Last year, the minister of education, Prof. Ruqqayatu Rufai, proposed to the leadership of Nigeria’s Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, to consider some critical reforms. The anticipated reforms were aimed at extending the validity of JAMB examinations from one to two years.

The Federal Government Girls’ College, FGGC, Imiringi, is located in the remote and quiet town of Imiringi in Ogbia local government area of Bayelsa State, Nigeria. It is one of the few structures that indicate  federal presence in the state when the state was carved out of Rivers State.It is located along the Ogbia/Yenagoa Road, off the Mbiama/Yenagoa Road, and about 30 kilometres from Yenagoa, the capital of Bayelsa State. Contrary to the fears of non-indigenes, it is easily accessible by a fairly good road network.

It was celebration galore in Kaduna on Monday, April 11, for residents in the city and most especially, the Kaduna Polytechnic Community, when the Academic Staff Union of the institution called off its six-month-old strike.The chairman who saw the re-opening of the polytechnic as a “birth of a new dawn” also observed that the new dawn in Kaduna Polytechnic was a victory for all since everybody was a winner.

Indications that the hundreds of public schools scattered in the many rural communities of Edo State are dilapidated, with some littered with teachers and principals, but without pupils, is no longer news in the state. In several other cases where there are schools with pupils and no teachers or principals to manage some of them built by communities and missionaries in the early seventies, the embarrassment has not been lost on the government.

Reports from the West African Examination Council, WAEC, and National Examination Council, NECO, reveal that performance of students in science subjects like mathematics, physics and chemistry, in the Senior School Certificate Examination, SSCE is poor in the Niger Delta region. Due to this, the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, has decided to embark on a workshop tagged: “Knowledge Enhancement and Pedagogical Training," to remedy the situation.

The federal government by law, sets the terms of Nigeria’s monetary policy through the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, which in turn, executes the policy as and when due. Therefore, the reported and unauthorised operation by National Examination Council, NECO, of 18 illegal bank accounts, shows that the examination body has defaulted in respect of the financial rule, which allows the examination body and the federal ministries and agencies to operate only three bank accounts.

Few months after resumption of academic activities in the Cross River University of Technology, CRUTECH, the institution may again be forced to close down as staff of the institution is set for another showdown with the state government.The grouse of the CRUTECH workers, this magazine gathered, is the non-implementation of the agreement reached between the state government and industrial unions in the university.

Most Nigerian children have never attended school says a data recently released by the National Population Commission, NPC. This of course is a known fact, an unacceptable truth especially as literacy is important to national growth and development. According to the chairman of the NPC, Mr. Samaila Makama who presented the findings in Abuja. States in the northern parts of Nigeria have the lowest rate of basic school attendance across the country.

In the management of universities, the Nigerian constitution allows for a single five-year term of leadership for any elected vice chancellor. This law applies to federal, state and private universities.  The observance of this constitutional provision is the reason why Prof. Sonny Tyoden will step down as vice chancellor of the prestigious University of Jos in June.

The need for the federal government to curb the recurring problem of low quality or fake certificates issued by the management of study centres, which government believes are interested in making money without impacting adequate knowledge in students, cannot be overemphasised. This poses a great challenge to the National University Commission, NUC, which they must meet, if the nation’s education products are to be recognised. Consequently, and in a clear disapproval of what is obtained, the commission swoops on the centres on regular basis.