Decolonising Nigeria’s Education

In his book, Education, Power, and Personal Biography, Argentinean sociologist and educator Carlos Alberto Torres challenged mythologies of liberal education and its notion that “education is a neutral activity, and that education is an apolitical activity.” It is impossible for education to be neutral and/or apolitical when lesson plans across all educational levels are sites of historical revisionism. If education is, therefore, not neutral or apolitical, whose views then have we been taught, and continue to teach in our educational systems?

In April 2015 a statue of colonialist Cecil John Rhodes was removed from the University of Cape Town’s campus in South Africa. The statue was the flash point around which students organised themselves under the banners of #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall and drove a national – later  international – debate about decolonisation and structural change in universities. The curriculum most of the colonised countries were left with by their colonial masters continue to be preached long after their “independence”. It’s time to ask ourselves if the bequeathed curriculum is still relevant to our current realities.

One of the key areas that needs urgent decolonisation is in the teaching of economics. Our economics departments are responsible for shaping the understanding and priorities of students who will lead economic decision-making in this country, yet the economics undergraduate curriculum is largely abstracted from Nigeria’s economic issues and reinforces an anti-poor understanding of policies. This is largely due to the fact that the teaching of undergraduate economics has been shaped by Western universities, and panders to the neoclassical school of thought and methods.

A decolonised curriculum is one that puts the teaching of Nigeria’s economic realities of inequality, poverty, upward concentration of income, unemployment and political misrepresentation at the heart of  the curriculum. It is important that we decolonise economics, because most students don’t go onto graduate studies, where theories and methods are questioned and interrogated. As a result, they will enter policy and business spaces thinking that intervention always harms the poor, that outsourcing is only ever efficient, and that markets are ultimately fair towards employees

Let’s look at the way the Labour Market is taught to undergraduates at our universities. The importance of this market cannot be over emphasised given the high levels of unemployment, underemployment and wage disparities in the country. Naturally, students come to class with the expectation that they will understand what they see around them. Unfortunately, the standard material disappoints by failing to address these realities.

The standard story about wages is that they are determined by “marginal productivity”. In other words, people are paid according to how much they “contribute” to the organisation. So the executive earns 200 times more than the janitor because he contributes 200 times more. This story is only partly true because we know that wage disparities are also a result of executive capture of the compensation process. That is, executives are in many ways determining the sort of pay packages that they receive. A decolonized curriculum would also stress this other channel through which income disparities arise.

Understanding this alternative channel for income disparity would easily explain why politicians earn considerably higher than the civil servants whose minimum wage has been pegged at N18,000 per month, despite the fact that the average politician contributes little or nothing to the revenue accruing to government coffers. This is our reality.

Another area that needs urgent deconstruction and decolonisation is in the telling of our history, whenever its fortunate to get told. A favourite Ewe-Mina (peoples from Benin, Ghana and Togo) proverb captures this succinctly: “until the story of the hunt is told by the lion, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Until indigenous communities can tell the story of America’s “discovery” by European explorers, until the African diaspora can write the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, until marginalised communities are the storytellers of their experiences, history will be rendered partially complete but wholly privilege the knowledges and perspectives of colonisers.

I learnt about the expedition of Mungo Park in my primary school days here in Nigeria, but I only learnt about the Great Wall of Benin during readings that had nothing to do with our national curriculum. Curiously, there’s a ‘Kingdom of Benin Study’ in the national curriculum in England. This gets worse when you dig a little further. On the website of the kingdom of Benin, the description of the specification of the wall was credited to an English author, Fred Pearce, the sketch of the plan of the old Benin city was credited to a British soldier, while the security fortification narrative was credited to a Portuguese ship captain, Lorenzo Pinto. If this isn’t colonisation, I wonder what is.

Olugbenga A. Olufeagba