The Beautiful Tree (8 page)

Over the next few days, I visited many of the association schools. There was a school in which French was the medium of instruction, with a principal from Benin serving migrant children from the surrounding Francophone countries who will return home for secondary school. It was the largest school, with 400 children; it was a two-story wood building (called a “story” building in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa) built on stilts. The oldest school, Legacy, founded in 1985, was also a “story” building, with an upper floor of planks that creaked and groaned as we walked on it, and through which we could see the classes below. When I visited at 5:00 p.m., a teacher was still teaching upstairs, voluntarily helping the senior children prepare for their examinations. The proprietor here had started the school by going door-to-door, encouraging parents to send their children to school—there being no accessible public school then, and he wanted his community to be literate. Then he started charging 10 kobo (that is, 10 hundredths of a naira) per day; later he worked on making parents pay weekly fees; as his numbers grew, he asked them to give what they could to help him run the place. As his school became established, he moved to charging by the month and then by the term. He, like everyone, found it really difficult to get the fees from parents, and he, like everyone else, offered free tuition to many of his children.

Were his teachers qualified? I asked. He began by telling me that he trained them himself; at the end of each term, they had workshops to increase the academic standard, and that was fine. Then he added: “We don’t cherish qualifications, we cherish your output. Can you perform? That is the important thing, not whether you have certificates!” He told a story about how someone came for a job, with an “impressive BSc in mathematics,” and he asked him: “OK, so my grandfather is 80 and in 8 years time he will be eight times your age. How old are you now?” I quickly butted in with what seemed the obvious answer, showing off my algebraic knowledge: “11.” Unfortunately, I fell straight into his trap, “That’s what he said, but the answer is 3, because the question is how old are you
now
!” The story was meant to demonstrate something about common sense and problem solving not necessarily equating with good qualifications. I too had an “impressive BSc in mathematics,” I thought. But the point was well taken—qualifications weren’t everything.

I asked whether the teachers belonged to a union. “No union here,” he said and laughed pleasurably. “No union, we work as a team, we cherish oneness, we have an end-of-term party, altogether, dancing, eating, and drinking.” I noticed that most of the teachers were women, and mentioned this. “Why? You say why? Because the money that is being paid, the men cannot be here; salary for most men is higher, and most men don’t like teaching, even here they want to be president, politicians, big men, lawyers,” he said, dramatically emphasizing each possible option: “They don’t want to teach, that’s the way it is in this country!”

Throughout, as I traveled around the slum, it was clear that the school buildings were of poor quality—this criticism that I met so often when talking to the development experts back in England was certainly valid. But they were no worse than the buildings in which people lived. It was true, I saw, they didn’t normally have toilets, but neither did the people’s homes. The children felt at ease in them—the teachers were drawn from the community itself and knew all its problems as well as its vibrancy. The more I visited these schools, the more I realized how organic they were, part of the community they served, quite unlike the public schools outside.

One afternoon, BSE and I visited a public school. We arrived at 1:40 p.m. The private schools would be in session until 4:00 p.m.; the public schools were already closed, children playing boisterously in the muddy space between the high-rise buildings. I noticed that some were urinating in the corner—these children didn’t appear to have functioning toilets either. The headmistress of one of the three schools was very friendly and welcoming, however, and invited me back the next day.

I return at 9:20 the next morning, slightly later than promised. Adekinle Anglican Primary School was the largest of the three primary schools closest to the road, taking up the daunting concrete blocks on both sides of the parade ground. (Many of the church schools were nationalized in the 1970s and 1980s, hence the Anglican title. They were classed as public schools, however, and received 100 percent of their funding from the state, although they still had some vestiges of private management, through the church.) The short, plump headmistress began ushering children into classrooms—supposedly the school had been operating since 8:00 a.m., but even so, many children seemed to be milling around. Possibly they were on break. In front of me, without trying to hide it in any way, the headmistress began to chase, then viciously beat with her cane, a small girl. She beat her to the ground and as the girl got up to limp away, she viciously laid into her again; the girl eventually escaped and made her way to the classroom, holding herself, weeping furiously; I’ve never seen anything like this in any of the private schools—yes, the teachers there sometimes had their canes, and I often worried about that, but they seemed playful with them, at most tapping the desks in front of the students to get their attention.

Shaken, I visited the classes with my host. She carried her cane with her, emphasizing every word she said with it; it was not only the children she made nervous as she thus gesticulated. Some teachers were teaching and appeared committed and pleasant, but in most classes, the children seemed to be doing little. Sometimes, this seemed to be because the teacher had completed the lesson, had written a few simple things on the board and the class had finished copying them. Then they sat in silence while the teacher sat at her desk and read the newspaper or stood outside chatting with her colleagues. The first grade classroom had 95 children in it, but it was three classes together—one teacher was sick, the other was on extended study or some other official leave. I wondered how often that happened, or whether today was just an exception. The children in this class were doing nothing; some were also sleeping; one girl was cleaning the windows. The one teacher was hanging around outside the classroom door. No one, certainly not the headmistress, appeared remotely embarrassed by any of this. I asked the children what their lesson was—when no one answered, the principal bellowed and barked at the children; it was a mathematics lesson she told me pleasantly, without any sense of incongruity, for no child had a single book open.

Of the three schools, this one could house 1,500 children. The headmistress told me that parents left the school en masse a few years earlier because of the teachers’ strikes. But things were better now, and children had returned. The school had a current enrollment of around 500, which was more than before, but enrollment growth was stagnant. It must be somewhat disheartening for teachers to go on strike and then find that the parents had made alternative, private arrangements. But the truth was actually more startling: no one here seemed to know that this alternative existed. For on the top floor of this imposing building, there were six empty classrooms, all complete with desks and chairs, waiting for children to return. Why don’t the parents send their children here? I asked the headmistress, innocently. Her explanation was simple: “Parents in the slums don’t value education. They’re illiterate and ignorant. Some don’t even know that education is free here. But most can’t be bothered to send their children to school.” I suggested that, perhaps, they were going to private schools instead? She laughed at my ignorance. “No, no, these are poor parents, they can’t afford private school!”

I asked the teachers where they lived: many traveled for an hour or more to get to the school; some traveled over two hours. The principal also lived a considerable distance away. Two teachers lived outside Lagos State; Yoruba was not the mother tongue of one, even though the majority of the children were Yoruba. This didn’t matter, she said, as the language of instruction was English. I mused how different it was in the private schools, where teachers were from the community; they knew the problems facing the children, for they themselves experienced such problems every day. And they could explain things in their mother tongue, if required, unlike the teachers at the public school.

I continued my visit to the other two schools on the same site—next was Ayetoro African Church Primary School. Some of the classes in the second primary school had only 12 or 15 children in them, although the class register showed 30 to 35. Why were so many absent? The principal told me: “You see, this is a riverine area, and when we have the rains like now, children have to stay home and clean their houses because they are flooded. So that’s why today there are few children in school.” When I told this to BSE afterward, he said, “But the children are here in the private school today!” He didn’t need to tell me; I could see this difference for myself.

The principal of the final school, Makoko Anglican Primary School, was a lovely, dedicated lady, and I warmed to her considerably. She took me into classrooms, and I asked the children if they had brothers or sisters in private schools, remembering what parents had told me in Makoko itself. The principal interrupted: “No,” she said, “these children are poor, they can’t afford to go to private school.” But I persevered; and the children said yes, yes, their siblings went to private schools. And they gave me names, like KPS, St. Williams’ and Legacy, with which I’d become familiar. At this point, the headmistress admitted that she had never been into Makoko itself, had never seen where her children came from. When pressed, she said she didn’t know whether there were any private schools there, but she was pretty sure there were not, and that the children were playing wicked games with their foreign visitor.

On the second floor of her school, two of the classrooms were empty; in the third were two middle-aged female teachers at their desks side by side near the door. They chatted with me pleasantly. Here, the third and fourth grades were housed together, with 60 children. Why were they in the same classroom? Because they didn’t have enough desks for two classes, so they sat them together. On the third floor, three classrooms were empty and in the fourth were three classes together; with 90 children registered, I was told, although only 75 were present. The three teachers again sat at their desks neatly arranged along the window side, doing nothing apparently, while the children sat doing nothing either. Again, the reason given was that they had no desks and benches for the children.

I pointed out to the headmistress that in the six empty classrooms in the first primary school, just yards away from where we were standing, there were stacks of unused desks and benches. She said she didn’t know that. Why didn’t she have the desks brought over? “What goes on in the other government schools is not my business,” she shrugged.

Almost two years after my first visit to Makoko, I arrived at the plush Secretariat buildings in Lagos, seeking an interview with the commissioner of education about the role of private schools in reaching “education for all.” I’d got my research results in the interim, and they were quite astonishing: we’d found 32 private schools in the shantytown of Makoko, none recognized by the government, and estimated that around 70 percent of schoolchildren in Makoko went to private school. In the poor areas of Lagos State more generally, we’d estimated that 75 percent of all schoolchildren were in private schools, of which only some were registered with the government. In fact, more students were attending unregistered private schools alone than were enrolled in the government sector. Based on these findings, and after showing him photographs and video footage of BSE and his school, I’d convinced television producer Dick Bower that the work was of interest, and he’d received commissions from BBC World and BBC 2’s flagship news program
Newsnight
to make documentaries in Makoko, illustrating the general themes that were emerging.

It was fascinating to watch Dick’s position change during the course of his two weeks in Makoko. Before arriving there, he’d been convinced that this would be a soft-focus story of one or two committed people establishing schools against the odds, focusing on a couple of cute children—like Sandra who had first led me to Ken Ade Private School—and telling their story. I don’t think Dick had really believed that so many private schools existed, nor that those who had set them up could be described as entrepreneurs rather than social workers. But then as we’d wandered around Makoko and bumped into one private school after another, I could see that Dick realized there was more to this story than he had first thought. But the real eye opener for him came when we interviewed the commissioner of education for Lagos State and, with his permission, filmed in the government schools too. Far from being a soft-focus film about the delightful antics of a few poor people, he realized that he was onto a hard-hitting political story, about the denial among people with power that something remarkable was happening among the poor. I’ll return later to some of what he heard when we interviewed the people in power. But waiting to get the interview with the commissioner of education, something odd happened:

In the commissioner’s narrow waiting room among the builders’ rubble and the rusting fridge marked “Property of the Ministry of Education,” sat a smart, distinguished-looking elderly gentleman, who was also waiting for an interview with the commissioner. After a while, he and I began chatting, and it turned out that he was working for the British Aid agency Department for International Development (DfID) on its project CUBE—cute—Capacity for Universal Basic Education. He was very keen to tell me about his work. While the World Bank had made a soft loan of $101 million to this project, DfID had
given
about $20 million. He told me the basis of the project: “We need to listen to what the poor have to say, something that’s never happened before—too many aid agencies just barge in and tell the poor what they require; we’re different, we listen first to what they have to say. Only in that way can we create sustainable solutions.” He told me that they had held frequent focus groups to discuss the poor’s educational needs. “We even get the children to draw pictures of what they want in their schools.” The children, he told me, had drawn pictures of merry-go-rounds and other children’s playground equipment, “just like in the private schools; they want their schools to be just like the private schools!” he laughed—clearly referring to posh private schools. Then once all this listening had taken place, “We deliver a report to the community telling them what they have told us about what they want.” All that then got translated, he told me, “‘into sustainable solutions.”