Nothing is as difficult, more susceptible to failure and more dangerous as installing a new order... for the reformer find enemies among those who benefited from the old order, and receives a lukewarm altitude from those who benefit from the new order.

Nicolo Machiavelli.

BACKGROUND

The history of human civilization has been that of social change, societal transformation, resistance to and receptive to change and transformation. Even the stoneage and Neolithic men made commendable attempts at re-shaping the environment in which they lived. This was typified in the various creativities and inventiveness that accompanied those epochs of the human past.

In contemporary society, education is a major catalyst of change as it has seen some societies surpass others in the global system which is today characterized by the Darwinian theory of "survival of the fittest and elimination of the weak".

THE CONCEPT OF EDUCATION

Conceptually, education is concerned with the cultivation of the whole person including intellectual, character and psycho-motor development. "The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines education as a process of teaching, training, and learning, especially in schools or colleges to improve knowledge and develop skills". At the informal level, it connotes the inculcation of cultural values by a person or groups in the society. Education has strategic role in the development agenda of nations of the world, as it supplies the needed manpower that is prerequisite for the actualization of sustainable livelihood and development.

Formal education means the totality of knowledge acquired from the educational institutions and is made up of primary, secondary and tertiary education. At the primary level, education is the "cutting edge" of a nation's education development. The rationale for this kind of education is that it has motivated governments, particularly, the Akwa Ibom State to re-align and concentrate efforts and huge resources at ensuring that primary school education forms a formidable and sustainable base for accelerating the development of the entire educational system.

GLOBAL STATISTICS OF SCHOOL ENROLMENT

At the secondary school level, there is an average drop-out rate of 38.7 percent in Africa, compared with I 8 percent in Latin America and Asia. In Europe, the rate was put at I I .4 percent.

The consequence of the ugly phenomenon for Africa is the increasing problem of secondary school drop-out who join the rank of the educated unemployed.

Similarly, in Nigeria available statistics show that access to junior and secondary schools has remained low. At the junior secondary school level, only 2.4 million of the 7.2 million young persons aged 12 - 14 years are enrolled, a gross enrolment ration of 33.5 percent. Similarly, the gross enrolment ratio at the secondary level is 2.6 percent.

Taking this ugly scenario of educational backwardness and intellectual depletion in Africa into consideration, it is pertinent to ask: what strategies should government adopt to boost school enrolment, as a result of the strategic importance of education to human resource creation and national development? Let us use Japanese paradigm, particularly during the Meiji Restoration, as a case study.

THE JAPANESE PARADIGM

History has recorded that no other country of the world has responded quickly and successfully to the challenge of modernization and development as Japan did in the period between 1868 and 1928. Meiji Restoration which began in 1868 was a period that Japan witnessed great transformation in its socio-economic and political life. One area which served as catalyst for these overall transformation was education.

With the creation of a Ministry of Education in I 87 I , the forth year of the Meiji, the Japanese government realized the need to catch up wit h the Western Europe and North America in respect of science and technology and enthroned a system of compulsory, free and egalitarian education through the nine years leading through junior high school. Let us now see the feasibility of the Japanese paradigm in the Akwa Ibom context.

FREE EDUCATION IN AKWA IBOM STATE: COSTS AND BENEFITS

There is in Akwa Ibom State, a deliberate strategy to use education to achieve socio­economic transformation, as witnessed in Japan, under the Meiji era. This position represents the conceptualization of development by His Excellency, Chief Godswill Akpabio, who like Charles De Gaulle, believes that ' leadership is too serious in a business to be left in hands of mediocres '. Like a ‘Consumer-School Theorist of Education', Governor Akpabio sees education as an inalienable right to be provided for all citizens from primary to secondary schools level, with government bearing all the cost.

This position was reaffirmed by the recent declaration by the Governor, of free, compulsory and qualitative education for all indigenes of the state. Thus, it is criminal, and unlawful for a parent not to avail his child (children) the opportunity of this libertarian gesture by the government of Akwa lbom State. One significant impact of the policy is that it will have a multiplier effect on school enrolment by 60 percent. Thus, it is posited that the current primary school enrolment which stands at 761,422 will increase to 932,872 an additional 171 ,450,while secondary school enrolment which is 159,009 will increase to 252,699, an additional 93,601.

A critical mind would begin to ponder on the workability of this policy, having failed in several states. The answer to this lies in the political will which forms the bedrock of the policies of the administration of Governor Godswill Akpabio. To complement this trail blazing gesture, the state has announced the establishment of two state-of-the art schools in each of the 31 Local Government Areas of the State. The qualification of these proposed institutions as world - class is that it has the necessary facilities found in American and British schools. Such facilities include stable power, portable water, computer and science laboratories, qualify teachers, staff quarters, decent hostel/dormitories, well stocked libraries and modern recreational facilities.

The rationale for limiting this gesture to two schools in each local government is to ensure the workability of the free education policy. The holistic assessment of the cost and benefits of this policy reveals in bold relief that the policy involve huge financial burden for the government, which His Excellency puts at about N7 billion annually. If seven billion naira annually can guarantee the future of the Akwa Ibom Child in the context of boosting literacy rate, creating intellectual and human capital, and ultimately halt the menace of brain drain, then certainly there is justification for the expenditure.

This becomes more important as the state is witnessing a great leap forward in tourism and industrialization as typified in the recent award of contract for the construction of the Tropicana Entertainment Centre, the independent Power Plant, and the International Airport. These of course, would require human capital and excellent one at that.

The 21^st century is obviously the most competitive century in hum1n history, and we take advantage of good leadership, as in the case of Akwa Ibom State in becoming equal partners in the globalization process. One of such ways is technological development which can only be attained through qualitative education.