A garden represents the resources of an ideal society. By cultivating, fertilising and pruning it, they assure themselves the fruits of their labour, in perpetuity.
How Nigeria’s natural resources are treated, however, is often depicted like a cake. This is apt. Ours is not an ideal society. Eating a cake requires no talent. It requires only that the eaters, like Oliver Twist, always ask for more.
In the political economy of Nigeria, cartels appropriate the idealistic language of social goods for the sole purpose of eating more cake. An often parodied example is the Ajaokuta Steel Mill which is seemingly on the verge of ‘industrialising the country’ after another round of multi-billion naira expenditure. Yet, more dangerous to the long-term health of our society is the Academic Staff Union of Universities and its appropriation of that supreme good: education.
Education is not the ceaseless accumulation of certifications, it is a state of mind validated by its outcome. It is a form of guidance to practical action. Hence, to claim education with no achievements is to be exposed as a fraud.
Once we see education as a state of mind to be validated in the field, we can focus less on those few Nigerians that attend tertiary universities. If we stopped seeing ‘education’ as a race to a university degree, what would we notice? A few things become clear.
First is that the real education emergency is not at the top of the pyramid but its foundation. According to estimates from the United Nations Children’s Fund, Nigeria alone accounts for one out of five of the out of school children in the world. That figure will be worsened by the economic crises fostered by our security crises and the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Second, our universities have not fostered any important industries in our economic history. Our crude oil extraction relies on the imported skills and technologies of foreign companies. There is no music or film department associated with the rise of our music and movie industries. Indeed, many of its leading lights decided to forgo a tertiary education entirely. Not even the emerging internet technology industry features the sort of synergy between Stanford University and Silicon Valley or even University of Cambridge and Silicon Fen. It is hard to imagine Nigerian academics monetising their research and patents like the scientists Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci of BioNTech, inventors of one the most effective COVID-19 vaccines so far.
Third, not all education in Nigeria is formal. Outside of the classroom institutions play a large role. For example, our actors, musicians, music producers and techies master their craft solely through their zeal for self-instruction and informal apprenticeships. Traders in Otigba and craftsmen learn through a formalised traditional apprentice system. With support, both can be developed into something like the German apprenticeship model which creates thousands of jobs every year.
Taken together, the above makes the need for reforms clear. Rather than seeing education as possible only through a narrow set of institutions, it is more superior to conceive of a ‘whole of society’ approach to education.
In this reordering, the State’s relationship to educational institutions must be pyramidical: broad at the bottom and narrow at the top.
At the base of the pyramid will be Universal Basic Education for all and a near-perfect literacy rate. Much is made of the fact that the Ministry of Education gets only 7 percent of the national budget. Lost in the outcry is that public universities, through ASUU, have cornered much of that expenditure This is misplaced luxury spending, akin to buying air-conditioners for a house without electricity. The focus of our attention should be on creating a large base of high quality primary education facilities, i.e. Universal Basic Education.
Another example of our ‘luxury spending’ is the existence of a Presidential Council dedicated to ensuring a high rank in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings. Nothing similar exists to measure the international competitiveness of our educational system. Arguably, education is existential while a ranking of how easily a business can be registered is merely cosmetic.
For quality control, we can enroll in international testing benchmarks like the PISA rankings in reading, mathematics and science which OECD conducts. Our educational system should be evaluated against the best in the world. Just like a pyramid gets narrower and sharper the further up it goes, so too should the state’s engagement with the education system. Past the stage of basic education, its focus should be regulatory, exhortatory and qualitative.
State-owned secondary schools should aim to educate the top-scoring 10 per cent of every educational set in world-class facilities . Public universities should aim for the top one percent. The State needs to nix the idea that its role is to assure equitable secondary and tertiary education.
The importance of continuous education should be emphasised and broadcasted through contests, prizes and the construction of facilities like libraries, night-education centres, technical-studies workshops and programming hubs. The best students, trainers and researchers should be granted national merit awards, with all due fanfare.
The vision sketched out above would leave millions of intelligent students whom the State cannot and must not cater for. That would leave them up to the market system. Preventing abuse makes regulation necessary. It should be straightforward, featuring a three-fold scale: Good Standing; Probation; Failure.
Any of the three would be achieved by matching unique metrics designed to bring out the best of each educational institution. For example, a football academy could be graded not just on the number of its players that go pro, but their grades in financial knowledge exams. Institutions in good standing should be allowed to expand. Those on probation should be blocked from expansion. Failures would have their licenses revoked.
The ideas sketched above are by no means perfect. However, they represent an upgrade from the status-quo where gatekeepers eat their cake rather than cultivating a garden. Throwing money at bad institutions will not solve their deficiencies. We must reform them: pruning and pulling root-and-branch where necessary.
Emmanuel-Francis Nwaolisa Ogomegbunam is a Nigerian by conviction
