The Beautiful Tree (9 page)

If he’d been listening to the poor in the locations where my teams had been working, he must know about what we’d been finding, I thought. So I told him of my research interest in private schools for the poor. “Ah,” he said, “there is a confusion here. In England, you call elite private schools ‘public schools,’ but here by public schools we mean government, state schools. So in our country, private schools are for the rich, and middle classes, and public schools are for the poor. You got confused because of the language.” For a moment I thought: what a coincidence, two senior Nigerians making the same claim about language being the source of my misunderstanding about private schools for the poor. Then suddenly, the penny dropped: this was not
another
senior Nigerian; this was the very same Dennis Okoro, the ex-chief inspector!

We joked about how we’d met before, even shared beers together, and how bad our memories were. It was more forgivable in a man of nearly 70 than someone in his early 40s, I contested. He gently excused me, “You must meet a lot of people on your travels.” Anyway, I told him that I’d been working for two years in the private schools for the poor in Makoko, Badagry, and other poor places around Lagos State. He must have seen such schools in his work with DfID, if not before? He didn’t actually say I was lying, but gently contradicted me by repeating his refrain: “No, private schools are for the rich, not the poor.”

After the interview with the commissioner of education, Dick Bower, the BBC producer, hit on the idea of asking Dennis if he would be prepared to come to Makoko with us—not specifying any particular reason why. Dennis gamely agreed. He was only available the following afternoon—a Saturday, unfortunately, so children wouldn’t be in school—but he had to be back in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, on Sunday. I’d been working with BSE all morning when Dennis and the BBC crew pulled up outside Ken Ade Private School in our battered old Volvo, hired from one of BSE’s relatives who lived a few doors down. BSE and I walked over to greet him. As we stood in front of the school, I said: “So here is a private school for the poor. They exist!”

I could see he was put out. But he soon pulled himself together. Dennis put the challenge directly to BSE: “Why do you call it a private school? Do children pay fees?” “Yes,” confirmed BSE. “Ah,” said Dennis, “so it is not a private school for the poor.” The conversation went back and forth, but the sum of his argument seemed to be this: The poor by definition cannot afford to pay fees for private schools. So if this was a fee-charging private school, it couldn’t be for the poor. Public schools were free precisely because the poor could not afford to pay tuition, and parents who could afford private schooling could not be poor.

I got him to speak to some of the children who were milling around us, and they confirmed that they came from families of fishermen and traders. He agreed that there were pretty poor people around here; he agreed too, in a very deprived area. But he continued, trying a different tack. His argument now was something like this: The private school might be in this deprived area, even possibly attended by poor children, but it was not a private school
for
the poor because it was not in the poor’s interest. It was not “pro-poor,” a term I heard for the first time from him but now commonly used by development experts. A private school
for
the poor, by definition could not exist because the poor must not pay school fees. So it may be a private school, he conceded after all, but it is
for
the purpose of making money, that is all, not
for
the poor. Dennis then said, “Look, there is a way that private schools can be
for
the poor.” He gave an example of how British Airways had wanted to help improve basic education in Nigeria. The company had found a very down-at-the-heels (public) school and refurbished it. It now had the most magnificent building and facilities—but still it was free, so it really was for the poor, but involved the private sector. “If Professor Tooley will fund your school,” he told BSE, “then it can provide free places to the children. Then it really can be a private school
for
the poor.” Then it can really be “pro-poor.” I considered mentioning that Ken Ade Private School already provided free and subsidized tuition to its poorest students, but decided to leave Dennis with the last word.

We all—the BBC crew, BSE, Dennis, and I—traveled from the slum to our hotel, the Mainland Hotel, on its periphery. We ordered food and drink. We were in good spirits—Dennis is a very friendly person, and nothing that had passed between us while we stood outside the school could change the warmth we felt for each other. We talked generally about other matters. But then as we came to the end of our meal, he wanted to thank us formally and made a little speech. He told us that he had learned much today. He had never been to Makoko before, he admitted—indeed, he had thought when he heard the name that it was somewhere else entirely. But, he excused himself, no government education official will ever have gone beyond the public school on the outskirts of the shantytown, so no one would realize such private schools existed within. He then told us a parable: “The elders of a village warn their chief that they must make a clearing in the bush around his house because there are snakes aplenty, right there around his house, and he must beware. But he had never seen any, so he didn’t believe that such creatures existed there. But then a villager had caught one, lying in wait by the chief’s water hole to catch its prey. Cleverly ensnaring it, he had taken it to the chief. ‘With my eyes I can see it. And with my hands I can touch it. Now I believe.”’ Dennis finished: “And I’ve seen and touched this private school. It’s good, yes it’s always good to learn of something that you didn’t know existed. I will tell everyone I meet about this from now on.” I could have hugged him.

For Dennis Okoro—and he was by no means alone in this—denying the existence of private schools for the poor had a logical dimension. Private schools are for the rich because the poor, by definition, cannot afford to pay for private education. Therefore, it follows, private schools for the poor cannot exist. But there was also a practical dimension to his denial. The private schools are not necessarily easily visible. They’re hard to find. In Makoko, you must go beyond the public schools on the outskirts, beyond the paved road into unknown and forbidding territory. If everyone tells you that there are no schools beyond, and it’s a threatening place, why would you bother to go and look for yourself? To find the private schools, you really must get your boots dirty. Not everyone is prepared to do that.

Makoko is an urban slum. This in itself was significant for Dennis Okoro. OK, so these types of schools are in urban slums. “But,” he said, “you won’t find them in rural areas.” To development experts, this is a hugely significant point. If private schools for the poor are only an urban phenomenon, they can’t really play much of a role in meeting the educational needs of the poor because poverty is greatest in the rural areas. You might find a few private schools in urban slums. But they’re nothing significant in terms of development because they don’t reach the rural poor.

But I was looking in rural areas too. In Ghana, it was to be a major focus. Would I find anything there to further challenge Dennis’s beliefs?

4. The Shifting Goalposts, Ghana

Serendipity led me to choose Ghana as a country for my research because around the same time that I’d met Dennis Okoro at a conference in London, I was speaking at another conference on education and development, this one organized by the Italian Liberal Party in Milan. And at this event, I met the Ghanaian minister of education (and youth and sport), the Honourable Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, a tall, handsome man in his early 50s, with a striking resemblance to the actor Richard Roundtree from
Shaft.
The conference was held in the beautiful ivy-covered manor house headquarters of the Liberal Party. My talk was scheduled for midday. At noon, the cool auditorium was packed full of gorgeous young women—I was very gratified to see the kind of audience the Italian Liberal Party could attract and braced myself for their admiring glances as I lectured on my findings about private schools for the poor in India, with brief references to what I’d also seen in Nigeria.

But it was not to be. Apparently there had been a late addition to the program. Leonardo, a star from AC Milan, one of Europe’s top soccer teams, had been invited to speak on how his club was funding an education project somewhere in Africa. At the precise moment he finished his presentation and got up to leave, the auditorium emptied. The young women mobbed him on his way out. I gave my talk to the Honourable Minister, plus one or two other stalwarts who remained, including Andrew Coulson, now director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

But we became friends over dinner, the Honourable Minister and I, a friendship that I’m glad to say we shared until his tragic and untimely death last year, and he invited me to Ghana to do the study. This was a rare opportunity—it would be very unusual to do the study where I had government support.

Soon after I met him, I traveled to Ghana. My first port of call was the Ministry of Education, where the Honourable Minister had told me to get the latest statistics on enrollment—public and private—to help me with my work. The director of statistics had apparently promised to have all the statistics ready. He was at a meeting somewhere in town when I arrived, so I waited in his office at the behest of his assistant, a balding and rather camp older man. A secretary was typing a report at one of the computers, touch-typing very slowly without looking at the screen. After a few minutes, she completed a paragraph then looked up at the screen. She had typed everything in capital rather than lowercase letters. She erased it all carefully and slowly retyped it all. But she still did not check her typing; her eyes were steadfastly focused on the page to be copied, ignoring the screen completely, except to check at the end when it was too late.

Hers was the only work going on in the room, and perhaps in the whole Ministry of Education. The entire place resembled a school during recess. Many men were wandering around on the balcony corridors, holding hands as Africans do, chatting, joking; others were eating and drinking, and some were sleeping. But this wasn’t recess; it was 3:00 in the afternoon.

Eventually, the director of statistics returned. He hadn’t prepared anything for me. He took a phone call, about an article he was writing for
Computer Africa
magazine, and talked for at least 20 minutes about how wrong it was for this editor to keep pressing him to have the paper ready. “Why not Thursday?” he said to me. “Why not Friday? Why today; today, always today?” After telling me this story, he then looked on the computer for the statistics I required. He searched for 15 minutes, while I sat quietly. Eventually, he learned that his assistant had the correct file; so he printed it out, transferring the single computer cable between the computers. Figures were only available up to 1994. That was nearly a decade before. Where were the later figures? “Oh, we haven’t collated them yet. We have the figures, but they are not collated yet.” I looked around his office as I waited: piles of paper, haphazardly strewn everywhere; piles on desks, on shelves, and on the floor; crumpled old folders; dusty desks and old computers; no other books apart from these myriad files.

From his office, I went to wait at the office of the Honourable Minister’s secretary. She was very kind, very pleasant. But she had the brief I’d prepared for the minister in front of her, outlining my preliminary findings on private schools for the poor in India, and asking whether this could also be true of Ghana. She laughed at me; “In our country, private schools are for the rich,”’ she said, baffled by the stupidity of this visiting white man.

It was a refrain that I was to hear time and again as I went around trying to find partners for the research. That wasn’t the only frustration at getting started. I visited the superbly appointed, air-conditioned offices of the British aid agency DfID, a few blocks from the Ministry of Education, complete with lavish corporate images of poverty alleviation, to see if it could help me find research teams. Its education adviser, an affable Geordie,
¹
Charles Kirkaldy, was friendly enough, but thought I was on a mission to nowhere. He told me he sometimes visited rural areas, passing government schools at 9:30 a.m. and seeing the teachers sitting under trees knitting while the children wandered around the school. But he tried to put me off looking for any private schools in these poor areas. “There’s no money in the villages to pay for private school,” he said.

He told me that DfID didn’t put much into education, just $80 million or so over the past five years, all of which had gone to the government for improving primary schools—much of that was for improving their buildings. (I saw it as I traveled around later, plush new government primary school buildings proudly sporting the DfID logo. There were also European Union logos and logos for various other European government aid agencies.) But he was openly dismayed at the lack of accountability for how the DfID funds were spent. “We’re spending a lot on capacity building in the ministry,” he said, “trying to make it run better.” But the Ghana Education Services was a “bureaucratic monster,” he told me, and the money just got frittered away. I asked whether any of it benefited children’s learning. He sighed and replied that he doubted it very much.

Although he thought my quest for low-cost private schools would be in vain, he gave me some names of possible research partners from Ghana’s top universities. For a few days, I interviewed these prospective partners only to be quoted their
daily
rates of $500 or more. With salaries at the university the equivalent of $1,000
per year,
this seemed rather excessive. They all also wanted dinner, or at least cocktails, in the luxury of the Golden Tulip Hotel, where DfID put up all its aid consultants for $200 a night. It seemed that international aid agencies had pushed prices for research consultancy sky-high. It was, in any case, more than my more modest budget could stand.