Expert Wants More Labs in Schools for Global Competitiveness

The Director, Federal Science Equipment Centre, Mr. Mathew Ndu, has stated that the country’s quest to achieve global competitiveness in sciences may not be realised if proper attention is not paid to the development of laboratories.

Ndu said this in a paper he presented at the closing of a five-day capacity building workshop for laboratory technicians in secondary schools in Lagos recently.

According to him, there is no way the country can produce well-rounded professionals especially in the field of science if there are no laboratories to back up theoretical contents in schools.
He regretted that even where laboratories existed, they are ill-equipped; adding that for products of Nigerian secondary schools and universities to match their counterparts in other countries professionally, more efforts should be made in the development and use of laboratories.

He said another major challenge facing the development of laboratories in schools is the non-existence of well trained personnel to manage equipment such as microscopes, chemicals and others.
“That is the essence of this workshop, to build up the knowledge of laboratory technicians for them to effectively run these laboratories in their respective schools. We have about 80 laboratory technicians drawn from the 104 unity colleges across the country participating in the workshop.

“These technicians have been taken through various sections of the centre to learn how to run their laboratories the way it should be run, repairing broken down equipment, as well as fabricating new ones. They were exposed to areas such metal, carpentry, glassware, precision, optics, electrical, electronics, plastic, as well as printing.
He said most of the technicians came in with equipment such as simple and compound microscope beam balance and stop watches among others for repairs from their respective schools.
According to the director, it has been discovered that there is usually no pre-service training for laboratory attendants in schools across the country; this he said led to the mishandling of the existing equipment which usually results to inadequate or incorrect analysis.

He said the laboratory attendants were often times engaged with school certificate qualifications with no experience on laboratory management and that there are consequences associated with such development. He said if there is no requisite knowledge on how to use the laboratory, the individual will be of no use in the laboratory.
“A laboratory attendant should at least be able to set up apparatus for teachers and be able to conduct the students properly whenever they are in the laboratory for practicals. They should also be able to identify the equipment available in the laboratory and their uses, as well as know how to preserve them.

“Safety in the laboratories and cleaning are also critical areas in the handling of any laboratory,” he said.
Ndu added that it is expected that every laboratory technician should be able to carry out minor repairs to save cost and expressed concern over the state of the machines in the centre. He said most of them are obsolete and in dire need of modern ones to ensure the continuous relevance of the centre in the scheme of science education delivery in the country.

Another challenge confronting the centre he said is the dearth of technical and science oriented staff, adding that the nature and function of the centre require specialised staff in the technical discipline. He said the pioneer staff trained overseas through fellowship programmes are retiring.

As a result, he said the centre resorted to using the retired staff that are still available as external resource persons whenever the need arose. Ndu also listed inadequate funding as a major constraint in carrying out the centre’s full mandate.