Education for all and the liberation of Nigeria

IN 1952, the radical Nigerian nationalist, Adekoge Adelabu of Ibadan declared as follows: “Education is the foundation of freedom. Ignorance is the basis of slavery. If you would free a people, first and foremost, educate them”. Sixty years after this declaration, an elected Nigerian president, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, echoed Adelabu’s words thus: “I am nothing without education; I came from a poor background. Without education you will not see Jonathan here (as President). For you to liberate a people, whether they are from southern Nigeria or the extreme north, it is through education”. President Jonathan made these remarks during his pre-independence day presidential media chat as transcribed in The Guardian newspaper of September 29, 2013.

These two statements reveal that Nigerian politicians recognise the primacy of education in the transformation of the society. These pious avowals have been made for about six decades, yet Nigeria is still far from achieving the goal of education for all. This is the enigmatic issue that I hope to examine in this lecture.

At the time the notice to deliver this lecture was delivered to me in September the strike action of the academic staff of universities was in its second month. When that strike was declared in early July, the one by the academic staff of Nigerian polytechnics had just ended after nearly three months. In the interval since July, there have been several short strikes and threats of more in the education sector and other vital public institutions. The upsurge of industrial disputes by workers in the institutions of higher education is symptomatic of a perennial malaise that afflicts the country. The demands of all the aggrieved unions relate to the fundamental issues of the inadequacy of facilities, the deterioration of working conditions, and the inability of the federal and state governments to meet the basic requirements of a knowledge society. In the light of these scenarios, I chose to address the imperative challenge of education for all as a prerequisite for Nigeria’s liberation from the shackles of mass poverty, superstition and economic under-development.

The phrase “education for all” is employed in this context to refer to the slogan created by the United Nations systems regarding the inalienable right of all peoples to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to enjoy the benefit of a fulfilled life of freedom. The idea of universal access to education came with the legal package of the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. In 1976 the then military government introduced the scheme of universal basic education for the entire country. Yet by the 1990s Nigerian governments were still promising that education for all would be available by the magical year, 2000. This target was not met. Because of this aborted dream, Nigeria has in the past one decade, became a prominent member of the dubious club of the world’s nine countries with the largest population of illiterate people, otherwise known as E-9 nations. Some of the others are Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. The statistics provided by the Nigerian government for 2013 show that there are 10.5 million children of school age who are not enrolled in school. During the 2013 International Literacy event of September 8, the Federal Ministry of Education disclosed that there are about 34 million adults who have not had the benefit of literacy in any form. With these disclosed figures, it can be estimated that there are no less than 44.5 million Nigerians who are currently denied the enjoyment of the fundamental human right of education. The situation is a grave one and it constitutes the most formidable barrier to the attainment of national sovereignty and socio-economic self-reliance.

The issue of mass education should be viewed in the context of the goals of development set by Nigeria. These goals are enunciated in the Vision 20-2020 document that projects that Nigeria should be among the twenty most advanced economies of the world by 2020, that is, about seven years from 2013. Some of the nations in this league of prosperous economies Nigeria are the United States of America, Canada, China, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and South Korea. In each of these countries, literacy rate is above 90%. The industrial and commercial prosperity of these economic super powers was made possible through the democratisation of knowledge. The work force in these economies is constantly upgraded and refined through the application of skills and hi-tech methods acquired through life-long education. How can Nigeria join this exclusive club without empowering its people with the weapon of education? I shall return to this matter later in the lecture.

Antiquity of Africa and the Knowledge Society

Our minds are conditioned by the colonial propaganda that Africa was a “dark continent” before Europeans came to enslave and plunder it about 500 years ago. Owing to this disorientation, even “educated” Africans think that organised education and knowledge have never been central to the development process in African societies. This racist falsehood must be debunked. Over 6,000 years ago, all the Black African civilizations of Egypt and the Nile Valley placed a high premium on education, science and technology. The foundations of modern science, technology, and philosophy were laid in these ancient African societies. The high priests of the temples were analogous to professors in modern universities. Pupils in these state-run institutions were issued mandates such as “Give thy heart to learning and love her like a mother…for there is nothing so precious as learning”. As Professor Will Durant (1954) says of the era, to be a soldier was a misfortune and to till the earth was weariness; only learning guaranteed happiness and fulfilment. Thus pupils were instructed “to turn the heart to books during the day time and to read during the night”.

The accomplishments of black African scientists and inventors are well documented in the works of the foremost Egyptologist, Professor Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal, especially in his Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology (1991). The facts are firmly established in these studies that Black Africa inaugurated the system of knowledge-driven development that now defines modernity. The Egyptian schools/temples known as “Houses of Life” were the centres of the transmission of accumulated knowledge. According to Diop, these were the places where “scholars lived who specialized in different disciplines as well as directors of workshops in charge of writing or recopying papyruses” (284). These scholars invented and developed mathematics, astronomy, architecture, agriculture, medicine and other sciences. Egyptian mechanical engineering attained its peak during the construction of the architectural monuments known in history as the pyramids which have survived for about 4,000 years.

These early universities survived for several thousand years. It was in these institutions that most of the venrated Greek thinkers and philosophers were taught – Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Euxodus, and Aristotle. Thales was the first Greek pupil in Egypt; he spent 13 years as a student of mathematics, especially geometry. Thales advised his pupil, Pythagoras, to go to Egypt to receive more advanced training. Pythagoras was in Egypt for 22 years as a pupil of black professors. He returned home to Greece to set up his school of mathematics named after him. We all remember our secondary school experience of “Pythagoras theorem” in mathematics. It was never disclosed to us that this theorem was originated in Africa and later popularised by Pythagoras.

Medicine was the most developed science in the Egyptian system and it originated in the temple of Imhotep, the world’s first multi-genius. Imhotep had expertise to cure over 200 diseases and he knew about blood circulation 4,000 years before it was studied in Europe. For 1,900 years after his death, Imhotep was worshipped as a god/divinity in Africa, Asia, and Europe. About 700 years after his death, the Greek pupil, Hippocrates, received medical training in Imhotep’s temple. This pupil taught by African medical experts is now wrongly celebrated as the “father of medicine” in European folklore.

The fame of Imhotep temple or medical school survived into the era of Jesus of the Jews. He is known to have been taught the science of healing and magic in the Imhotep temple. Jesus had been inducted into the Egyptian mysteries as a youth and was later admitted as an external candidate of Mount Camel (Palestine) campus of an Egyptian university. His final initiation (convocation) as a healer and preacher took place in the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) when he was about 30 years old.

The indebtedness of Greece and later Europe to the cradles of education in black Africa has been copiously demonstrated by African and European scholars and researchers. However, it is important to mention the role of the Greek man, Aristotle, in the stealing of the African legacy in science and philosophy. He was the tutor of Alexander the Great of Macedonia who conquered Egypt in 333 B.C. Knowing that treasures of science and philosophy would be available to loot, Alexander asked Aristotle to accompany him on the mission of conquest. This was how Aristotle coordinated the invasion of the Royal Libraries and carried away to Greece the booty of scientific, philosophic, and religious books. In his book Stolen Legacy, Professor George James explains that Aristotle moved his school and students from Athens to Egypt and converted the royal library first into a research centre and later a University. The Egyptian works stolen and copied into Greek language have come to us as “Greek Philosophy”. This is how Aristotle, the notorious intellectual pirate, became beatified as the author of 1,000 books in a life-span of 62 years!

After the era of the Greeks, Egypt was conquered by the Roman Empire about 50 years before the birth of Jesus. The Roman Empire inherited the knowledge systems of the Egyptians and the Greeks. The religion of Christianity was first established in North African centres of Egypt and Tunisia. The development of the ideas and philosophy of global Christianity was made possible by African intellectual geniuses such as St. Augustine of Tunisia who, at 27, became a professor in the University of Milan, Italy. He died in 432 A.D. In the fourth century A.D. Roman emperors proclaimed Christianity the only legal religion and banned any form of Egyptian/African education and beliefs. The Romans conquered Europe and imposed their religion, state and legal systems. England was a Roman colony; the English/British conquered Nigeria in the 19th century and established the models of European systems of governance and education. This is how we came to associate Europe with the source of the education and sciences known to us the victims of imperialism. It is my contention that Nigeria that hosts the largest population of Africans in the world has a responsibility to reclaim the proud heritage of Black African ancestors in education. For us to reinvent that effort and complete the journey of liberation from colonial domination, it is important that we acknowledge how Black Africa taught the world much of what are now celebrated as civilization.

To summarise this long history, I would like to recall the opinion of Professor Diop on the ancestry and antiquity of African education and knowledge systems:

“Insofar as Egypt is the distant mother of Western culture and sciences…most of the ideas that we call foreign are sometimes nothing but mixed up, reversed, modified, elaborated images of creations of our African ancestors, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, dialectics, the theory of being, the exact sciences, arithmetic, geometry, mechanical engineering, astronomy, medicine, literature (novel, poetry, drama), architecture, the arts, etc…

“Consequently, no thought, no ideology is, in essence, foreign to Africa, which was their birthplace. It is therefore with total liberty that Africans can draw from the common intellectual heritage of humanity, letting themselves be guided only by the common notions of utility and efficiency”. (Civilization or Barbarism, p. 4).

Advent Of Formal Education In Nigeria

Regrettably, the Nigerian elite have been unable to heed the advice of Professor Diop to be guided by the notions of “utility and efficiency” in our system of education. We are still slavishly held down by the limited purpose of education introduced by the British colonial government about 150 years ago. Formal Western education was introduced to Nigeria in the 1840s through the agencies of Christian missionaries. The first secondary school, C.M.S. Grammar School, Bariga, Lagos, was opened in 1859. Although the Anglican Niger Mission under Samuel Ajayi Crowther also started a school in Lokoja at about the same time, it took more than half a century for a secondary school to be set up in the northern provinces of the country. The first government secondary school in Nigeria was King’s College, Lagos, started in 1909. The central purpose of these educational institutions was to produce clerical personnel to serve the Church and the government/commercial establishments. There was no plan to produce personnel with the goal of transforming the socio-economic fortunes of Nigeria.

It is to be noted that there were a few “Nigerian” University graduates before the advent of formal education. For example, Prince Dom Domingos of the ancient Itsekiri kingdom (now in Delta Stae) graduated from the Portuguese University of Coimbra in 1610. He became king (olu) in 1625, the first West African to be a graduate king. In 1856, Herbert Jombo of Bonny now in Rivers State graduated from a British University and his brother, John Jombo, achieved a similar feat in 1878. At about the same period two Yoruba scholars – Isaac Oluwole and obtained degrees of British Universities. Many others were trained in the Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone from the late 19th century. Pioneers of West African nationalism advocated the setting up of African universities during this era. Examples are Dr. James Africanus Horton, Dr, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and J.E. Casely Hayford. They proposed universities that would be Afrocentric in scholarship and management; institutions that would be rooted in African culture and conduct research that would empower African nations to be self-reliant and free from foreign/colonial domination.

The advocacy for anti-imperialist education was articulated by Nigerian anti-colonial nationalists from the 1930s. Members of the Nigerian Youth Movement pioneered this call and it was intensified by the Zikist Movement from the mid-1940s. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe adumbrated the ideas in his book, Renascent Africa (1937). He coined bombastic expressions like “social regeneration” “mental emancipation” and “political resurgimento” to emphasise his points. Radical socialists such as Kola Balogun, Samuel Adesanya, Raji Abdalla, M.C.K. Ajuluchukwu, Osita Agwuna, Mokwugo Okoye, Eyo Ita, Michael Imoudu, Aminu Kano, and Sa’ad Zungur were in the forefront of the clamour of education for liberation from colonial rule and socio-economic backwardness. Mbonu Ojike’s “boycott the boycottables” campaign of the 1940s was part of the anti-imperialist upsurge. Ojike called for the boycott of European books and films for their effect of spiritual alienation. The items identified for boycott included alcoholic beverages, wines, cigarettes, books, dresses, and other luxuries whose import drained the national treasury. It is a sad reminder of our neo-colonial bondage that the number of imported luxuries has increased several fold 50 years after Nigeria’s independence in 1960.

When the institutions of higher education were established in the 1930s, they were fashioned after the metropolitan models in Britain. Professor Babs Fafunwa’s A History of Nigerian Higher Education (1977) examines the details of this tragic wrong step in education. This trend has continued till this day from the establishment of the Yaba Higher College in 1934 and the University College, Ibadan, in 1948. Although a vital course such as engineering was introduced at the Yaba Higher College in 1937, it was not on the curriculum of the University College, Ibadan, which opened in 1948 with the bulk of academic and physical facilities transferred from Yaba. Instead of starting with technical courses, the University College gave premium of place to irrelevant degree programmes such as Latin and Greek. Hundreds of brilliant Nigerian students wasted their talents majoring in these outmoded disciplines. The limpid pace of expansion of tertiary institutions was a deliberate ploy by the colonial regime to under-develop Nigeria. By 1962, there were only five universities with an enrolment figure of less than 10,000. Fafunwa’s study of the situation led him to lament in his book cited above that “traditional European systems of education as imported to Africa have…contributed in no small measure to the backwardness of African development both economically and intellectually”.

The Adelabu-Awolowo Paradigm of Education for All:

The most revolutionary proposals on education for liberation were made in the 1950s by Alhaji Adegoke Adelabu, the “Penkelemesi” of Ibadan politics and Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the then premier of the Western Region. Adelabu represented Ibadan in the Federal House of Representatives. His proposals were contained in his 1952 book, Africa in Ebullition: A Handbook of Freedom for Nigerian Nationalists. The book was intended as a manifesto for the anti-colonial struggle in Nigeria and a guide to the modernisation of the post-colonial country. Part of Adelabu’s manifesto was cited at the opening of this lecture. A fuller version is at page 28 of the 2008 reprint of the book where Adelabu declares as follows:

“Education is the foundation of freedom. Ignorance is the basis of slavery. If you would free a people, first and foremost, educate them…Therefore, experts must be called upon immediately to work out detailed plans for the institution of universal, free, compulsory, elementary, mass education for the 30 million inhabitants of this country. Primary, secondary, teacher-training, technical, vocational, university and post-graduate educational services must be expanded to pyramidal dimensions commensurate with the vast new base of the elementary schools”.

Alhaji Adelabu was angry about the wastage of human capital arising from the failure of Nigeria to offer education for all citizens. He expressed his disappointment thus:

“Every time I take up a book or periodical to read or utter a word of English, I suffer from a terrible pang of conscience. It is a shame that over 25 million of my fellow countrymen will live and die in the second half of the so-called civilized 20th century without tasting of the sublime wine of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Plato, Socrates, Longfellow, Hume, Shaw, Mills, Cicero, Fagunwa, Marshall, Spencer, Spurgeon, Drinkwater, Zola, Voltaire, Anderson, Rodo, Awolowo, and Azikiwe”.

The names invoked in this passage reflect the diversity and depth of Adelabu’s reading and scholarship. He was a product of Government College, Ibadan, and Yaba Technical College. He was the quintessential example of the intellectual geniuses who were active in the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s. Adelabu lambasted the class of the Nigerian bourgeoisie whose ostentatious lifestyle consumed the resources needed to fund the free education scheme. In his own words, the reason for the inability to implement the programme was because:

“We, the privileged few, prefer to ride about in costly limousines, live in 3-storey mansions, consume more alcohol than is good for our digestive systems, bring up our children in pampered ease and inglorious leisure, instead of discharging our sacred obligations to show the light to our less fortunate brothers. Every item of luxury in our domestic and national budget, whilst there are uneducated people about any remote or outlandish portion of this country, is a sin against the law of God. In quick haste and eager desperation, let us make amends before deserved and overdue retribution overtakes us…”

Sixty years ago when Alhaji Adelabu wrote this manifesto, some countries in Asia had embarked on the revolutionary programme of free education for all. He therefore advised Nigeria not to look the way of conservative Britain or Europe but to take a cue from “the vast lands of Asia with their teeming hordes. The impossible has been done in Russia. It is being done in India and China. The present educational set-up in Nigeria is the hallmark of insufficiency. It is designed to serve the purposes of imperialism”. Adelabu died in an automobile accident in 1958 at the age of 43.

In 1952 when the Adelabu book first appeared, Chief Obafemi Awolowo became the Leader of Government in the Western Region with its capital in Ibadan. In 1954 he became the Premier of the Region under the government of the Action Group party founded in 1951. It was a sweet coincidence that both Adelabu and Awolowo were based in Ibadan, the cradle of University education in Nigeria. Adelabu was in a rival political party, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) headed by Nnamdi Azikiwe. In 1955 Chief Awolowo’s government inaugurated the free and universal education programme in the Western Region, the first of its kind in Africa. The scheme was a huge success and its positive impact has made the southwest areas of Nigeria the host of the highest density of educated persons in Africa. As a consequence, the southwest geo-political zone is also the most industrialised and commercially prosperous section of Nigeria.

The Awolowo modernisation initiative through education and industrialisation was interrupted by the political upheavals of the 1960-1970. He was sentenced to 10-year jail on controversial charges of treasonable felony in 1962. In 1966 the military coup d’etat took place and the aftermath led to the 1967-70 Civil War. Whilst in prison in Calabar, Chief Awolowo concluded work on his manifesto for free education for the whole of Nigeria. The ideas were first outlined in chapter 13 of his The People’s Republic book in 1968. The summary is presented in the third chapter of the sequel, The Strategy and Tactics of the People’s Republic of Nigeria (1970). The appendices in this book contain detailed Naira-by-Naira calculation of the cost of running the free education scheme in the country from 1970-1999, that is, a period of 30 years.

The Wasted Post-Civil War Years:

In the decade of post-war reconstruction, Nigeria had the opportunity to implement the programme of mass education for the entire country. Fortuitous wealth from oil “intoxicated” the military regimes to undertake ostentatious projects, including financial assistance to distressed foreign countries to pay salaries of their workers. Nigeria also initiated state-funded industrial programmes in iron and steel, transport and automobile plants. These plans could not be consummated partly because the country lacked the knowledge base to support them. By the 1980s the unpatriotic military hegemons succumbed to the pressure by the World Bank and other imperialist powers to destroy the economic foundation through the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). Investment in education and public institutions declined. The universal basic education programme started in 1976 was paractically abandoned. This was how Nigeria missed the opportunity to overcome the scourge of a huge population without relevant knowledge to build and sustain a modern society.

The Current Debacle:

Fifty years after Nigeria attained independent statehood, the country is still burdened by the problem of nearly half of its school-age children shut out from the system. Statistics derived from the 2006 national census show that there are about 42 million children eligible for enrolment in primary schools. However, the figures published by the Universal Basic Education Commission in The Guardian newspaper of September 13, 2013, indicate that the total enrolment for the entire country in the 2011-2012 period was 23 million. There are, therefore, about 20 million children denied their fundamental right to benefit from the universal basic education scheme. However, the official figure of children out of school is put at 10.5 million. In all likelihood, this figure was obtained from guess work as there has been no reliable census carried out to determine the number. The report carried in The Guardian referred to above shows that there is a shortage of 1.3 million teachers at the primary school level. Millions of school children are also stranded in the transition from the primary to secondary school level. The Federal Ministry of Education Statistics of Education in Nigeria: 1999-2005 reveals that the total secondary school enrolment in 2005 was about 8.5 million.

The story of tertiary institutions is not comfortable either. Only a small percentage of those with secondary school certificates gets admitted into tertiary institutions. This is primarily because the number of schools is too small to accommodate all those who are qualified for and seek admission each year. There are only about 130 universities in the country with a population of 160 million. The total enrolment in the universities is estimated to be 1.2 million students. The benchmark projected by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is that about 16% of a country’s population ought to be enrolled at the tertiary level for the country to be competitive in the global system. On the basis of this projection there should be about 25 million students enrolled in Nigeria’s tertiary schools but there are less than two million currently enrolled in the 130 universities, 115 polytechnics and monotechnics, and 159 technical colleges.

Professor Peter Okebukola, the former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), has provided useful insight into the problem of limited access to higher education. He applies the Higher Education Participation Rate (HEPR) to measure Nigeria’s poor status. According to him HEPR means “the proportion of eligible population who have access to higher education”. He observes that Africa’s “higher education participation rate is currently 10% while in the United States and Europe it hovers around 50-60%. South Africa is 18% with a plan to push it to 20% by 2012. Britain has set 50% as its HEPR. Data computed from UNESCO Institute of Statistics sources put our HEPR at 8%. Nigeria should set 20% as a target to be met by 2020. To meet the target, we need to achieve at least 10% annual growth in enrolment” Okebukola, 2012). Comparative figures of 2007 from other emerging economies show that Nigeria’s transition rate from secondary to tertiary level of education is one of the lowest in the world. For example, the transition rate in Brazil is 30%; it is 50% in China and 90% in South Korea.

The Nigerian situation should be further contrasted with that of countries that have taken education more seriously. Each of the three countries of the United States of America, China, and India has no less than 5,000 universities. Indiana State in the United States has 137 universities, more than the entire number in Nigeria. The province of Tokyo, the capital of Japan, has about 120 universities. Even Bangladesh, which is materially poorer than Nigeria but with about the same population, has more than 1,000 universities. The United Kingdom with a population of 60 million has about 400 universities. South Korea with about 50 million people has no less than 150 universities in addition to 2,800 specialised research centres that provide critical research services for the hi-tech industries and multinational companies. It is the strategic liaison between the universities/research centres and industries that guarantees competitive advantage for Korean manufactures and services in the world market.

It is pertinent to observe that the free education programme initiated by Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s government in the 1950s was several years ahead of a similar on in the Republic of South Korea. In the early 1960s, Korea’s military president, General Park took measures to halt the mass migration of Korean youths to the United States of America. The first step taken was to inaugurate a radical education reform scheme. His government reasoned that since Korea had no mineral resources to exploit to generate wealth, the best weapon to propel the country to modernity was to educate every Korean to university level and, by so doing, implant in their brains/outlook the knowledge and confidence to be able to exploit mineral wealth of other countries to develop the Korean economy. Through a mass movement involving villages and urban communes, General Park’s government created slogans and popular songs that ridiculed families that lagged behind in the race for university education. The use of shame culture worked; by the late 1970s South Korea had one of the densest percentages of university studentship in the world.

The government consolidated the development of human capital by embarking on state-sponsored industrialisation. A decree was issued making it mandatory for every wage earner to save 25% of savings. The policy yielded large reserves of investible funds in the banks which were instructed to offer liberal loans to investors and industrialists. Some of the industries and companies that developed from this self-reliant policy soon expanded into multinational conglomerates operated by highly literate and globally competitive Korean personnel. Examples of these Korean corporations are Hyundai, Samsung, Daewoo, and LG which are active in the Nigerian economy. Hyundai and Daewoo heavy industries are involved in the construction of hi-tech facilities for deep-sea oil and gas exploration in Nigeria’s coastal waters. Samsung and other Korean electronics giants account for about a third of products in the world; one in every two ocean liners in the global maritime business is made in Korean shipyards. The Korean economic and technological miracle is the harvest of investment in education for all.

Let us return to the parlous state of higher education in Nigeria. The number and quality of staff and facilities in the Nigerian tertiary institutions constitute another area of distress. The shortage of relevant academic staff in the colleges of education and the polytechnics is estimated to be in the range of 60%. As at 2009, the 95 Nigerian universities needed about 50,000 academic staff but only about 30,000 were available. The acute shortfall in the number and quality of staff is aggravated by the deterioration in facilities. These debilitating factors are the primary reason why no Nigerian university has featured among the league of 500 of the world’s best in all rankings conducted in the past one decade.

External Orientation of Curricula

The crisis of inadequacy of numbers of institutions and staff is not the only ailment that afflicts our education. The twin problems of irrelevant curricula and external orientation of scholarship constitute another plank of the crisis. This matter has been thoroughly examined by decolonisation scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Edward Said. Let me illustrate the apprehension of the problem done on the Nigerian situation by Nigerian scholars. Without prejudice to the accomplishments of individual African scholars and universities, the overall impression is that our universities have not contributed significantly to the development of the continent. This is primarily because their academic curricula are not rooted in the culture and environment of Africa. The institutions were not set up to develop indigenous knowledge in Africa and raise it to attain global standards. Rather, the tertiary institutions are, in the main, impoverished extensions of foreign universities in Africa. Professor David Okpako in his book, Malaria and Indigenous Knowledge in Africa (2011) explains this crisis of external orientation thus:

“…the (African) university has not consciously played the expected leadership role in African cultural renaissance but rather has largely stuck to the colonizers’ agenda. The university in Africa has been in the forefront of the propagation of European culture and denigration of African core cultural values. It has therefore been a hindrance to genuine African intellectual emancipation and development” (24).

Professor Olufemi Taiwo’s book, Africa Must Be Modern: The Modern Imperative in Contemporary Africa – A Manifesto (2011) reaches a similar conclusion in respect of research focus and relevance. This is how he presents the matter:

“Just like what happens in other areas of African life, African exertions on behalf of knowledge are afflicted with a terminal case of extraversion. All or most of the work that is done locally is not done for immediate or direct local consumption. Rather they are denominated by whether or not they would be good enough for inclusion in overseas outlets. Universities routinely insist that for advancement, their faculty should publish overwhelming percentage of their intellectual production in so-called ‘international journals’” (106)

Professor Taiwo observes further that,

“…because African knowledge production is extraverted, the direction of research and the choice of themes and methodologies are not driven by considerations of what would enable the best self-knowledge or the thorough investigation of local phenomena but by whether or not foreign sponsors – from foundations of journals to prospective consumers – would be interested in the research agenda…What should have been the primary concern of indigenous odes of knowledge production…is relegated to inferior status and what should have been peripheral is elevated to the core of our scholarly interventions. No one should be surprised that few in the world look to Africa for insights that might ben garnered from our strivings for insights into the human condition and its fate in a hostile and fragile world. This, ultimately, is why African universities do not make it into any lists of the world’s best and are unlikely in the near future” (110-111).

Taiwo agrees with other scholars of similar persuasion that this failure is the direct consequence of European colonialism which thwarted the lofty ambitions of the pioneer African nationalists regarding the duty of a university. In his own opinion, “What colonialism did instead was to midwife an educational system that was shorn of any high ideals but suffused with crass instrumentalism: produce personnel who would keep the colonial bureaucracy and the limited commercial life designed for Africans rolling. The manpower development and nation-building motif was born of that ‘perfumed abortion’. (116). Professor Taiwo proffers an exit from the quagmire by urging that “We need to embrace the scientific orientation and, even as we may believe in the insufficiency of our nature that makes us hanker after religion or spiritual solace, we must commit to the experimental method, the firm conviction that, using reason, we can force nature to yield her innermost secrets to our probing, and that knowledge is power” (117)

Professor Okpako’s redemption thesis in the book cited above is equally elaborate and radical. Having surveyed the crisis in the higher education sector he concludes as follows:

“Nigerian universities are dilapidated shadows of their former selves. When universities in the world are assessed for quality, no university in Africa comes into serious reckoning, as Ibadan was in the 1970s. The institutions have lost many leading scholars, through brain drain, migrant labour, suicidal forced retirements, and those who are left behind labour valiantly, but in frustration, lurching from one crisis to another. It is unrealistic to hope that one day, the prosperous days of the 1970s would once again dawn on the universities; that money would once more be available to pay for the African scholars’ indulgences of intellectual dependence on other cultures. It seems to me therefore, that this is the moment for the universities in Africa to take serious stock of what they teach and how they do it, at research priorities, and what ought to be the best strategies for prosecuting it. I am urging that we turn this period of adversity to advantage and use it to begin to assert our intellectual independence by embarking on a radical review of scholarship in the university in Africa” (58).

Education for all and National Liberation:

The analysis in the foregoing sections has established the fact that Nigeria can never attain the status of a sustainable and self-eliant modernisation without first creating a knowledge-based society through universal education. The abundance of natural resources does not guarantee development. The example of South Korea has demonstrated that a country can be a major player in the world’s economy without endowments in natural resources. There are data to show that Nigeria has more natural resources than all of the countries in South-east Asia. Yet, as our experience of six decades of oil and gas has proven, these riches can fatten the fortunes of foreign exploiters at own expense.

It is instructive that Nigeria has produced a programme of economic and technological self-reliance as envisaged in the Vision 20-2020 and the Transformation of Agenda 2011-2015 of the current administration of President Goodluck Jonathan. Regrettably, the aspirations in the two documents do not go far enough to emancipate Nigeria from dependency on foreign knowledge and services. For example, the job creation section of the Transformation Agenda identifies unemployment as one of the debit sides of economic growth. It observes that the “Nigerian economy is experiencing growth without employment as the rate of the growth of the labour force exceeds the employment opportunities that are being created. The unemployed population is at present dominated by the youth who are mostly school leavers with senior secondary school qualifications and graduates of tertiary institutions”. The composite unemployment data for January 2010 were estimated to be 21%. The situation is worse than this. One of the remedies proposed is to target five million new jobs annually from 2011-2014.. There is also a plan to review “university curricula to align with industry job requirements and promotion of apprenticeship/work experience programmes and joint ventures”.

There is a loud declaration that human capital development “is strategic to socio-economic development of a nation and includes education, health, labour, and employment and women affairs” and it is emphasised that investing in “human capital development is therefore critical as it is targeted at ensuring that the nation’s human resource endowment is knowledgeable, skilled, productive, and healthy to enable the optimal exploitation and utilization of other resources to engender growth and development” (p. 12).

In spite of the pious hopes expressed in these paragraphs, there is no concrete plan indicating the number of educated personnel to be created during the plan period and the programmes to achieve it. Only two paragraphs are devoted to education at page 128 of the Mid-Term Report of the Transformation Agenda published in May, 2013. The review says that the “Transformation Agenda in the education sector aims to refocus the educational system in the areas of access and quality, infrastructure, teacher quality and development, curriculum relevance, funding and planning”. The identified initiatives to achieve these goals are “Early Childhood Care and Education; the Almajiri Education Programme; Back-to-School Programme – South East; Promoting Girl Education; Construction of Model Nomadic Education Centres; and Revitalization of Adult and Youth Literacy”.

These projections are not fundamental enough to achieve the goal of creating a knowledge society. My proposal is that Nigeria must return to the template of education for all developed in the 1950s by the government of Chief Awolowo in the former Western Region as updated by the 1976 Universal Basic Education scheme. The first priority programme is to aim at eradicating any form of illiteracy and obstacle of access to free and compulsory primary education. The first constituency to target is the 10.5 million children of school age who are not enlisted in the system now. The Federal Government should lead the States and local councils to establish the census of the victims. This will enable government to determine the number of physical facilities to provide and teachers and other staff to be employed. The country-wide exercise of identifying the population of pupils and their geographical and gender distribution will generate thousands of jobs. The construction of structures and production of educational materials will expand employment. The engagement of new staff and training will offer additional job opportunities.

It is already known that there is a shortage of 1.3 million teachers in the system. In the first few years of the programme the shortfall in the number of teachers will be met by engaging students of tertiary institutions and senior secondary schools during long vacations. There will continue to be public and private schools. However, as it is at the tertiary level, minimum standards of facilities and staffing must be established. Only proprietors who meet the benchmark will be allowed to own and run primary schools.

There are socio-economic conditions that account for the out-of-school problem. One of them is the poverty of families and households. To remedy this and provide equality of opportunity, it is proposed that primary school pupils should be entitled to subsidised meal each day. This will be a major incentive for children and parents to want to be enrolled in school. The incentives should include uniforms and basic educational materials such as electronic gadgets and books. It is gratifying to note that some states such as Osun have started implementing this progressive policy. At the initial stage, the Federal Government will provide part of the funding for the programme. When it has taken off, the states and local councils will bear the bulk of the expenses, with Federal subsidies and supplements, particularly in areas of critical need. By 2015, the total enrolment figure at the primary school level should be about 35 million.

With this envisaged expansion at the primary base of the educational pyramid, there is bound to be pressure for access at the secondary and tertiary levels. The Federal Government figures indicate that only about one-third of primary school pupils advance to the secondary level. This number has to be doubled within a few years to 15 million from the 8.5 million currently enrolled. By 2019, the products of the additional 10.5 million will be available to enter secondary school. Based on the conservative projection of 50% transition rate, the country should make provisions for an enrolment figure of about 21 million students at the secondary level in 2019. If we make allowance for population growth rate of three per cent, we should plan for about 25 million students in secondary schools.

The data above should serve as guide to estimate the admission figure for the tertiary education level. Okebukola (2011) has proposed that Nigeria should aim at 20% transition rate to tertiary level by 2020. This will mean having five million students in higher institutions in the next six years or a four-fold increase from the present 1.2 million. The carrying capacity of the 130 universities in the country cannot accommodate this increase. Inevitably the existing facilities have to be expanded and new tertiary institutions established. Compared to countries with our population size, the number of higher institutions in Nigeria is acutely inadequate to provide admission to eligible candidates. To meet some of the ambitious aspirations envisioned in the Vision 20-2020 document, Nigeria would need five times the current number.

As has happened in other countries, most of the additional universities and polytechnics will be set up by private proprietors. Their potential to run viable institutions has been proved since 1999 when the first three operators were licensed. In one and half a decade, there are now 50 private universities. It is the responsibility of the government to assist private investors in the capital-intensive business of universities and technical institutions. This stimulus plan can be implemented by relaxing some of the forbidding conditions attached to the establishment of private universities. For example, the pre-condition of acquiring 100 hectares of virgin land discourages many prospective proprietors. Besides the exorbitant cost of land acquisition, the condition drives private owners to site institutions in rural areas where basic facilities are non-existent. This compounds the problem of developing academic infrastructure. A multi-storey building in an urban centre can provide adequate space for a university. There are many universities in the world were started in such sites. If this approach is adopted many of our cities like Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Kaduna, Jos, Abuja, Maiduguri, Enugu, Onitsha, Aba, Port Harcourt, Benin, Warri-Effurun and others can host universities and polytechnics.

The federal land grant policy employed by the United States of America in the 19th century has much value for us in Nigeria. Through the policy the federal government donated public land to states to establish tertiary institutions. This was what created some of the state university systems such as those of California, Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. In the opinion of Alan Brinkley (2000), these universities “played a vital role in the economic development of the United States of America…The land-grant institutions were specifically mandated to advance knowledge in agriculture and mechanics”. From the beginning they were committed “to making discoveries that would be of practical use to farmers and manufacturers. As they evolved into great state universities, they retained this tradition and became the source of many of the great technological and scientific discoveries that helped American industry and commerce to advance” (573).

Education, Industry and Employment

Experts in the field think that about three-quarters of what humans design, build and produce is related to engineering skills. Academic courses in engineering were introduced at the Yaba Higher College in 1937. About 80 years after, what is Nigeria’s standing in this strategic domain of technical capacity? Current estimates show that Nigeria does not have up to 50,000 engineers and allied professionals. Each of the populous states in the country such as Lagos or Kano or Oyo would need as many engineers and technicians to maintain municipal and public services. The low level of engineering knowledge in Nigeria contrasts sharply with that of, say, Japan where about one-fifth of the population of 120 million is made up of engineers and allied professionals. This high density of engineering energy is one of the factors that explain the pre-eminence of Japan in industry and the world economy. For the Nigerian society and economy to be truly modern, the country would need millions of engineering experts. It is instructive to mention here the example of the former Soviet Union in respect of mathematical capacity. By 1989 when the socialist system collapsed in the Soviet Union, there were 33 million mathematicians. It is no surprise that that country, now Russia, was a pioneer in space technology and has remained dominant in that field for 50 years.

If Nigeria does not have the critical mass of engineering and technical knowledge, how can she ever attain sovereignty in the construction industry? The country has been in existence for 100 years yet there is no major indigenous construction firm active in Nigeria and elsewhere. That is why foreign construction corporations handle all the big building contracts – roads and highways, bridges, airports, sea ports, refineries, power plants, and even the offices and residences of our presidents and governors. Every such mega project contracted to foreign organisations is a conduit for capital flight. The contracts create jobs and businesses for foreign countries and fatten the fortunes of their economies. As a consequence the Nigerian economy is under-developed.

68We can illustrate this economic tragedy further. In the early 1980s Governor Lateef Jakande’s government in Lagos State started the construction of the metroline. The reactionary military regime of General Muhammadu Buhari aborted the project. Three decades later Lagos State is yet to recover from the destructive impact of this sadistic measure. One of the negative effects is that the reconstruction of the Nigerian railways system is being handled by experts from China, a country that takes education seriously. In July 2013 when President Goodluck paid an official visit to the Peoples Republic of China, the Nigerian media reported that there were about 17,000 Chinese technicians and professional engaged in various projects in Nigeria.

Nigeria’ failure to invest in relevant education is the main reason why foreign corporations and personnel virtually monopolise the strategic areas of the oil and gas economy. After 60 years of the industry, the Nigerian content of it is not more than 10%. It is a fact that the real wealth in oil is in the refined products. Nigeria has been an oil-dominated country for six decades yet it is still a major importer of refined products. During the 1967-70 Nigerian Civil War, Nigerian scientists and engineers in Biafra designed and operated mobile oil refineries. Four decades after this feat was achieved Nigeria is dependent n imported fuels and products. The bulk of the crude oil produced in Nigeria is exported without value added. Consumers nations that buy the oil manufacture about 100 products from every barrel of crude oil. To free Nigeria from this suicidal dependency on imports the country must invest in education and local enterprise in refineries and petrochemicals.

Local content in the oil industry is about 10% in Nigeria; in Venezuela it is about 70%. The national oil corporations in Venezuela and Mexico handle all phases of oil production – from exploration to production, refining and export. Venezuela also has many offshore refining facilities; Nigeria has none. Because of the corruption and ideological timidity of Nigerian governments, they have subordinated the vital interest of the country to the control and manipulation by multi-national operators such as Shell, Chevron, Mobil, Total, and AGIP. The Petroleum Industry Bill aimed at reducing the exploitation of Nigeria has been stalled in the filibustering doldrums of the National Assembly for seven months. Instead of wasting money in importing petroleum products Nigeria should take a cue from Venezuela, China, and Norway by raising local content in the industry. The priority aspect of this is to support the establishment of small- and medium-scale refineries in every local government area along the oil-producing corridor. With the abundance of oil and natural gas, the route to economic liberation lies in investing in the building of refineries and petrochemical plants in the Niger Delta region for export to the world market.

With education and appropriate financial stimulus agriculture can generate bounteous harvests in enterprises and employment. Nigeria’s location in the heart of the tropics is an advantage, especially with over 84 million ha of arable land. Owing to neglect of the sector and failure to apply technical knowledge to develop agriculture, Nigeria now spends more than one-quarter of its annual budget on import of food and consumables. The Federal Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Adewunmi Adesina has promised to reduce this financial haemorrhage by saving Nigeria from rice slavery by 2015. Adesina’s audacious advocacy for self-sufficiency has led to more reforms in the sector. The Ministry has registered about 15.5 million farmers for the purpose of developing a sustainable value change structure for farming and agribusiness. These progressive ideas will depend on the number and quality of agricultural technical knowledge in the country.

Universities and technical institutions are the pivot of the envisaged transformation in agriculture. Substantial research has been done in various aspects of agriculture. The government should intensify the policies of linkages between researchers and industrial end users. By the 1980s Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, had conducted the research in animal husbandry to end the primitive method of herdsmen roaming the wild for fodder which can be grown in laboratories within a few days. The scientific scheme has not been implemented because of lack of seriousness on the part of government. Research breakthroughs have been recorded in the University of Ibadan in agriculture and forestry. The University’s collaboration with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) has introduced a revolution to the cultivation of cassava. Nigeria is the world’s leading producer of cassava and yam. Each of these root crops can sustain a robust national economy if the government is serious about diversifying the sources of revenue and creating job opportunities. The Asian country of Thailand earns the bulk of its foreign exchange from export of cassava products; the amount is bigger than what Nigeria earns from the export of oil. Thailand is able to do this because it gives priority attention to technical education and research.

Nigeria is the world’s largest natural habitat of the oil palm. In the 1930s the oil palm industry in Nigeria employed over four million people in direct and indirect engagement. Advanced research on the industrial uses of the oil palm has been undertaken at the Nigerian Institute of Oil Palm Research (NIFOR) near Benin. Investors from Malaysia benefited from some of this research. Nigeria neglected the oil palm business in the 1970s with the advent of crude oil; Malaysia intensified investment during the period and she is now the world’s leader in the industry. Nigeria must return to the path of oil-palm prosperity through education, research and applied technology.

Nigeria’s riches in solid minerals have not been exploited primarily because there is shortage of technical knowledge and government support. The 1000-km stretch of territory in the central region of the country contains precious minerals. Host like Nasarawa, Kaduna, Plateau, Enugu, Kogi, and Kwara are richly endowed. These states now depend on monthly revenue from the Federation Account because their natural resources are not developed. The commercial exploitation of the solid minerals awaits adequate investment in education in mining and processing. Naijing University of China founded about 1,800 years ago is renowned in mining technology and research. Nigerian universities and polytechnics in the solid minerals zone should be encouraged to specialise in these fields and aspire to be world leaders.

The neglect of education has also prevented Nigeria from reaping the benefits of being a maritime nation. The country’s water and maritime resources are in abundance. There are over 3,000 km of inland waterways, an 850-km Atlantic coastline, and Africa’s largest wetlands in the Niger Delta. Most of the riches and hidden treasures in these water courses are yet to be identified and exploited. In 1960 the Netherlands Engineering Company (NEDECO) was commissioned by the Nigerian government to carry out a comprehensive inventory of the waterways and their economic potentials. This was done preparatory to the setting of the Niger Delta Development Board which is now defunct. Hundreds of thousands of water engineers and maritime experts are needed to explore the wealth and opportunities in the riverain areas of the country. Dredging and reclamation of swamps require expertise in diverse fields of knowledge

The shipping and maritime industry in Nigeria requires no less than 150,000 experts to optimally operate it. Presently there only about 1,000 Nigerian personnel involved in the business, leaving a vacuum of 140,000 for foreign nationals and investors. The Nigerian Maritime Academy at Oron in Akwa Ibom State is too under-developed to meet the requirement of training for the industry. In contrast to Nigeria there are 44 maritime institutions in the Philippines, 26 in India, 16 in the United Kingdom, and 14 in Bangladesh. For Nigeria to achieve sovereign control over her maritime resources, she must establish more institutions and facilities for training mariners and navigators.

The crisis of inadequate electricity power supply has frustrated Nigeria’s economic development for decades. Many of the potential sources of generating electricity are dormant because of low investment and lack of a critical mass of technical capital. Owing to the shortfall in the number of engineers in the country, building more generating facilities will not be a guarantee of reliable power supply. The building of more power plants must be matched with an aggressive drive in the training of power engineers and technicians; hundreds of thousands are needed to stabilise the system for industrial production and reliable social services.

The nexus between education and the creation of jobs and wealth is well illustrated by the situation of housing. The Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development estimates that there is a shortfall of 15 million housing units in the country. This is an area that encompasses diverse skills and economic opportunities. Think of planners, surveyors, architects, designers, builders, plumbers, painters, insurance and mortgage agencies, suppliers, and sundry commercial enterprises involving in the sector. Housing is an area where education and research can be creatively applied to free Nigeria from dependency on foreign sources. Nigerian researchers have established the fact that affordable and environmentally-appropriate houses can be provided on a mass scale by utilising local earth and clay bricks in place of cement blocks. The cement technology was developed for cold regions of the world; the cement absorbs heat in day time and discharges it to warm spaces at night. It is therefore not very suitable for constructing living quarters in the humid, tropical climate such as Nigeria’s.

By minimising the use of cement in favour of earth and clay bricks, Nigeria will save much on import bills and also create enterprises and employment. In 2005 I did a pilot study on the matter for the government of Delta State. The study revealed that building with clay and other local materials could employ about 250,000 engaged in the mining of clay and sand, production, packaging, transportation, construction, insurance, etc. These data can be multiplied for many states in the country. Besides jobs and enterprises, the indigenous building technology will substantially reduce expenses incurred in providing energy and equipment to cool facilities built with heat-generating cement. Here, again, is a field where Nigeria can attain liberation through the diligent application of education, research, and nationalism.

There is more to be gained by promoting the policy of affordable and relevant housing. One of the factors that induce corrupt practices in the public service is pressure on employees to own their houses/homes as a mark of personal achievement. Nigeria’s traditional culture puts a premium on this symbol, even when the builder/owner does not reside in the house. But the exorbitant costs of building cannot be met from the regular income of public servants. The problem is compounded by the inadequacy of mortgage institutions in the country. The consequence is that those who are able to develop property that costs more than they can legitimately earn are likely to succumb to the pressure for corrupt enrichment. It is the responsibility of the government to promote the cheaper and more affordable types of houses in order that public servants such as teachers, nurses, doctors, and others can look forward to owning their houses through personal savings. Such a policy of a caring government will encourage employees to be honest and diligent in the discharge of their duties. It is the weapon of education supported by a national ideology of egalitarian access to good and affordable living that can curtail corruption.

For an economy in recession, it is the duty of the government to implement measures to cushion the masses of the people from its ravaging effects. Employment of students and youth is one of such measures. Education and industrialisation should be organised to create opportunities for jobs for students and youth. Every major industrial and commercial enterprise in the country should be compelled by law to provide for vacation job engagement for students. For example, the telecommunications industry in Nigeria has been one of the fastest-growing in the world. During the decade of 2000-2010, over 100 million mobile telephone subscribers were registered in the country. But all the handsets and other accessories used in the country are imported. This should not be. In Singapore, Malaysia, India, China, and Japan, school children are engaged in assembling and packaging electronic products. Through this early exposure to the production process, the children develop interest and skills to become future investors, designers, and entrepreneurs in the electronic and technological industry. Nigeria being the largest market for these products should leverage on this advantage by insisting that telephone handsets and allied gadgets are assembled/manufactured in Nigeria to generate employment and incubate industrial investment.

PUBLIC WORKS

The expansion and diversification of the economy is dependent on the application of knowledge-driven investment. It is the government, not the private sector that must lead this process. This was the path of development that Nigeria chose in the 1970s as signalled by investment in iron and steel, automobile assembly plants, power, refineries, paper mills and communications. It is regrettable that the country digressed from this policy by pandering to pressures from the World Bank and other hostile institutions. The private sector in Nigeria is dominated by foreign interests that have no stake in the industrial transformation of the country. The sector is too weak to bear the responsibility. With the possible exception of Lagos State there is no other one that has the kind of private sector to support the quality and pace of development necessary. The government has to assume the leadership role in industrial development. For both small-scale and capital-intensive enterprises, it is government that has the wherewithal to undertake them. A stimulus scheme for this economic change requires increased funding for the Bank of Agriculture, the Bank of Industry, and agencies that promote businesses. The programme can be implemented in partnership with the patriotic segment of the private sector as it is being done in the power industry. Economists may call this state-capitalism but it the most suitable for the Nigerian situation.

The development of industry and enterprise will encourage investment in education and research. An educated work force is the bastion of self-reliant economic development. The products of the educational institutions that empowered with knowledge will run the economy and public affairs to make Nigeria globally competitive and free from the yoke of dependency on import of ideas, goods, and services. This condition of national sovereignty was what Adegoke Adelabu presaged in his immortal words thus:

Education is the foundation of freedom. Ignorance is the basis of slavery. If you would free a people, first and foremost, educate them.

By neglecting to fund education and research in adequate measure government in Nigeria has contributed to the stagnation of industrialisation of the economy. There are dedicated researchers and workers in all the institutions but their efforts are frustrated by obsolete equipment and poor remuneration. Professor Wole Soyinka, our alumnus, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the first African to achieve the feat. All the other academic Nobel laureates in Africa are in literature – Mafouz Naguib of Egypt (1988), Nadine Gordimer (1991) and J.M. Coetzee (2008), both of South Africa. No African scholar has won the prize in science or medicine. This is probably a reflection of the state of scholarship in the continent. In 2001 I interviewed Professor David Okpako on the matter for The Guardian newspaper in Lagos. From his experience as a distinguished pharmacologist Okpako explained that the science laboratory that can produce a Nobel laureate in the sciences must be in active, uninterrupted use for twenty years or more. There is no laboratory of that status in Nigeria. Besides the chronic problem of poor equipment and funding, the frequency of trade union strikes and closure of institutions have banished such opportunities from Nigeria.

Okpako’s emphasis on focused and relevant research is reiterated in his 20011 book already cited. For example, he is of the firm view that African scholars should lead the world in malaria research and cure. This has not happened because Africans approach the disease from the ideological standpoint of Europeans and ignore the body of knowledge acquired by Africans over the millennia. In the second week of October, 2013, there were media reports that a malaria vaccine was being developed. When this breakthrough is made, the prize winners are likely to be foreign researchers and organisations that are appropriately funded.

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