” to help the desperately drowning Liberian Educational System.
