Meritocracy: noun, 1. an elite group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent rather than on birth, class privilege or wealth. 2. the persons constituting such a group. 3. a social system formed on such a basis.
On many occasions in this column, I have reported how shocked and bewildered I was the very first time I came across the 98.2% failure rate in the NECO November-December 2009 examinations. Let me now report that soon after I had absorbed the bewilderment of that discovery, I felt some relief! As a matter of fact, on July 13 this year when I delivered a lecture at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) and mentioned this fact of a great relief that followed my initial shock, the Deputy British High Commissioner, Mr. Peter Carter, who was on the high table, rather spontaneously abandoned all diplomatic niceties and composure and blurted out rather loudly, “You were relieved! Why?” Yes, I had felt relieved, I replied; I had felt relieved because after I had thought deeply about the matter, I recognised that no group of children on the planet could be so dumb, so congenitally retarded as to score that abysmal failure rate of 98.2%. Obviously, I added, the essential problem was not with our children, it was with our system of education. That system of education is failing our children, robbing them of their right to relevant and quality education.
The same logic could be applied to employers of labour in our country who, as I have reported on many occasions in this column, have for a long time now been complaining that the graduates produced by our universities and other tertiary educational institutions are in general so poor in quality that they are “unemployable”. Well, let me now add to that observation an assertion that as far as anyone can tell, employers of labour in our country, those among the demographically small circle of the very wealthy in Nigeria who pride themselves on having worked for their wealth, have never done much to improve the quality of education in our secondary schools and universities. They have, it seems, just assumed that somehow, quality education, quality graduates just emerge from tertiary institutions the way fruits naturally grow from trees. In all the struggles that teachers in our secondary schools and lecturers and professors in our universities have been waging to have funding that is adequate to the task of educating millions of our youths, these employers of labour have generally watched as bystanders, as neutral observers with no stakes in the outcomes of the struggles.
This observation can, and indeed should, be couched in terms of macro-institutional policies and the ruling political order itself. As ASUU has been informing the country and the world for decades now, the Nigerian state consistently scores very low on UNESCO guidelines for capital investment in educational infrastructure for the developing countries of the world. There are many things terribly wrong with education in Nigeria; perhaps the single most important factor is consistent under-investment in education over the decades. And this period happens to be the very period in which the country’s political and economic elites grew immensely rich while the vast majority of our peoples became more and more impoverished. With very few exceptions, the employers of labour that endlessly complain about the quality of graduates produced by our universities have been at the heart of this process of obscene self-enrichment at the expense of the vast majority of Nigerians, at the expense of the development of educational and other infrastructures in our country, at the expense indeed of the quality of life and prospects of the future for our youths. We must not lose sight of this factor and its significance in the calamitous decline of meritocratic values and practices in virtually all aspects of life in Nigeria in the last three to four decades. Indeed, we must place this factor at the heart of all our conversations concerning the abysmal statistics and data that indicate that corruption, mediocrity and rot have eaten deep into the fabric of the social order in our country.
I should perhaps state very clearly here that I am not a warrior, not an ideologue for pure and unadulterated meritocracy in Nigeria or indeed in any part of the world in which we live. For no pure meritocracy has ever existed and will ever exist in human society. Indeed, relatively speaking, meritocratic values and practices first came into prominence in the modern era largely on the heels of the bourgeois world revolution. As status based on noble birth, inherited wealth and social pedigree was powerfully challenged by ability and talent as the commanding criteria for the creation of the industrial and financial capitalism that changed the world forever, meritocracy achieved a prominence that was unknown in any previous stage of human development. However, in nearly all the countries of the world, “old money” based on meritocratic values and practices constantly gives way to “new money” that largely derives from the subversion of meritocracy as an important organising principle in the social order, especially by large-scale and endemic corruption.
For Nigerians over the age of fifty, these observations will perhaps induce some sentimental nostalgia for late colonial and newly independent Nigeria when merit, talent and ability, mostly obtained through education but also expressed through a dogged spirit of industriousness, mattered a lot, when “old money” derived from trade and commerce reigned as the benchmark for the creation of wealth in our country. School children used to make educational trips to the industrial and commercial enterprises of magnates; I think here of the Odutola Tyre Manufacturing Factory in Ijebu-Ode. Transport magnates like Sir Odumegwu Ojukwu, the father of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, were fabled embodiments of “old money” in that period of our country’s economic and social history. And when the so-called “industrial estates or corridors”, as the first mark of state capitalism in Nigeria, were created in the three regions of the country, they were for the most part run efficiently, at least for some time and especially in the Western Region.
I personally feel no nostalgia, no sentimental wistfulness for the particular order of meritocratic values and practices of that period in the economic affairs of our country. In the present discussion, I cannot get into a full discussion of the reasons for feeling this way. Perhaps at some future date in the column, I shall do so. For now, it suffices for me to state that what I feel, what I urge is this: meritocracy has its place in all modern societies, not as the reigning or supervening element, but as a sort of salve that gives assurance that democratic governance and peace, progress and justice will not be subverted, will not be wiped out by corruption run amuck. Pure meritocracy always inevitably leads to alienated rule by technocrats and bureaucrats; on the other hand, a significant absence of meritocracy leads to the sort of rampaging and destructive rule of kleptocrats and unregenerate oligarchs that has Nigeria and Nigerians under its heels at the present time. Ability and talent are not morally neutral qualities; in the hands of opportunists and cynics, they can be the weapons of thieving, unjust rulers; conversely, when allied to the forces of justice, equality and dignity for all women and men, they can be used to break down the walls of oppression and misrule.
As a people we are not unchangingly defined and constituted by those abysmal statistics, data and figures that are regularly trotted out by both concerned patriots and bemused, unbelieving traducers of the Nigeria in which mediocrity, corruption and rot have become like second nature to the rulers and the ruled, the powerful and the disenfranchised. Any number of refutations can be given to illustrate this contention. Here’s one of them: the children of Nigerian immigrants in the U.S. regularly outperform the children of many of the other national immigrant communities of that country. So, there is nothing naturally “wrong” with our children here in the country; it is the system, the prevailing order that is failing our children at home. Here’s another point to keep in mind: even with the disastrous fall in standards in education in general and writing in particular, the intellectual life of the Nigerian nation is generally far more vibrant than what obtains in many other countries in Africa and other parts of the developing world. And here’s another point that is hardly known, even in Nigeria itself: even with the poor ranking of our universities in the African continent and in the world, against all the odds, many home-based Nigerian academics are producing works of world class standard and are very, very dedicated to their students; moreover, when given the chance in the international arena of global academia, they give very good accounts of themselves.
How can these positive or hopeful portents be used as transformative tools? How can we make Nigerians of all social groups and ethnic communities begin to believe that our children can perform as well at home as they do abroad, that our rulers will not always be unconscionable looters and wastrels, that honesty, compassion and decency might one day actually form the composite ethos of our society? There are no easy answers to these questions, but neither are they beyond the pale of what is possible, given the right kind of environment. This will be the starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series.
