BELATEDLY, the Federal Government has bowed to reason and cleared the backlog of the money it owed the Nigerian students studying on Bilateral Education Agreement Scholarship Awards in Russia. But the payment is a stopgap. The real issue at stake is that it took an international outcry, protest marches and media spotlight for the Federal Ministry of Education to offset the bills.
In order to promote mutual understanding, cooperation and exchange in politics, economy, culture, education and trade, countries sponsor international students, teachers and scholars to study and conduct research in their universities. Under the purview of the Federal Scholarships Board, BEA Awards are scholarship awards made to eligible Nigerian youths after due process by development partners. The Nigerian government gives $500 monthly for supplementation; $250 yearly for warm clothing; $200 yearly for health insurance; $500 yearly for medical scholars only and $1,000 for postgraduate research grant yearly, where applicable. Other grants include N100,000 as take-off for postgraduate scholars and N60,000 as take-off for undergraduate scholars where applicable. The 322 students on the BEA in Russia had gone eight straight months without the government paying them their upkeep.
Last year, the same students complained that even Russia was not fulfilling its own part of the agreement. “The agreement in its raw form,” Godwin Ezinkwo, a doctoral student, said, “provides accommodation for students, but unfortunately some of the host countries do not honour this agreement.” According to him, students are made to pay for accommodation, but could not, because their stipends and remittances for at least six months had not been paid. He told the House of Representatives Committee on Diaspora Affairs in 2013, “As I speak to you now, students are going to be evicted from their hostels because they cannot pay for the accommodation.”
Consequently, many of them have become destitute, and do menial jobs in the biting Russian winter to stay alive. Although the Russian government is now fulfilling its own part of the agreement by paying the tuition of our students, it is the Nigerian government that has been turning its own citizens to beggars in a foreign land by not paying the monthly allowance. Akinola Akindamola, who is studying at the Volgograd State Technical University, had lamented, “It is unfortunate that girls with exceptional academic brilliance are now forced to indulge in all manner of indecent lifestyles. These girls now go to clubs and dance semi-nude for a fee that could be as low as $20. For the boys, employers use us for odd jobs, such as clearing of snow and as labourers on construction sites. Even as we do that, there is this perpetual fear that the police will arrest us.” Pathetic.
The Ministry of Education and its successive ministers must account in detail for the BEA programme, which Nigeria also has with Morocco, Ukraine, Cuba, Algeria, Mexico, China, Turkey, Egypt, Japan, Serbia, Macedonia and Romania. What is the fate of our students in these other countries? In the raging crisis, the role of our ambassadors in the countries where the BEA subsists is questionable. They should be proactive in alerting Abuja to the plight of our students out there.
But the crisis is a sign of the desecration of education by the government in Nigeria. A government that gives a meagre N1 billion each to its nine newly-established universities for take-off, but unashamedly budgets N64 billion for the Abuja City Gate, apparently, has not got its priorities right.
Ghana is a major beneficiary of the collapse of education in the country. Lamido Sanusi, a former Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, had once lamented, “Although there are no comprehensive data on the number of Nigerian students abroad, recent data have shown that there are about 71,000 Nigerian students in Ghana paying about $1 billion annually as tuition fees and upkeep, as against the annual budget of $751 million for all federal universities (in Nigeria).” Nigeria has 15,000 students undertaking various courses in the United Kingdom, but a report says the figure may climb up to 30,000 by 2015, which will account for seven per cent of the total UK university student enrolments. As of October, over 7,000 Nigerian students were studying in about 733 institutions in the United States. There are another 1,500 Nigerians in Canadian universities. Nigerians reportedly spend an average of $500 million annually in European and American universities.
Education is the bedrock of civilisation and development. Without a sound, accessible education structure, the society is doomed. The magnitude of the disaster unfolding before our eyes could be seen in the impaired foundation of education in the country. Nigeria, with 10.5 million children of school age roaming the streets, shamefacedly boasts the highest figure of such anomaly in the world.
The best option is that we must begin to be inward looking in the provision of higher education for our teeming youths. There is an urgent need to review the scholarship scheme to ensure that we limit the agreement to countries that treat our nationals with dignity. The Federal Ministry of Education must ensure that the students’ stipends are paid regularly, henceforth.
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