Youth,’ says William Pitt the Elder,‘is the season of credulity.’ This sums up the tragedy of the Nigerian youths who grew up believing that they are the leaders of tomorrow. Credulity is not a vice. Every human being has the right to dream. And so a child growing up, and along the way picks up a dream—of becoming a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, a manager, a professor, a top business executive, a civil servant, and so many other lofty status that makes one a success in life. On the strength of that singular dream, a child labours through schools, burns the midnight oil and eventually makes it to the university. Out of those who eventually graduate from Nigeria’s many universities, only very few, say, 30% ever get close to realizing their dreams. Graduation draws them right into the reality of the Nigerian condition.
If you doubt my assessment of dream truncation, consider some critical but grim data. First, Nigeria is demographically a youthful country. That translates into some optimistic prognosis about how that youth bulge could become the opportunity for development planning that would be premised on youth empowerment and employability. Unfortunately, we have to contend with the global phenomenon of unemployment, and its specific Nigerian horror. As at 2015, Nigeria’s youth unemployment rate is over 50%. This figure might even be larger as the CBN hinted in 2014 that over 80% of Nigerian youths are jobless. Factor Nigeria’s lack of an impressive data culture in policy intelligence and analysis into the unemployment and education equation, and you get an understanding of how depressing the reality is.
No doubt, Nigeria has a serious development deficit. There is no developed nation in the world that does not recognize the significance of the youths to national progress. The youth constitutes a critical mass of national capital which is then converted into a workforce that could move the machinery of development. When this fails to happen, unemployment is transformed into a debilitating malaise that wastes the vitality of the nation. This is the stage at which Nigeria stands in terms of the employability of its youth. And we only need scrutinize the root cause of the Arab Spring, and the sacrifice of Bouazzizi, the Tunisian youth who was forced by the shame of acute unemployment to set himself ablaze, to realize what chronic unemployment portents for a nation of over 190 million people with a significant youth component.
While this is the dire consequence of unemployment, what is the cause? Here we examine two corollary variables whose combine effects are undermining Nigeria’s development capacity. I have in mind the Federal Government of Nigeria and the Nigerian tertiary education system. The Nigerian Policy on Education (NPE) is a document fabricated within the context of a paradox. On the one hand, the government recognizes that human capital development plays a huge role in driving development planning. Hence, the essence of having a policy on education is meant to push that recognition to the point of policy implementation. On the other hand, however, the very policy document that is founded on the critical role of human capital development undermines its own rationale by cutting its potential output by a radical half! In other words, by its avowed pursuit of 60:40 ratio in favour of the sciences over the humanities and the social sciences (HSS), the government undermines the potentials of the HSS contribution to national development. Suffice it to add that the critical issue really is not the 60:40 ratio which in some sense is self-justifying, it is the import of that policy as a totality of attitude of policy makers borne out of some intellectual laziness or partial blindness.
The ratio, I suspect, is borne out of the government’s belief that the HSS are not development-useful. And that seems perfectly logical. I mean, what possible role could history or religious studies or modern European studies or philosophy play in the nation’s attempt to create a science and technology framework that could launch Nigeria’s development initiatives? It therefore seems to make equally perfect sense that the sciences ought to be promoted and funded over the HSS. This development reasoning is not purely Nigerian. The HSS all over the world are under siege, especially in the wake of the rise of the STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering and mathematics. These four forms the hard core of development education that any nation urgently requires. And so, several departments of the non-development disciplines have been forced to rationalise their staff, brutally merged to save cost or forced to close shop. Beheading therefore became the cure for a severe headache!
And the Nigerian tertiary education system only makes the matter worse. Because this system is essentially tertiary, its foundation is built on what we can call a ‘certificate illusion.’ In other words, the thousands of youths entering the universities every year hold the false hope that it is their certificates that would earn them a lifelong meal ticket. They are cured of this illusion after four or so years in the ivory towers. And so over the years, the Nigerian universities, the intellectual sites for the generation of national intelligence and competences, have become grim industries that churn out graduates who will eventually be unemployed or unemployable. And the graduates of the HSS are the worst hit in this unemployment equation. It would make for a rather enlightening statistics to know the proportion of HSS graduates that make up the unemployment data.
Most Nigerian universities are complicit in this depressing predicament. At one end, there seems not to be any publicized and sustained series of concerted efforts, intellectual and political, to outline the critical role of the HSS in national development. Except maybe the universities themselves are indifference to the possible roles the HSS can play in the development equation of Nigeria. If universities are centres of competences, then there is a lot that needs to be done to ensure that there is really a genuine attempt to deliver on that mandate to boost Nigeria’s chance of ever achieving a wholesome development profile. When compared with other disciplines, the HSS constitute a set of disciplines whose value significance to the society and the nation ought to be critically revisited, or precisely updated. The slogan of the humanist scholars is that the humanities humanize. True. In the inculcation of a sense of beauty and values, an awareness of the divine, the internalization of the elements of critical thinking, etc., a human individual is weaned off terrible subhuman attitudes and beastly tendencies that compromise the essence of harmonious human relationships in what we call the human society.
Yet, the HSS graduates must compete with other well-endowed and competently prepared graduates in the age of global competitiveness. The critical questions therefore are: In what sense can the HSS humanize in the age of capitalism? How can the humanizing advantage of the HSS inflect the Nigerian development challenge, and transform it radically? What more do the HSS graduates require to become functionally adequate? These questions are critical and the right answers to them not only becomes the leeway the HSS require to be saved the looming threat of rationalization, these answers are equally significant in integrating the HSS graduates into the development equation in Nigeria. It does not serve any purpose to recraft the National Policy on Education to achieve a 50:50 ratio balance. On the contrary, what is needed is a concerted rethinking process that can impact policy intelligence and implementation. Put in other words, the policy hand of the Nigerian government must be forced to see why rationalizing the HSS or starving it of funds would not be in the national interest, in the final analysis.
There is a tendency that the global trend in the diminution of the relevance of the HSS would eventually trickle down to Nigeria. As it is, the first manifestation of that trend is the NPE and its lopsided ratio, fuelled by the strange belief that it takes only science and technology to develop Nigeria. Unfortunately, government and its policy makers are not looking at the issues from the other side—that science and technology themselves pose significant threat to Nigeria’s development objectives in several critical senses. For instance, the emerging technologies have become the convenient avenues by which fundamentalism and terrorism have run out of control in the human society.
It therefore seems that the establishment of the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy (ISGPP) becomes a timely catalyst that can independently jumpstart the conversations around the urgent need to rethink and rehabilitate the HSS not only to be in tune with its own mandate, but also to facilitate a genuine and necessary dialogue with the Nigerian development needs and objectives. The ISGPP is initiating these intellectual and policy conversations in the recognition that the HSS constitute a critical mass of disciplines whose development values have been lost in the jaundiced perception of what development is, and who and what they can contribute to it. But as a first condition for that possibility, the Nigerian universities owe the Nigerian youth a radical intervention that would be conducive to employability. It seems to me that that is one fundamental development dividend that any nation owe its youths. And the employability of the HSS graduate is a function of how entrepreneurial skill can complement the humanizing mandate of the HSS. In that, I see the marching order for the Nigerian universities: the immediate and urgent implementation of a thriving entrepreneurial education compulsory for students, and shorn off all overly theoretical ambition.
