What is to be done about Nigerian education? (1)

The recently concluded 20th Summit of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) (March 18-20 in Abuja) represents a landmark in the public discourses on the crisis in Nigerian education. The summit brought together a brilliant company of scholars, teachers, businessmen and public officials who not only understood just what is wrong with our educational system but what needs to be done about it.

Also present was a mass of school children who listened and learned and then had a chance, on the last day, to make their own representations regarding the crisis and what should be done to end it.

In the weeks preceding the summit, NESG officials set the tone by widely circulating five weighty questions regarding the state of Nigerian education, and invited the public to come to the summit and “join the discourse” on “how to fix Nigeria’s education system” or how to device “a governance and accountability framework” for it.

The five questions were as follows:

There are 57 million out-of-school children in the world. 10.5 million of these are Nigerians. What kind of future can Nigeria build with an uneducated citizenry?

No Nigerian university is ranked amongst the top 1000 universities. No wonder there’s an exodus of Nigerian students to foreign universities. How can we reverse this trend?

Harvard produces the most CEOs; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) produces the best engineers; Yale University produces the best lawyers. What do Nigerian universities produce? STRIKES?

Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, J.P. Clark, Jadesola Akande, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Dr Niyi Osundare, Professor Umaru Shehu: products of the golden years of Nigeria’s education system. Can we find a successor generation in a system that is broken and perpetually on strike?

Nigeria’s best university in 2013 only ranked 1,926th in the world. Nigeria’s best academic institution cannot compete globally. What can we do to raise the standard of Nigeria’s education system to a globally competitive level?

These and other heavy questions were considered in some detail between presenters and an interactive audience. The NESG secretariat is compiling the answers and resolutions and will, according to its custom, forward these to the federal government to digest and incorporate into its action program on education.

But beyond the euphoria of the summit, the sense that “something is being done,” every thinking Nigerian should be pondering these questions and, alone or in league with other concerned citizens, working up a blueprint, however fragmentary, for reviving and modernizing our educational system. In this column I shall attempt to bring together my own thoughts, synthesizing and updating three decades of my newspaper articles and lectures on these issues. And I invite you, the general public, to join me in the discourse on the pages of BusinessDay. Articles should be 800-900 words. Longer articles may be shortened to fit the space—or perhaps serialized in two or more parts.

To me it is quite clear that alongside security and jobs, education is and ought to be this nation’s highest priority. Without security of life and property; without productive enterprises to engage the energies and provide decent wages for our teeming millions; without the understanding of self and the modern world, underwired by intellectual and technical skills acquired through a soundly conceived and variegated scheme of education and training—without these, Nigeria is going nowhere at all! Everything else depends heavily on this three-cornered, inter-dependent and inseparable foundational base: security, jobs, and education. The planning for the one must entail the other two.

When you think about it, you wonder how anyone could have thought otherwise. But knowing it is not enough: it’s the doing it. The planning and consistent execution of policies regarding security, job creation and education must go hand in hand always. The fact that up to this point it has not is at the heart of our national crisis.

To the question: What kind of future can Nigeria build with an uneducated citizenry? The answer, to put it in bold and possibly exaggerated terms, is: Boko Haram! When you sow no (or low) education, no (modern industrial) skills, and no jobs (no industrial enterprises where the young can earn a decent living), you reap armed robbery, kidnapping, and Boko Haram. 

In short, with an uneducated citizenry Nigeria has no future. The dark ages of a tiny educated and monied aristocracy sitting on the heads of a mass of illiterate and unskilled peasants and laborers are gone. Mass education, science, technical and vocational skills, jobs, industrial production, participatory democracy, a level playing field, equal economic opportunity—these are now the global norms; and their forward march is inexorable.

The monied aristocracy of Nigeria may struggle to preserve and continue the outmoded system of serfs and overlords—but it won’t be for long. And Boko Haram is but a preview of the horrors that await. For what is Boko Haram but the vanguard of a massive rebellion of the uneducated and neglected underclass who have come to the conclusion that western education is evil because all it does is confer fabulous wealth on a few while the overwhelming majority suffer in wretchedness and want? . . .

Onwuchekwa Jemie

• To be continued