Education needs no introduction. In terms of development, it is the be all and end all of everything. Education is about the norms you choose to keep or discard. It is the skills to produce stuff that are valuable ala my previous productivity article. It is how you think of choices at elections. It is the way society responds to public health challenges such as the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Education is about everything that we know and do and how we transmit what we know across society and across generations, and also how we systematically learn new information. Education is not just about going to school and getting certificates but about learning stuff. Every country, including us, should want to get everyone to be as “educated” as possible, to learn as much useful stuff as possible that hopefully aids their productivity, and to continue to generate knew knowledge.
We generally think of education in three stages: basic education, post-basic education, and advanced learning and knowledge creation. In terms of education being a public good basic education is perhaps the most important. It is in the public interest for everyone in society to know how to read, write, communicate, think, and to know the basics about everything society knows. It is in the public interest for everyone to know about public health challenges so they wear their masks during pandemics and understand the dangers of open defecation. It is in the public interest to know how to think about issues before they vote for leaders and how to understand the impact of their activity on the environment.
Basic education is where people learn the basics that allow them to learn more specific skills that enhance their productivity and income in the future. In our current educational structure this would be primary and secondary school. Unfortunately, despite being the most important part of the education lifecycle it is the part that typically receives the least support. The federal government typically spends about two percent of its budget on basic education. About half of that goes to the universal basic education fund and most of the rest go to a handful of federal government colleges.
The states and local governments (who are statutorily responsible for basic education) do a bit more but not nearly enough. If we are to judge by the outcomes then we are failing woefully. Only about 75 percent of pupils actually complete primary education. Our secondary enrolment rate was just 42 percent in 2018. Things are much more worrying if you consider the quality of education and spatial variation across the country. To be clear it is not that Nigerians do not realise the importance of basic education.
From the latest living standards survey, in many parts of the country, specifically in urban areas, education is typically one of the largest expenditure items for households after food. But 40 percent of households are poor and a many more are just outside the official poverty line. Those who are wealthy enough bail themselves out with a quality private education but the rest are left unfortunate. But remember, basic education is a public good. If society decays because of the poor basic education then there will be nowhere to hide even if you managed to go to a top tier school.
If we want to build the country that we want then the starting point is to make sure that everyone – EVERY SINGLE PERSON – has a good quality basic education, and we must back that quest up with money, time, and effort. The federal government needs to stop hiding behind statutory responsibilities (which as I have mentioned before were not handed down on a tablet to Moses) and take more responsibility in pushing towards this necessary goal. The states and local governments also need to do much better and be incentivised to do much better. The current status quo where the spending focus is on tertiary education probably needs to end.
Personally, I think the entire university and polytechnic system should be defunded and scrapped and replaced with a system of courses where people pay their teachers directly and just keep learning whatever they think is useful. Maybe with some funding for really advanced PhD. level learning and for research, and some support for the brilliant but verifiably poor. But that is a story for another time. As a country we need to figure out how to get to the basic education promised land, and for that we all need to put the money, time and effort on that table.
Dr. Obikili was chief economist at BusinessDay
