- We’ve no tools, chairs, tables, students lament
- Schools need support from private sector – Lagos Govt
Findings by The Point, spanning three weeks, have revealed that three out of the five technical colleges in Lagos State are in a terrible state of disrepair, with both students and teachers lamenting the lack of teaching facilities and the menace of decaying infrastructure.
The five technical colleges are located in Ikotun, Ikorodu, Epe, Agidingbi and Ado-Soba, respectively. Specifically, trips to the technical colleges in Ikotun, Ikorodu and Epe showed three marooned student/ teacher settlements with obsolete and sub-standard machines and other teaching aids. Besides, the schools are not only bereft of furniture in the classes, there is also no power supply to any of the schools.
IKOTUN
Head, Painting and Decoration Section of the Government Technical College, Ikotun, Mr Kehinde Olutayo, lamented, “There is no space for our workshop. The workshop is combined with the classroom; so we are highly limited. In fact, the infrastructure we have is manual and not digital. This does not help our practice sessions with the students.
“We have some challenges in the aspect of spraying. After informing the school authority, they promised to buy a manual compressor like the one vulcanisers use so that when there is no power supply, we can make use of it. But till now, it hasn’t been purchased. So, what we have been doing is to teach them the theoretical aspect.” Olutayo added,
“In the school, we don’t have sufficient furniture such as tables and chairs. After complaining to the school authorities, they said the contract for the furniture had been awarded to the Technical College, Epe since last year.” Corroborating him, some of the students in this section recalled the pains they often went through in the school.
Olawale Ajiboye, ‘the governor’ of the section said, “The chairs and tables we have are not enough. We reported to the school authorities, last year. A Parent/Teacher Association meeting was held whereby some parents donated some furniture for the use of the school. But we haven’t seen anything given to the school this year. The ones we even have are bad; they are also not enough, and that’s what we have been managing.”
Also, Rebecca Etokhokpan, a 17-year-old Tech 3 student, lamented that “most customers prefer the paints produced by other industries because they think that we produce fake paints, since we don’t have enough facilities.”
The examination officer and head Babatunde, also stressed, “The challenges we have are poor power supply, insufficient furniture and obsolete facilities. For instance, we normally move round to solicit with some industries around us.
“There are some machines they have in the industries that are not
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