Two
senior academics, and elder statesmen, namely, Vice-President Yemi
Osinbajo and Poet laureate, Niyi Osundare, returned the deplorable state
of Nigerian education to the front burner of national conversation last
week. Prof. Osinbajo, at the inauguration of Sir Adetokunbo Ademola
Dining Hall of the Nigeria Law School, lamented the decline in the
quality of legal education and went on to call for the necessary
restructuring in order to bring the profession at par with international
standards. On his part, Osundare deeply regretted the eroding standard
of education especially in our universities. Argued Osundare: “I once
told a journalist that if I were to be a student in Nigeria of today
with the fallen standard, I would not have achieved what I achieved
today. Nigeria and the system in those days helped me to develop.”
This
loaded lamentation carries the ominous prediction that in the current
prostrate circumstances of Nigerian education, men of letters of the
stature of Osundare are very much unlikely to be produced. Before
discussing the topic, it is pertinent to observe that a fundamental
inattentiveness afflicts policy discourse and by extension, policymaking
in our clime. This inattentiveness and incoherence are concealed by
talkshops, parade of expertise and a surfeit of diagnostic analyses as
well as proposals for reform. More often than not, these long running
seminars featuring some of the nation’s brightest minds do not get to
affect policymaking; hence, the tragic repetitiveness of the same woes
that attracted the labour of the experts.
Let me illustrate. Twenty one years ago,
the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation assembled some of the best minds around
the country to take a comprehensive look at our education system and its
attendant dysfunctions. At that event, Prof. Oladipo Akinkugbe, a
former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ilorin, called for a
five-year state of emergency in the education sector in order for the
nation to fix its multiplying problems. Nothing of the sort happened.
Over a decade later, when Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili was the Minister for
Education, she took a tour of the nation’s major public schools and
lamented their abysmal state manifested in decayed infrastructure,
inadequate funding, low teacher commitment, widespread exam malpractices
and repeatedly poor performance in national examinations. To be noted
is the fact that these were the same problems identified in 1994 by the
dialogue of experts conveyed by the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation.
As the reader may well guess, neither
Ezekwesili’s lamentation nor the limited reforms she attempted stemmed
the rot in the system, and so in 2013, Prof. Ladipo Adamolekun, a former
World Bank consultant, gave a distinguished Convocation Lecture at the
Joseph Ayo Babalola University, observing that the situation in our
educational landscape had gone from bad to worse. In 2014, the Nigerian
Educational Summit Group arguing that our educational system was in dire
straits devoted its 20th Annual Summit to yet another roundtable on
educational decay. Needless to say that these examples are only
indicative of the many workshops and dialogues held on educational rot,
not to mention countless editorials and commentaries in the media.
The puzzle to raise therefore is, why
does the situation continue to degenerate despite the abundance of
expert discourse on the subject? My own guess is that the profuse
conversation has not impacted policy, while policymaking itself has only
half-heartedly grappled with the problems of that sector. On a broader
note, the decay of the Nigerian state and its policymaking apparatus
continues unabated because those who ought to reform them become part of
the problem, swallowed up by the very crisis that they apparently set
out to ameliorate. There is the factor too that the Nigerian political
elite depending on the size of their individual pockets have access to
private schools at basic and tertiary levels as well as to overseas
institutions for which the Nigerian market has become a powerful source
of earnings.
Of course, it would have been more
logical for the political elite to have developed Nigerian institutions
to a level of competitiveness which would have made it unnecessary for
them to pay through their noses to educate their wards and children
outside of the country. But this logical expectation does not become a
reality; indeed, with every passing year, the standards appear to drop
further because of a vicious circle syndrome, in which the half-baked
products of yesteryears are dropped into the system as instructors.
Hence, instead of our schools and colleges coming out of the woods and
travelling upwards in quality and credibility, they appear to be going
downhill all the time.
The assertion can be buttressed by the
woeful performance of secondary school students in national public
examinations such as the Senior School Certificate Examination and the
General Certificate of Education. In 2014 for example, 70 per cent of
students who sat for the WASSCE failed to obtain five credits repeating a
decline going back several years. That is not all. With a few happy
exceptions, the decay in the learning environment has become more
gripping as the years go by. Going back to one’s primary or secondary
school for many Nigerians including those who graduated less than five
years ago often brings profound sadness at the state of abandonment in
which the schools carry on.
In the Convocation Lecture delivered by
Prof. Adamolekun referred to previously, he stated that he encountered
an adult Nigerian who did not have secondary school education having
attended what in the Western Region was known as modern school, yet
spoke better English than most Nigerian graduates of today. The truth
is; the gap between knowledge and the certificates awarded by Nigerian
institutions is widening by the day in a phenomenon known as diploma
disease in which degree or certificate mills replace education. To get
back to the politics of educational decay, it will be interesting to
know why the ruling class perpetuates a resource distribution
arrangement that has kept the schools eternally underfunded, sentencing
them to a hand-to-mouth existence. The old maxim that it costs a million
dollars to ask a question in nuclear physics suggests that schools on
the treadmill featuring desolate learning environments can only
reproduce the decadent standards in which they have been fixed by a
nonchalant political elite.
What then is to be done? It should be
obvious that there already exists a library of informative suggestions
made by experts that is capable of turning around the education sector.
What is required is the political will to implement such proposals as
the re-ordering of priorities in order to mainstream education, human
capital development targeted at motivating the educational workforce in
particular the teachers whose rewards remain in heaven. There is the
urgent need too to resuscitate the inspectorate division of the
ministries of education which ought to regulate the performance and
conduct of teachers and administrators.
We can also usefully borrow from aspects
of the Japanese school system whose students stay in school round the
year; their school calendar begins in March of one year and ends in
February of the next year and they have far less off work days than the
Americans not to mention the Nigerians. At any rate, the Buhari
administration must do its level best to reverse the current disgraceful
state of Nigerian education.