Education: Nigeria in a knowledge economy (1)

The topic of this paper is ambitious, but absolutely rife, apt and ger­mane to the great question of the day in Nigeria and the rest of the world. Education is, no doubt, the hand­maiden of development in any nation. This is so even in the societies that are said to have developed, not to mention those nations like Nigeria who are said to be developing or worse still, under-developed (a terrible consignment of fate dished out to us by our imperious defin­ers in the West!). This is why it was still necessary for Barack Obama, President of the United States to centralize educa­tion, which he finds to be suffering from acute decline, in his campaign for a sec­ond term in twenty-first century United States of America.

If this were so for the world’s uni-polar super-power (US still claims that, position in spite of the great competition by China for that position), the rest of the world, especially the third world, including Nigeria, cannot af­ford to understate the critical import of educa­tion to its national development agenda—be it 7-point or, as it is today, Transformational Agenda. Raven (2002), reflecting on the out­come of 911 (the tragic events of September 2001) averred that even to attain security and peace in the world, education is the key; the best defence against terrorism is an educated people. Education, which promises to each individual the opportunity to express their in­dividual talents fully, is fundamental to build­ing a peaceful world.

Raven went further to admonish the de­veloped world, especially the United States, to rise up to the occasion of contributing substantially to the project of alleviating the pervasive poverty of the ‘poorest people of the world.’ And this can and should be done through education.

James J. Duderstalt (2002) paints the pic­ture of the crisis of access to Higher Educa­tion in the world more graphically and the sorry state of the developing world in this regard when he states that; there are 30 mil­lion people in the world today who are fully qualified to enter a university but for whom no university place is available. Within a decade, there will be 100 million university-ready people…in most of the world, higher educa­tion is mired in a crisis of access…Unless we can address this crisis, billions of people in coming generations will be denied the educa­tion so necessary to compete in, in an age of knowledge (my emphasis)

We are one of the fastest growing popula­tions in the world and one of the 10 most pop­ulous in the world and the black world’s most numerically strong. This is in age in which there is a youth budge, and our population is one of the most youthful; ‘half of the world’s population is under the age of 20, with over two billion teenagers on planet Earth, most living in Asia, Africa, and Latin America,’ with a staggering demand for education. We know from studies that Asia and Latin Ameri­ca are fiercely addressing the education crisis. What about Africa? What about Nigeria?

Education is inextricably connected to the question of development. The production of knowledge and the human capacity weighs heavily with how a nation’s development is pursued and attained. In Nigeria, histori­cally speaking, education and development are inseparable. Our nationalists underscored this fact even in the drive for political inde­pendence in their awareness that ‘the country could not develop without a proper ground­ing in a national education system that can guarantee the production of the desired qual­ity workforce without which national devel­opment is impossible (Olusegun Obasanjo, 2012).

The former Head of State and President of Nigeria found that ‘the current reform agenda and transformation programmes of the Fed­eral Republic of Nigeria are part of the his­torical attempts to direct public attention’ that must transpire for us into addressing ‘our daunting challenges in the public and private spheres, especially in higher education.’

Now what is development and how does it devolve on the development of a nation? There are all kinds of theories of development especially in this age of development studies. We shall not belabour the burden of theoriza­tion here.

A nation or a nation state is a modern ‘so­cietal unit’ into which most population and peoples of the world are categorized for the purpose of geo-political reference (Moham­med, 2002). The term development refers to the act of advancement, growth, change or evolution from one stage to another, marked by progress. Within the context of this work, development applies to improvement in con­dition often found on the notion of National development loosely referring to the process of projected improvement of the well-being of the citizens of a nation.

National Development implies a general and sustainable improvement in the socio-economic well-being of a state, arising from the structural transformation of the economy. The rating of state in terms of the level of development is based on the degree of avail­ability and utilization of some goods and services essentially designed to enhance the well-being of the citizenry. Such goods and services embrace basic human needs such as food, housing, water and education among others. Development is seen as the manage­ment of available resources, for economic, social and political progress, based on an eq­uitable distribution of the basic needs such as food, shelter, health, education, water, job to the population in a politically stable and se­cured environment (Dokubo, 2011).

Dependency Theory views development as relational, based on internal conditions dif­fering between economies of developed and under developed countries. World System Theory holds that industrialization cannot al­ways be equated with development; and, State Theory proposes that economy is inter-twined with politics; therefore, the take-off period in development is unique in each country.

The objectives of development as indi­cated above tally with those proposed by Todaro and Smith (2001) on increasing the availability and widening the distribution of basic necessities of life (food, shelter and se­curity); raising levels of living standards as­sociated with cultural and humanistic (core) values; and raising the range of economic and social choice available to individual(s) and nation(s), to free them from servitude and de­pendence. Other approaches in developmen­tal studies also tend to rely entirely on culture as its launching pad. National development embraces a whole nation and circumscribes ‘the overall development or a collective so­cio-economic, political as well as religious advancement of a country’ (Lawal and Olu­watoyin, 2011). This is obtainable through development planning as collective strategies which a government maps out.

How have we utilized education (through the National Policies on Education) for na­tional development in Nigeria since indepen­dence? Again, this is the subject of another discourse. Suffice to state here, as elaborated in the body of the work, that the structure, plans and designs of the policies, the educa­tional system in Nigeria lack policy coher­ence, policy ownership and ample imple­mentation. Thus, its focus on self-realization, individual and national effectiveness, national unity and ‘the objective of achieving social, cultural, economic, political, scientific and technological development, has not materi­alized into the sustained and sustainable de­velopment of the nation. Reason? Incoherent policy implementation and other challenges such as incessant strikes, lock-outs in the ter­tiary institutions (note the recent protracted strike actions of ASUU and the almost one-year strike of ASUP, which has just been sus­pended, unattractive and dis-incentive service conditions, leading to brain-drain –to pastures that are not so green nowadays-; poor work environment in institutions leading to inad­equate resource materials in libraries and laboratories; immoral and unethical practices in the institutions—financial mismanagement by administrators and misconduct by staff; poor management of crises in the institutions; inadequate funding of education by govern­ment, including lopsidedness in allocation with a disproportion in allocation in favour of recurrent expenditure over capital expendi­ture; delayed releases of appropriation; poor funding of the free education policy at the primary school level; mushrooming of pri­vate institutions and difficulty in regulation of standards. Thus, obviously, the concept of national development should manifest in the life of society through technology, economy, politics and the standard of social living. Unfortunately, that has not been the case in Nigeria, as a result of the failure of our educa­tional sector to play its key role of providing the knowledge (human capacities), which will drive development, especially as we peep at the global knowledge society and economy.

Tweet