Enough of these attempts to demonize private schools each time the opportunity arise. You don’t give a dog a bad name in order to hang it. In a school of 35 teaching and non-teaching staff, for instance, with salaries ranging from N15, 000 to N40, 000, if you multiply the salaries by 12 months, then multiply by the total staff in a school, I know you will begin to ask yourself how these schools are able to pay all members of staff, meet other expenses and still break even in a recession, in a country like Nigeria.
The fueling of the generating set is a challenge. Petrol is now N145 per liter. In a situation where you have to run the generator from 8 in the morning to 4 or 5 o’clock in the evening, that is 8 – 9 hours on daily basis. You know how much that will cost in a day, a week, a month, even in a term. The children of these days are very inquisitive and intelligent, if they suffer for an hour in a term as a result of power failure, don’t be surprised that the children may not resume in the following term because they would have reported you to their parents during the holiday.
There are private schools with full air-conditioned classrooms, laboratories, computer and ICT facilities etc. In such schools, you don’t expect school fees to be in the neighbourhood of N10,000. If you have between 6 and 10 fully air-conditioned classrooms in a school, you cannot power the air conditioners and other facilities with “I better pass my neighbour” generator. You need a generating set of between N500, 000 and N2,000,000, to power all the classrooms at the same time.
The cost of maintaining the generator is another challenge which you have to consider. The engineers who will work on it time to time, so that it will not breakdown and make your students suffer. The power firm (Power Holdings Company of Nigeria – PHCN) is not reliable. This is a country where you cannot boast of five hours of electricity on daily basis. Most times the voltage is so low that it cannot power a television set.
Time will fail me to tell you that the air conditioners will develop fault occasionally and you will need to fix them.
Each electronic board in classrooms runs to N250, 000 each, you have plastic chairs and lockers, in how many public primary or secondary schools will you find the facilities that I have mentioned above? Many public schools cannot boast of good and working fans. How will the students cope with their studies during hot weather? There are differences in what take place in a classroom with a bad roof and another classroom that is well equipped.
Aside from the cost of building and daily running of private schools, the quality of teachers employed in different private schools is another factor to be considered. Many people are quick to judge private schools over their fees. Some will say, the schools take so much from parents and pay little to staff. Well, that depends on the school your child attends. There are private schools that pay their staff well above what obtains in public sector. There are schools that give out cars, generating sets, refrigerators, and television sets etc., as “thank you” gifts to outstanding teachers, but nobody will speak about them.
How do you expect a school with N10,000 as the entire fees in a secondary school to still be able to buy a car for any of the staff having paid the staff salaries for the term – that is three to four (3 – 4) months, meet other necessary expenses and still afford a car as gift to a teacher? But, there are schools, private ones in Abuja, Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Kaduna etc., who roll out gifts at the end of each session to both outstanding teaching and non teaching staff. There are schools with foreign administrators, there are private schools with experienced and highly qualified Nigerian administrators and staff.