Kebbi’s Medals of Shame!
By 
Abdullahi Usman
 
                                                                                 

“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired”.          -           Fannie Lou Hammer

 

At the risk of sounding immodest, I would like to crave the readers’ indulgence by commencing this piece with a recollection of an interesting personal experience I had over 23 years ago, during my form three second term examination at the then Government College (now Nagarta College) Sokoto. Our Physics teacher, a Youth Corp member from the Eastern part of country whose name I still vividly recall but would rather not disclose for obvious reasons, had asked me to see him at his house immediately after my Biology paper that morning. Sensing that he probably wanted me to do some errands for him as they often requested of students at the time, I decided to dash there early enough to enable me finish whatever job he had for me so that I could proceed to revise my notes for my second paper later that day.

 

On getting to his house, and to my utmost shock and bewilderment, my usually friendly teacher immediately launched into a verbal tirade about how disappointed he was with my performance during the multiple choice Physics examination we had written the previous day. For a while, I just stood there speechless, not knowing what to either do or say, especially since I was reasonably sure that I could not have performed so badly in a paper I thought I had enjoyed writing. As my teacher would later explain, he had earlier bragged to all his fellow NYSC teachers, some of whom already knew me, about this “exceptionally brilliant” student who was doing so well in his class that he would get nothing less than 100% in the exam, and was thus not ready to be the object of ridicule among his colleagues on account of my failure to deliver on a promise I was not even aware of. His misplaced optimism in my ability to achieve that feat was informed by the fact that I had managed to score 100% in the same subject during the first term examination. My teacher’s evident annoyance was informed by the fact that I was only able to achieve a 97% score this time around, a situation that was not helped by my impulsive decision to alter two answers I had initially ticked correctly during the course of the examination.

 

What was the proposed way out? Well, as I would later find out, that was exactly the main object of the whole idea behind my invitation to his house in the first instance. At the end of his long diatribe, he offered me a simple and straightforward three-step solution: (i) collect my answer sheet back; (ii) correct the three answers I had failed, and; (iii) hand over the answer sheet back to him for re-scoring. Upon realising that I was not going to accept this ingeniously dishonest way of scoring 100%, he pleaded with me to at least correct the two answers I had erroneously changed by reverting to the initial options I had chosen; an action that would have taken my score just a point away from the desired perfect score. This was followed by repeated assurances that if I kept my mouth shut, nobody would hear about it since he would never divulge what was about to transpire to any one else. The line that did it for me was my spontaneous attempt to explain to the older man that even though there were only two of us in the house, God was seeing everything we were doing and my conscience would forever remain uncomfortable with a situation whereby I would score 100% through less that honest means. Obviously, my dear teacher could not rationalise how a skinny and fragile 15-year old could be lecturing him on morality and, at that point, he simply asked me to get out of his house. From that moment on, however, I noticed a certain unusual level of mutual respect in his dealings with me, which was rather untypical in a student-teacher relationship. If my dear teacher happens to read this piece wherever he is today, I have absolutely no doubt that he will corroborate what I had just narrated above in its entirety.

 

You can, therefore, imagine my utter bewilderment and disappointment when I read excerpts from the Special Report on 2004 Exam Malpractice Rating of States and Geographical Zones released on October 5, 2005 by the Exam Ethics Project, which showed a 40% rise in exam malpractices nationwide between 2003 and 2004 and a 276% rise between 1999 and 2004. The report, which employs statistics from public examination bodies such as WAEC and NECO to derive the Exam Malpractice Index (EMI), a measure of the number of candidates involved in exam malpractice out of every 100 that sit for such examination, showed that the National EMI grew from 12.1 in 2003 to 16.9 in 2004 (1999 was 4.5). As if that was not a bad enough statistics, my dear Kebbi State was reported to have secured the number one spot both at the zonal and national levels with a 51.29 EMI rating! To put the situation in its proper perspective, this grim statistic would suggest that 51 out of every 100 pupils that sat for WAEC and NECO during the 2004 examination season were involved in one form of examination malpractice or the other. Conversely, Yobe State had an index of 1.69 to emerge as the best in examination ethics.

 

A further analysis would reveal that the North-West Zone, to which Kebbi State belongs, witnessed an unprecedented level of deterioration from being the most ethics-friendly zone in 2002 to the 4th position among the 6 geo-political zones in both 2003 and 2004; a situation that was largely attributable to Kebbi’s dismal showing. On the other hand, the North-East managed to maintain its 5th position while South-West reportedly moved from 4th in 2002 to the pole position in both 2003 and 2004. Even within the North-West itself, a state like Zamfara reportedly recorded remarkable success within one year by moving from being the most ethics-unfriendly state in 2003 to the most ethics-friendly state in 2004 among the 7 states state that make up the zone, with Katsina coming a close second. Now, if the above frightening comparative analysis vis-à-vis Kebbi State’s unviable position on the EMI scale is not enough to send chills down the spine of every sensible Kebbi indigene in general and our educational policy formulators in particular, I wonder what else on earth would!

 

Indeed, one could recall numerous past attempts by a number of concerned Kebbi stakeholders to raise pertinent issues regarding, amongst others, the state of our education with a view to salvaging whatever was left of this vital live wire to our human capital development aspirations. This, of course, is aimed at securing a guaranteed future for the state via the provision of qualitative education for our young ones in various spheres of knowledge. Indeed, one had noticed a steady decline in the quality of the products of both our primary and secondary schools, with the exception of a few well funded private schools scattered here and there across the state. This perilous state of affairs has actually extended to some of the products of the state’s premier tertiary institution, a polytechnic located within the state capital, which usually draws a healthy proportion of its yearly intake from the same student population with a weak educational foundation.

 

A case in point is the rather embarrassing situation I was faced with on Saturday, October 15, 2005, when I asked one of my close relations, a supposedly 2004 National Diploma graduate of the state-owned polytechnic to help pass a copy of ThisDay, The Saturday Newspaper, from a pile of five national dailies placed somewhere across the living room. At the first attempt, my dear ND graduate brought me a copy of the Daily Trust, which I promptly rejected before he went on to bring back the copy of the Weekly Trust that was lying next to it. The second and third attempts fetched me copies of The Guardian and Vanguard respectively, before he finally succeeded in bringing the preferred newspaper, a feat he conceivably achieved only because it was the last one left. At that point, I was not sure whether I should laugh or cry, especially when I thought of the numerous others that may be in the same situation with him. This might sound to a number of people like a fairy tale I have just invented and I would probably never have believed it myself if I had not personally experienced it first hand. The bottom line in all of this, however, is that a situation whereby a supposed holder of the National Diploma is not able to read and properly identify a popular newspaper not only leaves much to be desired about his own credentials, but also seriously calls to question the credibility of the institution he attended.

 

Admittedly, this observed decline preceded the current administration in the state and could, indeed, be traceable to the general rot in the nation’s education system, which began to manifest during the mid to late nineties. However, whereas other states have chosen to take the bull by the horns by facing up to the real issues, these important critical analyses of our educational sector were often responded to via misguided invectives directed at whoever was unfortunate enough to have raised them. Apart from the usual unwarranted name-calling and spurious attempts at second-guessing the exact motives of the authors, such rejoinders more often than not ended up addressing everything else other than the pertinent issues raised in the initial write up they were meant to respond to. Advice, in the words of Roberta Stiles, is like medicine; you have to take it to find out if it does you any good!

 

A specific example of such rejoinders was the that by a one-time Information Commissioner almost two years ago, in which he preferred to leave his readers to individually “decode what the mischief makers were trying to arrive at”, instead of going straight ahead to provide empirical evidence to debunk the claim in the initial write-up that a particular military administration in the state spent more on education in relation to the total budget than the amount being expended by the current government. The best effort our dear Commissioner could muster in his puerile attempt at providing an ample proof that the rate of examination success by Kebbi pupils had tremendously improved during the current administration was to curiously refer his audience to “examination bodies in and outside the State or the intake of Kebbi State students in institutions of higher learning across the country”.

 

In directing us to the relevant examination bodies, I am sure he must have been referring, in part, to the same WAEC and NECO statistics used in arriving at the annual EMI rating that showed Kebbi as the worst in terms of examination malpractices nationwide. One sincerely hopes that our teachers are not deliberately looking the other way while pupils cheat, or even actively institutionalising this dangerous and shameful trend among our young ones in order to be seen to be posting impressive success rates annually. In as much as we should always strive to achieve success in all we do as a people, the manner in which that success is achieved must be of more paramount significance than the success itself. We must, therefore, ensure that we provide relevant structures that will guarantee qualitative education for our children at all levels and at all times such that they will have no need to either accept or resort to any form of sharp practices during their examinations.

 

The second leg of his defence relating to the intake of Kebbi State students in the nation’s institutions of higher learning has also been punctured with the recent release of figures for the 2005 University Matriculation Examinations (UME) by the National Universities Commission (NUC) and JAMB. These figures indicate that out of the total number of 913,862 candidates that applied for admissions into the nation’s universities, Kebbi State accounted for only 3,062 applications or 0.34%, placing it 33rd among the 36 states of the federation. Conversely, Imo State accounted for 99,512 applicants (over 32 times the Kebbi figure) or 10.89% to emerge number one, while Kogi State emerged the highest- ranked Northern state with 34,755 applicants or 3.80% to emerge 13th overall.

 

Within the North-West zone, Kaduna State provided the highest number of applicants with 10,945 or 1.20% to take the 21st spot. The saddest aspect of it all is the fact that the Kebbi section of the old Sokoto State, comprising the present Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara States, has finally been overtaken by the Sokoto axis in the sense that the 2005 UME applications table places Sokoto State a point above Kebbi State with a total of 3,175 applicants or 0.35% to place 32nd. That alone constitutes enough evidence to us all that the chicken has finally come home to roost! This is by no means an attempt to disparage our dear neighbours to the north, but if an area that has historically trailed us educationally could easily overtake us in university enrolment within so short a time, the only plausible explanation must be that we are either deteriorating or they are indeed running faster than us. Either way, this negative trend portends a very bad omen for the future human capital situation of our beloved Land of Equity.

 

Another significant blunder on the part of the Honourable Commissioner was to equate the overall number of students of Kebbi State origin in institutions of higher learning nationwide with the level of success of the state government’s educational policy. This is as a result of the fact that a significant number of Kebbi indigenes are scattered across the nooks and crannies of country, where they earn their daily living in various spheres of human endeavour. These individuals’ children, as the Commissioner must be fully aware, mostly attain their primary and secondary education in their parents’ respective places of abode, following which the successful ones among them secure placements in the numerous tertiary institutions nationwide. It will, therefore, be downright fraudulent to lump these kids with those who schooled within Kebbi State and regard them all as part of the measure of the success of our educational policy back home.

 

In conclusion, it would not be out place to state that Kebbi’s dismal showing in both the 2004 National EMI rating and the 2005 UME Applications table calls for a serious response by way of an immediate declaration of a State of Emergency in the educational sector, via a two-pronged attack aimed at reversing these ugly trends within the shortest possible time. An annual enrolment rate of barely 3,000 immediately suggests that the proposed Kebbi State University of Technology would either be predominantly populated by pupils from other states or end up cannibalising the state’s enrolment quota in older and more established universities, as the more expedient ones among the limited pool of applicants prefer to enroll in the new university closer to home for convenience and financial considerations. The bad EMI rating, on the other hand, will also deprive the budding institution of the desired qualitative pool of prospective applicants, which will adversely affect its planned successful take-off. Failure to simultaneously tackle these two important areas will exert a negative impact on both the quantitative and qualitative measures of our human capital development indices in the long run, thereby stifling our future growth and development objectives. To borrow the words of the irrepressible Alhaji M. D. Yusuf, may God give us the will and the way to do what is right at all times.

 

 

Abdullahi Usman

(October 17, 2005)