State of education in Nigeria
The educational system in Nigeria was allowed to unravel for two decades and the result is what we are reaping now.
Things are still so bad because they went bad for so many years without anybody doing anything about it. It is always difficult to build but to destroy is very easy and it will take a long time before we can achieve success in building this pivotal sector.
When Wole Soyinka said a couple of years ago that we should close down the universities and start rebuilding, many people felt he was exaggerating. I think there is a lot of truth in what he said. There is a lot of room for improve¬ment, first and for most is a change in our attitude.
When education was priority in the country, we didn’t need any¬body to preach to us to work hard, honestly and try not to cheat. We did it because that was the only way. But today, the situation is dif¬ferent because our value system has being ruined by politicians.
If you ask the young people how many books they have read, you will be surprised because they have placed their value in money. People want the money without working for it.
Today, you ask students what they want to be and they say they want to be local government chair¬men, senators, politicians; because they know that is where the easy money comes from. This is the fast¬est way to a nation’s ruin and it has ruined our system.
Our value system will have to be revamped and our respect for teachers will have to return. When we were young in the 1950 and 1960s, students desired either to become teachers or to become preachers. Even parents wanted their children to become teachers. This was when teaching had value, the teacher didn’t earn much but what he earned was enough to give him a decent life.
A teacher also had respect from the community. But today, every¬body is running away from teach¬ing. The educational environment is not even conducive. Money is not really our problem but how to spend it well. Our government also has to reorganise its priority.
There was a time Nigeria was committing 18-20 percent of our budget to education and there was a time it went down to 1.8 percent and that was when our universities were clambered completely. The pays during the 1990s were not encouraging and it took a lot for me to manage what I earned.
Is funding the problem of edu¬cation
Our problem is not in funding, it is inadequate use. When you have your allocations, you should know where to set the priority and how to use the money. There is a lot to spend money on in the Nigeria educational system. Why not say we are going to commit 20 or 25 percent of this money to post graduate education?
And then you select some cen¬tres of excellence from the six major regions of Nigeria and you fund them. Which will mean staff training and development, the overhauling of educational tools, the library, the laboratory, the classrooms and student’s hostels.
The physical environment in our universities today is not con¬ducive for learning at all. There is noise everywhere and student’s space is limited, lecture rooms are so close to student union buildings and kiosk all over the place.
There was a time when people who approach the university will automatically stop what they were doing because it was like a sacred ground, but the university is no longer that now. People who are proliferating universities all over the place, which they call private universities; a lot will have to be done about quality control.
What effort has the licensing of private universities played in the cause of education in Nigeria
Many of these private universi¬ties are set up by people who want to make money. There are universi¬ties in the country where you pay almost N1million a year, which people cannot afford, which means that these universities are set up to care for the few political class be¬cause it is people who acquire their income through dishonest means that have that. Some are set up to boost the ego of the entrepreneur.
They see the university as a factory.
A university is defined by the level of degree of universality that it has in terms of curriculum de¬velopment, staffing, student intake and generation and dissemination of ideas. There was a time Nigeria had the right attitude to university education before the coming of the military.
Our students also need to know their rights and exercise these rights. Many of our students are not interested in what they are being taught as long as they make their grades. You need to ask your¬self what you have learnt since you started learning that course and what they can pass on in future.
Many students don’t ask these
questions. Many teachers cheat the students. A semester of 15 weeks, you teach for three weeks, thereby killing the minds of the future. If I was taught this way, I wouldn’t be where I am today. Many of our students are being short-changed. Many of our colleagues are out chasing contracts and government appointments.
Nigeria has some of the most dedicated, principled and diligent academics but they are in the minority and they are being short-changed by the system. We live in an underdeveloped situation which has a way of under-devel¬oping people’s mind and corrupting their values.
Need for state of emergency in the education sector
With the state of emergency, we need to look very closely into all the institutions parading them¬selves as universities and ask how many of them really qualify for the names they call themselves. How much teaching is done and how much cheating is done? How many universities can Nigerians af¬ford? How are we going to finance them? Right now we have 228 universities according to National Universities Commission.
Statistics shows that there are so many candidates that qualify for university admission in Nige¬ria that are not being admitted. The solution is not setting up mushroom universities all over the country. What we need to do is extend, validate and strengthen the existing universities. Take the core universities and expand them.
A lot of money goes into servic¬ing those overhead that really do not contribute to what is happen¬ing in the laboratories, libraries and so on. So, what we need is rationalisation. At the moment we set up institutions for sentimental reasons, egoistic reasons.
During the oil boom of the 1970s it was the hotel business. When it went out of fashion, then everybody was setting up petrol stations. We are now in the era of the proliferation of universities and they are charging money. I still don’t see much of a difference in the performance of graduates of private schools and the graduates of public school.
In a number of cases, the gradu¬ates from federal universities are better and have a stronger sense of what a university is like. Many of the private universities are run like prisons. There is no universe in these universities.
When we garbage in, we pro¬duce garbage out. The old system has collapsed; if you don’t have it, you cannot give it. It is a vicious cycle. If you were not taught well when you were in school and you were produced raw and uncooked, whatever you have is what you will give to your students.
In the past we use to recycle excellence, today we recycle medi¬ocrity because our society tolerates it. The people who rule the world through their technological power and who also control the economic axis of the world- Japan, America, Britain, France, Germany amongst others, know the value of excel¬lence. You don’t just approximate, you go right to the core with tenac¬ity, scrutiny, paying attention to details; these are the things that matter.
One thing I have discovered is that Nigerians have a way of get¬ting used to bad things. We don’t ask questions any more that is why our rulers will always take us for granted. In the United States, as a teacher, your students have to evaluate you at the end of every semester and they have series of questions they will have to answer.
Does the teacher come early to class? Does he master his subject? Does he teach well? What have I gained from his class? Does he allow me express my own opinion or does he lord his own opinion on me? Is he cautious and polite? Will I recommend this teacher to another friend? If you have two consecutive negative reports, your salary will either be cut or you will be sent packing. This is called ac¬countability.
In Nigeria, there is no account¬ability in our educational system and our political system. A lot is wrong with our leadership as well as our follower-ship. If the people say they don’t want this, nobody can force it on them. We have to be able to look our leaders in the eye and ask them why not. That is the only way we can change them from being rulers into being lead¬ers. Leaders are very rare in Nigeria at the moment.
