Nigeria @ 54: How independent is the education sector?

IN what seems like a reoccurrence of what happened two years ago, when millions of Nigerian students celebrated the nation’s 52nd independence anniversary at home due to strike by university lecturers under the aegis of Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, millions of pupils and students across several states, yesterday, said a silent hurray as they stayed back home to mark the nation’s 54 years of independence.






The usual enthusiasm that greets every Independence Day anniversary, especially among school children, who bask in the euphoria of the excursions and march-past parades before state officials and other eminent personalities at stadia across the country, was missing yesterday.

This is no thanks to the closure of schools due to the outbreak of the deadly Ebola Virus Disease, EVD, imported into the country on July 20 by Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian-American diplomat.

This is made worse as yesterday marked the 170th day since the kidnap of over 200 female students from  Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, by the Boko Haram group, while they were writing their SSCE.

Critical re-examination
Re-examining the nation’s education sector at 54, stakeholders that spoke to Vanguard Learning lamented that five decades after independence, Nigeria is still grappling with challenges bordering on rot, incessant strikes by staff unions over welfare and the state of teaching and learning facilities, kidnapping and killing of innocent school children in their schools by Boko Haram, increase in the number of out-of-school children and the dying prospect of meeting the 2015 United Nations’ deadline for Education for All.

There is also mass failure in national examinations, inadequate access to tertiary education, steep hike in tuition fees in tertiary institutions, the rising army of unemployed graduates roaming the streets, craze for education in foreign Nigeria-@-54countries and brain-drain as a result of mass exodus of teachers to foreign institutions, among other worrisome issues.

A rejected budget: In what looked like an early punch to the Federal Government, the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities, SSANU, in January, kicked against the N373.4bn allocated to the education sector in this year’s budget, claiming that it is far below the 26 per cent minimum budgetary allocation recommended by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO.

The SSANU Chairman, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta,  Ogun State, Abdussobur Salam, said though education got the second highest allocation in the budget, the fund was too paltry to have the desired impact on the sector.

Army of unemployed youths
A recent survey which puts the figure of the nation’s unemployed youths at 54 per cent became glaring on March 15, when no fewer than 19 innocent job seekers, including pregnant mothers, lost their lives in stampedes that occurred during a nationwide recruitment exercise held by the Nigeria Immigration Service, NIS, in different stadia in the country.

For just 4,000 job spaces, over 70,000 job seekers stormed the venues of the recruitment test, a worrisome situation which stakeholders say is a direct opposite of government’s claim that over 1.6 million jobs were created in 2013, while the National Enterprise Development Programme, NEDEP, will create 3.5 million jobs for unemployed Nigerian youths this year.

… and Chibok girls were kidnapped
Nigerians were yet to get over the news of the Immigration stampede when, on the night of April 14, no fewer than 276 female students who were writing their SSCE were whisked away from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, by Boko Haram insurgents.

Sadly, the nation marked its 54th independence anniversary yesterday as over 200 of the girls are yet to return, making it exactly 170 days since the girls got  missing.

JAMB’s new directives
Worried that the nation’s higher institutions have only been able to accommodate about one third of the over 1.5 million candidates who write the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations, UTME, annually, the Registrar, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, Professor Dibu Ojerinde, few months to UTME, disclosed that beginning with the 2014 UTME, candidates will be given the choice to pick only one university of their choice, as against the traditional first and second choice options of universities and/or polytechnics.

He said: “The policy was necessary to solve the admission crisis bedevilling the nation’s education sector.

WAEC shocker
Just as Nigerians were getting over JAMB’s directive, the Head of National Office, West African Examinations Council, WAEC, Mr. Charles Eguridu, dropped a shocker that signifies a decline in the performance of students in external examinations as 529,425,000 candidates, representing 31.2 per cent of the total 1,692,435,000 candidates who participated in the examination, recorded credit pass in five subjects, including English Language and Mathematics, as against 36.57 and 38.81 per cent in 2013 and 2012 editions, respectively.

Education Builders
However, to Vanguard Learning, the celebration of Nigeria at 54 years, will not be complete if we do not mention companies, NGOs which have contributed to the development of education in the land. Firms like MTN Foundation, ExxonMobil, UBA Foundation, DUFIL and Promasidor, have through their corporate social responsibility, contributed immensely to Nigeria’s education sector. Their contributions were done in form of awards of scholarships, purchase of equipment for schools, construction of classrooms and science laboratories to mention a few.

Executive Trainers Limited, ETL,   in the past six years has directly been involved in the training and retraining of vice- chancellors, rectors, provosts, registrars, bursars   and other top executives in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions.

On its part, Foundation for Effective Leadership and Development, FELD, a non- governmental organisation has consistently in the past three years offered scholarships and grants to 11, 374 persons.

school1 Scoring the sector 54 per cent, the South-West Zonal Coordinator, Parents Teachers Association of Nigeria, Mr. Olusoji Adams, attributed the many problems the sector is facing to Nigerians’ lack of the fear of God.

“Nigeria has all it takes to offer free education to all its citizens but that is not what we are witnessing. If we want to witness any form of improvement in the education sector, government at all levels must, as a matter of urgency, increase budgetary allocation to the sector to, at least, 34 per cent. This is because there are a lot of intelligent people who desire to be educated but lack the finance to do so.

“In 1971, as the Federal Commissioner for Finance and Vice-President of the Federal Executive Council in Yakubu Gowon’s Federal Military Government, Obafemi Awolowo, of blessed memory, told government that with the amount of money the country is making, it could afford to offer free education at all levels of education to its citizens.
“Though it was put to vote and was out-voted, but we can only imagine how developed Nigeria would have been if we started practising free education since 1971.”

Standard of education
The Provost, Michael Otedola College of Primary Education, Epe, Professor Olu Akeusola, is of the opinion that Nigeria’s problem isn’t with the standard of education but with the implementation of policies.

He said: “It is so sad that 54 years post-independence, Nigeria is yet to get it right in the education sector because our leaders are so much in a hurry to come up with new policies that are not properly implemented.

”The 6-3-3-4 system of education would have been the best if it had been properly administered. This is because the senior secondary schools are supposed to be feeders for the universities; technical colleges would feed polytechnics while Grade 2 students would feed Colleges of Education. But today, we have scraped Grade 2 and everyone wants to go to the university and only consider polytechnics and Colleges of Education when they fail to gain admission into universities.

“A lot of directors in the Ministry of Education are not educationists but lawyers and accountants.
So until we are able to properly administer policies and put round pegs in round holes, we would continue to have lacunas.”

In agreement is the National Coordinator, Education Rights Campaign, ERC, Mr. Hassan Soweto, who lamented the consistent decline in the sector over the years. “The sector has fared  poorly and if a graph of the sector is drawn, you’ll see a sharp decline in both funding and infrastructure provision.”

“We recorded over 50 per cent failure in WAEC which has been going on for the past five years and can be attributed to lack of motivation for teachers and unfavourable atmosphere that doesn’t encourage learning,” Soweto said.

Continuing, he said: “Fifty-four years after independence, the sector is doing poorly and we urge the government to use this anniversary celebration occasion to revamp the sector.”

Saddened by the drop in the standard of education, which he blamed on lack of merit, a veteran teacher in one of the unity schools, who pleaded anonymity, said: “From independence to date, the standard of education has drastically fallen and this is evident in our spoken English.

“Initially, a secondary school certificate holder could speak fluent English, but now, some professors can’t properly express themselves in correct English and the media isn’t left out, and this is a mirror of what happens in every subject which reflects in our chosen professions.

“This is as a result of loss of discipline in schools, the issue of tribalism and lack of merit, which has been thrown overboard.”

Quality education
For an official of the Ministry of Education, Oyo State, who declined to give his name, Nigerian education has not lived up to expectation as many people are migrating to Ghana and other countries in search of quality education.

“Our problem is that government has not prioritized education and spent the education budget accordingly as no one is monitoring the money allotted to the sector. Unity schools’ teachers are suffering, they have not been promoted and have been on strike.

“In the 70s, upon graduation from the university, you are given instant employment and the perks that come with the position but that is not the case today as government is leaving everything to the private sector who are just using beautiful buildings to deceive parents while, in actual sense, things are not working in the school and the courses are not accredited.”

To sum it up, one year to the 2015 Education for All deadline, concerned stakeholders doubt Nigeria’s ability to live up to the goal, especially against the fact that UNESCO, in an earlier report, said that it would take more than 70 years before all children will have access to primary education.

Entitled 70 Year-Wait for Primary School, the report says 57 million children, over 10.5 million of whom are Nigerians, remain without schools and at the current rate, it will be 2086 before access is reached for poor, rural African girls.

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