Some Nigerian intellectuals in particular and development scholars in general criticize the colonial education system as inadequate for the progress of the colonized. This criticism should be re-examined given the poor state of education in today’s Nigeria. Recall that colonial education produced the scientists, engineers, and administrators who produced war resources and effectively managed institutions and organizations in Biafra during the Biafra-Nigeria war. Because many of those scientists and engineers and their equally brilliant counterparts in other parts of the country have retired from active work or passed on, the country cannot have them back. Nor does the current educational system possess the capacity to reproduce their type.
An impressive number of academics educated in some of the best universities in Europe and America continued to produce the cream of bright and well-educated manpower in the country’s universities after the civil war. Successive crops of equally bright Nigerians sought higher education in foreign countries. Many returned home and took employment in the public and private sectors. Many graduates of Nigeria’s primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions in colonial and immediate post-colonial periods often describe their educational experiences in awe. The environments in which the three levels of education take place today are viewed with disgust by the same alumni who were awed by their educational experience. What happened to the excellent and dedicated teachers, good physical infrastructure across the three layers of education, and graduates with functional skills inherited at independence?
Cracks in Nigeria’s educational system had started by 1976 when the Obasanjo administration hurriedly implemented universal primary education. The resulting shortage of teachers led to recruitment of many unqualified teachers into the primary school system. Though the Shagari administration of 1979-83 is credited with founding an impressive number of unity schools and federal universities, the same administration badly managed the Nigerian economy. The resulting economic crisis left the educational sector under-funded and created the beginning of an economy unable to provide employment to the products of education. Since then, subsequent military and civilian administrations have neither created a strong economy nor have they been able to reverse the decay of the education sector. Hence decline in the quality of education which gradually started in 1976 and accelerated in the 1980s and 90s continues to the present day.
A critic may argue, and rightly so, that some of the recipients of the high quality education of the colonial times and immediate post-independence years held important positions in the country but did not put Nigeria on a better footing than they found it, their good education notwithstanding. Bad leadership at local, state and national levels continues to have a ‘backwash effect’ on management of public and private institutions. Indigenous successors of colonial functionaries are supposed to build upon, improve, or change for the better, the institutions they inherited from erstwhile colonists. The failure of the Nigerian education system is another case of a lost opportunity.
Another missed opportunity lies in the succession of military governments that ruled Nigeria for 25 years after the civil war. The military had the singular opportunity to shepherd Nigeria’s development without opposition. They operated a quantitatively small state apparatus of military councils made up of a few soldiers, advisers and members of cabinet. The small state apparatus saved or was supposed to save Nigeria a lot of the revenue derived from crude oil. Military governments, especially those that ruled the country from 1983-1998, conjure a bitter taste in the mouth whenever they are mentioned, some because of their authoritarianism, others because of their incompetence and corruption.
Why should one blame a dictatorship for not shepherding national development while democracy has become the vogue in the global system? Government shepherding of economic development is not new. Leaders of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore used a government-directed approach to produce miracle economies and influenced the world to see governments that direct national development as developmental states. In the case of Nigeria, military dictatorship left the country worse than it found it and missed the opportunity of using Nigeria’s oil wealth to transform the society in a political milieu undistracted by opposition or concern for elections.
Nigeria is now an electoral democracy. A developmental state can effectively operate in a democracy. But a National Assembly of 109 Senators and 360 members of the House of Representatives cost huge amounts of money in salaries and perquisites in an economy in which one natural resource is the primary source of national revenue. Moreover, Nigerian legislators are identified as the highest paid in the world. Each legislator earns 116 times the country’s GDP/capita, so goes the claim.
Debt-relief, another missed opportunity, was a source of fresh air to many Nigerians who follow national affairs. The forgivers of the debt relished the optimism that Nigeria had been re-kitted for a fresh and dependable start. The empirical situation has proven that to be false optimism. Data published by the World Bank in 2015 show that Nigeria’s external debt stood at 13.8 billion dollars in 2013. The years 2012 and 2013 were good years for oil prices yet the government either borrowed or intended to borrow from external sources to fund the national budgets of those years. It is difficult to explain this debt syndrome except to say that incompetence, corruption, waste, and haphazard governance at all levels of government consume the huge national revenue from oil.
The average price of crude oil remained at over $100.00 in 2014 until it began a downward spiral in September of that year. The fall of oil prices in the last quarter of 2014 was unique. It was, perhaps, the first time conflict in the Middle East coupled with a meeting of OPEC did not put the world in a crisis mode for energy. The Middle East was and remains at the peak of violent conflicts, yet crude oil prices have not skyrocketed and major financial markets of the world have not experienced a shakedown. What might be the reason for this unusual equanimity in the world energy sector and financial market while the crude oil basket of the world burns?
In a brief exchange during a debate on debt relief, I stated that Western countries would not fold their arms in a fatalistic response to the biting problem of high oil prices. That they, as problem-solvers and shapers of their future, would someday find substitutes for oil, solve the problem of dependence on foreign oil, and take oil-producing countries by surprise. That time has come only 10 years after that exchange.
Advanced and some advancing countries have diversified their sources of energy. They produce and use electric cars, bio-fuels, refined coal, wind and solar power. ‘Hydraulic fracturing popularly known as fracking has made the extraction of energy cheaper’. The top 10 users of alternative energy belong to the top 10 economies in the world. The United States, the giant of global oil consumption has increased its rate of production of crude oil and natural gas. And more countries continue discover and produce crude oil.
The fall in oil prices is therefore a warning to a country like Nigeria whose leaders squandered opportunities to take the country even to the threshold of economic development. The excess crude account which is supposed to be a buffer fund plunged to $2.45 billion in December 2014 in response to the fall in oil prices. This means that the idea of saving part of the excess crude account for future generations is on shaky ground if nothing is done to diversify, broaden and deepen the economy. Consequently, building a robust economy is the greatest legacy one generation can leave for the other.
- Ukaegbu, Professor of Sociology & National Development writes from USA
