Tag: NECO

It is clear that the power of a properly educated and trained citizenry to increase the competitiveness of Nigeria in the comity of nations cannot be ignored without devastating consequences for the country and its citizens.

Following the conclusion to last week’s piece, today’s column will be devoted to fuelling public debate on how to address the failure of the education sector in the country. Today’s emphasis will be on ideological underpinnings of education in a ‘federal democracy.’ Efforts will be made to spell out what should be done to bring education back to the front burner, not only in terms of policy making but also in terms of school/college effectiveness.

Given the dismal statistics about low learning outcomes in WAEC and NECO, it is safe to assume that the foundation for higher education in the country has been compromised by the failure to create effective primary and secondary education culture in the country. The failure of the education sector is similar to that of the energy sector which provides electricity for less than 25% of the population less than 25% of the time. The decline in education should be worrisome enough for the federal government to declare an emergency in this sector. But lessons learned from declaring an emergency in the energy sector years back are too clear for the federal government to take a similar risk with education. The provision of electricity has been getting poorer since the declaration of an emergency in the sector. But no problem goes away by itself. There is a need for human intervention in any institution created by human beings.

The major problem facing the education sector is how to achieve and sustain quality and equity at the same time. For example, ongoing efforts by the federal government to achieve quality in secondary education has led to the abandonment in a democracy of the principle of equality of opportunity for all citizens. With about 100 Unity Secondary Schools across the country, the federal government has for decades believed it is possible to provide quality education that can bring about what W. E. B. DuBois once characterised as the Talented Tenth that moves society to higher achievements. Admission to Unity Schools has, as Femi Folorunso observed in a recent lecture in Lagos, generated suspicion and resentment on the part of southern Nigerians whose children with higher scores could not get into the same Unity School that children from the north with far less points than their southern counterparts easily got admitted to, on account of keeping Nigeria united.

As bad as that situation is for achievement of a union of affection in the country, another related problem is that it is generally only children of the middle class that get admitted to Unity Schools. Where the admission policy or process does not openly endorse discrimination, exclusion of children of the working class or under class have no access to even sitting for entrance examinations to most of the Unity Schools. Most of such children have been restricted by material poverty and lack of access to middle-class influence peddling to neighbourhood primary and secondary schools, most of which may not even appear on the register of schools in the federal ministry of education.

In addition, efforts at the private level to provide quality teaching in primary and secondary schools have resulted in mushrooming of private or fee-paying schools in the nooks and corners of the country. Again, it is parents with material resources that can afford to send their children to private schools. Thus, the children of majority of Nigerians are left to choose among neighbourhood primary and secondary schools funded through a combination of efforts by the federal, state, and local governments. If there is any noticeable quality being offered in the private schools, the exodus of children of middle-class background that go to Ghana every year for primary and secondary education, (not to talk of those who go to the U.S., U.K., and now U.A.E.) does not show any durable confidence in the education provided by most of the fee-paying schools in Nigeria.

To say that the country is at a cross-roads in terms of education provision is an understatement. With about an average of 40% success rates at the end of secondary education and a university system believed by many federal ministers as producing unemployable graduates, the country is in deep trouble that can affect its foundation, not necessarily in terms of disintegration that has become a popular bogey in the mouths of politicians and cultural leaders from the north and the Southsouth in recent years, but in terms of not transcending its present status of the world’s dumping ground for all goods from pasta to plasma television. Any further lowering of the competitiveness of the country will be enough to make the country import more than it can pay for, even now that oil is enjoying the benefit of a seller’s market. The situation will be worse for Nigeria when oil in the next decade or two becomes an item in the buyer’s market with the resultant falling of oil price.

It is clear that the power of a properly educated and trained citizenry to increase the competitiveness of Nigeria in the comity of nations cannot be ignored without devastating consequences for the country and its citizens. Like everything else, organising provision of education to respond to the fear that allowing states and regions more freedom to determine how to refine their culture and advance their development, is not likely to achieve anything more than the organisation of the Nigeria Police Force has done: inefficiency and ineffectiveness. It is indeed safer to believe that encouraging all parts of Nigeria to develop ways of providing quality education to citizens without excluding any group or class directly or indirectly has a higher chance of enhancing the country’s unity than holding parts of the country down from getting imaginative about how to solve the problem of education provision for citizens.

What is needed is for the federal government to leave the running of schools to local governments, as Folorunso recommended in the lecture referred to earlier. This will allow states and local governments to collaborate on curriculum development and inspectorate system. The current system of allocating funds to states and local governments from the revenue from rents collected on oil and gas may need to stop, to allow local governments and states to collect taxes from citizens and in the process create a bond or contract between the two sides about how to solve the fundamental problem of training children that can keep Nigeria going beyond the decades of oil.

What the federal government needs to do is to work out in conjunction with the federating units a vision of what type of Nigeria we plan to create. The present mantra that Nigeria is being prepared to become the 20th largest economy is too vague to base an education development strategy on. Whatever number Nigeria occupies at present in the ranking of economies has not come from its efforts as much as it has from the oil in the womb of its soil. Now that it is becoming clearer by the day that the century of hydrocarbon may be coming to an end, the preparation for the century of knowledge as the source of wealth and employment requires that the current system of a big federal bureaucracy directing national education for the purpose of keeping the appearance of national unity will be unable to face the challenge of designing an effective education provision for all citizens. Since most citizens attend public primary and secondary schools, it is no use pretending that the problem of quality and equity will go away by either sending children abroad or allowing private vendors of education to operate with little or no monitoring from the governments with jurisdiction over their locations.

To be continued.