Tag: Rufai

In this column last week, I stated how startled I was when in March 2012, I read an article in the British newsmagazine, The Economist, in which Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala made an assertion that she would be quite satisfied if by the end of her current term as the nation’s Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy she would have managed to reduce the scale of corruption, waste and mismanagement of government finances in our country by 4%. Well, this week, I wish to draw attention to another statistic that was even more abysmal and more depressing than our Finance Minister’s extremely low aspiration of 4% success rate. This is none other than the 1.8% of those who passed the Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination (SSSCE) conducted by the Nigerian Examination Council (NECO) in November-December 2009. 1.8% passed which means that a whopping 98.2% failed. Failure in this case means passing with credit in less than five subjects including English and Mathematics. As stated concretely in NECO’s official breakdown of this calamitous failure rate, while 234,682 sat for the exam, only 4,223 passed.

After my initial shock and panic upon coming across this terrible failure rate, I deliberately calmed down and began to ask myself some questions: Was there something in the breast milk or infant formulas that a new generation of mothers in our country was feeding their infants that was producing “oridota” children that were alright in every other respect but were congenitally moronic and uneducable? Was this failure rate an aberration or was it a regular occurrence? Are there any other countries in Africa and the world in which such a failure rate has been recorded? Why was there not the slightest expression of outrage and concern by the Federal Minister of Education in particular and every public officeholder in the land? And what of the generality of Nigerians, especially the parents, guardians and custodians of our children – why were they not up in arms demanding that the government and the whole nation pay attention to, and do something about this scandal?

For the records, let me report that since 2009, I have searched widely on the internet and have not found any other place in the world and in modern history and experience where and when 98.2% failed a public, national school leaving examination. I am still searching and if I find a “better” record than that, I promise to share it with the readers of this column. And I should state here that it did not take long reflection on my part to come to the conclusion that the very unspeakably low figure of 98.2% failure did not indicate that our children are the products of a mutation in breast milk production that was making them moronically uneducable; rather, it was the system that was failing our children and robbing them of their birthright to education. Let me also report that since that lowest of the low in 2009, the passing rate in NECO exams has improved beyond that 1.8%. However, I regret to report that the improvement is really nothing to write home about, as the saying goes. Here are some figures from NECO’s recent published statements on this “improvement”: in English, 4.7% passed in 2010; 10% in 2011; 33% in 2012. In Mathematics, 19% passed in 2010; 44% in 2011; 54.8% in 2012. And overall, the total passing rate has not gone above 35%.

Need I state that in most countries of the world, including some countries on the African continent, the concern in national educational planning in a very competitive world is not to bring up abysmal failure rates but to improve even more on passing rates that are normatively higher than the range of the 80 percentiles? This means in effect that because we are located at such a very mediocre passing rate, we face the double jeopardy of, first, being ahead of nearly all others in the race to the bottom and, secondly, being so far behind, so distant in the race to the top.

I should of course add that I have been to countries like China and Japan in which I have been moved to great pity for the high levels of psychological damage done to their secondary school pupils in the cutthroat struggle to pass well in their national school leaving exams. For this reason, I am not unmindful of the dangers involved in fetishizing high passing rates in the contemporary world. But to say this is not to ignore for one moment that every child, every girl and boy, deserves quality education in our country, our continent and our world. For education remains not only a means of socio-economic self-improvement, but it has also become perhaps the most highly prized human social capital in 21st century global capitalism. Moreover, those of us who have been privileged to receive quality education – often at public expense – have an obligation to do everything we can to make others less privileged than ourselves to receive relevant quality education. We can and must do far better than 35% passing rate for the young people graduating from our secondary schools. And we must do this quickly and thoroughly.

This will require many things of which the primary thing is the recognition – the declaration, in fact – of a profound state of crisis in our secondary education system. We must invest more and wisely in the education of our children: better trained teachers, with the incentives for them to be dedicated to their profession; better physical infrastructures and learning environments; and a thoroughgoing rethinking of how best to use education to prepare our young people in informed local, national and global citizenship in a multi-ethnic and multicultural society and in the world of the 21st century. Moreover, this great crisis in our secondary education system extends deep into our tertiary educational system, so much so that one is inextricable from the other. Unfortunately, this is hardly recognized by the powers that be in our country. This observation leads me to the present stalled negotiations between ASUU and the Federal Government, especially with regard to the very unhelpful intervention of the Finance Minister in the negotiations that was the topic of this column last week.

Here, I must state something that I suspect will come as a surprise to many people reading this, including possibly many members of ASUU itself, and it is this: Because there is little appreciation for the fact that our universities are burdened, indeed overburdened, with the many effects and ramifications of the profound crisis in our secondary education system, most thinking, literate adults in this country have little or no intimation of the extremely daunting tasks that our universities face in educating the general order or quality of pupils that come to them from our secondary schools. For the simple fact is that most universities in the world – and throughout the history of the modern, research-intensive university – are not founded and structured on the presupposition that they would have to do the kind of considerable remediation that must be done with the order of students that come to our universities. Consequently little or no remediation is done in our universities: the intakes are for the most part simply moved along, but with the great majority of our university dons doing the best that they can under the prevailing circumstances. Meanwhile, our universities have fallen considerably in prestige and respect, at home and abroad. Most of our elites send their children abroad to foreign countries for their university education. “Foreign countries” here often includes countries in Africa like Ghana and South Africa! Let us not mince our words here: in about the last two decades, the attitudes of most of the federal and state administrations of this country toward our universities and our university teachers show very clearly that they have little regard, little respect for our universities and our university dons. Who can miss the great disrespect in the following words from the Finance Minister that I chose to be one of the two epigraphs to my column last week: “At present, ASUU wants the Federal Government to pay N92bn in extra allowances, when the resources are not there, and when we are working to integrate past increases in pensions. We need to make choices in this country as we are getting to the stage where recurrent expenditures take the bulk of our resources and people get paid, but can do no work.”? By what reasoning, by what logic but that of a haughty, supercilious disdain can one talk of our university teachers as similar or comparable to redundant, idle government workers who “get paid but can do no work”?

This disregard, this disdain of the Finance Minister for our universities and university teachers extends, I would argue, to the country’s politicians in particular and the populace in general. To say that in five years only about 4% of the corruption, waste and mismanagement in Nigeria and its government could realistically be expected to be reduced is to have an extremely low opinion of the country, its government and its people. If any technocrat from the World Bank or the IMF from another country in the world had made that statement, especially if he or she was a white person from the Western countries, the whole country would have been in an uproar and justifiably so. But all the same, such a show of national outrage would have entirely missed the point that among the elite technocrats of the world, it fundamentally does not matter from which country or which part of the world you come from. The technocratic mandarins of the IMF and the World Bank do exactly the same things anywhere in the world they serve and this norm includes what they do in their own countries. Thus, in the case of our own Finance Minister what we have is a symbolic confrontation between her 4% success projections and the 1.8% passing rate of the NECO exam results of 2009. As a matter of fact, 1.8% is a much greater figure than the percentage we can extrapolate from what Okonjo-Iweala herself has claimed to have “saved” the country since 2011 (N53 billion naira)! And please, don’t forget that since 2009, NECO passing rates have moved from 1.8% to around 35%.

To break out of the present impasse between ASUU and the Federal Government, every effort must be made to do away completely with the abysmally low expectations (and low performance) of the honourable Finance Minister. Very few national, publicly financed university systems in the world face the kind of burden that our universities face in the task of educating the order, the quality of students who come into them from our secondary schools. In the given circumstances, our universities are doing a creditable job and would do even far better if given the wherewithal to do so.

The time has come to at last face this huge crisis squarely and responsibly. I give personal testimony here that when I was ASUU National President more than thirty years ago, we faced a very different set of circumstances than now. But some things about the Union remain constant: now as at then in the early 1980s, ASUU was/is always ready to work with the government in the interest of our universities and the nation. The first step in that direction is that the government must demonstrate that it recognizes the enormity of the burdens that our universities face and is prepared to work with the Union and all other interested parties to resuscitate our universities. This won’t be easy, this task of resuscitating our universities. What is easy, what any thinking Nigerian can see is the fact that this present government and any government in the future will always confront the stark reality of this profound crisis; it will not simply go away if it is not confronted or is confronted with the technocratically manufactured low expectations of an Okonjo-Iweala in which, even as NECO’s 1.8% rises to 35% – which is not good enough – her 4% dips below, far below 1.8%

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu