Medical practitioners the world over are wont to proclaim that a good prognosis precedes a good diagnosis; and they want us to take that root, stem and branches. Borrowing a leaf from the physicians, social commentators and public affairs analysts would make us believe that a drastic disease calls for an equal drastic measure of cure. Both positions are probably incontestably right.
A cursory look at the country will show that education and security could be said to be critically sick and, therefore, deserve equal measures of treatment to get them back to acceptable and comfortable shapes.
From the foregoing, it is, therefore, no small wonder then that just as the Police High Command is organising a two-day “Security summit on how to stop pastoral farmers/herdsmen clashes in Nigeria” in Abuja on May 8 and 9, the frontline legal icon and Founder of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), Aare Afe Babalola (SAN), has called on the National Universities Commission (NUC), the university regulatory authority in the country, to convene an education summit where the various ills plaguing the nation’s educational system will be addressed in the overall interest of education.
The security summit is most assuredly a welcome development in the face of the threatening menace of various shades and shapes of violence, including kidnapping and the orgy of Boko Haram and its attendant loss of lives, and means of livelihood amounting to several billions of naira in both ambulatory and non-ambulatory property.
Babalola, who spoke recently at the farewell reception for the immediate past Executive Secretary of the NUC, Prof. Julius Okojie, and the reception for his successor, Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, in Ado-Ekiti, said the summit had become more imperative than ever before for the country to tackle the hydra-headed problems bedevelling its education and, thereafter, take its rightful place in the comity of providers of quality and functional education world-wide.
The reception was organised to appreciate Okojie for the support he has consistently given to the university and to welcome Rasheed for his love for ABUAD. More importantly, it is to impress it on Okojie to use his wealth of experience to continue to support Rasheed to ensure continuity and to be able to identify problems afflicting education in Nigeria with the overall aim of offering constructive advice on how to overcome such problems.
His words: “I want to seize this opportunity to appeal to the two NUC giants, Prof. Okojie and Prof. Rasheed, to continue to work together. Prof. Okojie should continue to use his wealth of experience to advise his successor. The umbilical cord of their working relationship must remain unbreakable as this is one of the veritable ways the much desired change in the country’s education landscape can be consummated and actualised.”
Leaning heavily on his seven-year experience as Pro Chancellor and Chairman of Council of the University of Lagos (UNILAG) and as the Founder of ABUAD since 2009, Babalola, a man who will not stand idle when his voice must of necessity be heard, identified the major problems afflicting the educational landscape as funding, attitude of Nigerians to giving, university autonomy in relation to the power of the Governing Council and Pro Chancellors; the quality of students being admitted into Nigerian universities in the face of JAMB lowering cut off mark to 160; the place of good quality teachers and curriculum development; as well as the emerging technologies, which are redefining virtually all professions in this “knowledge age”.
“All over the world, every university has the right to screen the candidates it wants to admit. It also has the right to embark on other exercises, whether written or unwritten, to make it and its products stand out. It is for this reason that any student applying to study Law in the University of Oxford is mandatorily required to take the Law National Aptitude Test (LNAT), any student applying for Biomedical Sciences must take Biomedical Admissions Test (BMAT), any student applying for Chemistry must take Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA) while any one applying for Classics must take Classics Admission Test (CAT)”, he added
He added: “It must be emphasised that many of the students being recommended for admission in the universities by JAMB are certainly not university materials. Universities need to be populated by students who have received proper and quality primary and secondary school education; and that was why I was shocked and amazed when JAMB reduced the cut-off for admission in universities to 160 last year. This is rather bad. The minimum cut-off mark should not be below 200 for universities while a cut-off mark of between 160-180 should be for polytechnics and colleges of education”.
Babalola, who has always maintained that education is too important and expensive business to be left to governments alone to fund in the face of innumerable and competing other needs, decried a situation where $7,130,137,243 amounting to N1,212,123,331,310 budgetary expenditure of North California State University in 2012 dwarfs the Federal Government of Nigeria’s N495,456,130,065 budget for 50 federal universities, including the Universal Basic Education for the same year; and which translates to 40.88 per cent of the budget allocation of the former.
With this scenario, the protagonist of quality education postulated that it would be impossible for Nigerian universities to compete favourably with any of the top universities in the world let alone drive innovation and maintain qualitative levels of delivery without donations, endowments or gifts from sources other than the government.
Babalola, who also denounced the attitude of Nigerian to giving, lamented that “an average Nigerian does not believe in giving and that is what makes a lot of difference in Europe and America where individuals wilfully will their estates in support of university education.
‘’Today, it remains incontrovertible that the best universities abroad thrive on grants and donations. And so, funding of universities in country can be improved upon if Nigerians change their attitude about giving. The funding of education cannot and should not be left to government alone,” he said.
He added: “The time to act is now, that we can through donations, gifts and endowments change the face of education in Nigeria. If universities have to rely on grants, endowments and other kinds of gifts, then the societies in which they exist must imbibe the culture of philanthropy. This culture of philanthropy is unfortunately insufficiently practised in Nigeria. This failure to imbibe it is a threat and challenge to funding of educational institutions.
“The government should let Nigerians know that they cannot be bearing children for government to educate. Besides, government itself should change its attitude towards the funding of education. It must make deliberate efforts to comply with UNESCO’s recommendation of 26 per cent of the country’s yearly budget allocation to education. In addition, governments at all levels should stop deceiving the people about offering them free education which no government has been able to do after the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo (SAN), who devoted as much as 52 per cent of the resources of the then Western Region to successfully prosecute free education in that region.
“…the change we need is not about corruption only. We need change about giving, about endowment, about institution of professorial chairs in our universities. Our case should not be different from what obtains in other parts of the world. My plea to you is that you should use your good offices to impress it on the government to increase the annual budgetary allocation to education while there should be more financial commitment on the part of the generality of the people, particularly the well-to-do in the society”.
On Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), which private universities has not been able to benefit till date, Babalola said the time has come for NUC to reverse that trend. He said private universities are non-profit entities limited by guarantee and are clearly distinct from limited liability companies where shareholders share money at the end of every business year.
According to him, any private university, which operates on its permanent site with a minimum of 20 of its academic programmes accredited by the NUC and has also commenced its postgraduate studies, should enjoy unfettered access to TETFund.
Babalola recommended more of such summits to brainstorm on the way forward in Nigeria’s education future, adding that there lies the much-desired change, peace and harmony in the land.
