When Water Pass Garri: The Twin Malady Of Nigerian Education

By

Prince Charles Dickson

Jos, Plateau Nigeria, Dec 9, 2005

 

Education for Sale

Honestly, I feel not much needs to be said about our educational system, albeit our health, economic, and socio-political systems because there is a growing wave of Nigerians who have been brainwashed to believe that Obasanjo and his PDP led crooks are the best thing to have happened to Nigeria, so things are not really as bad as we writers and social critic paint them. Besides should one really complain when the people on top do not read, how much are our writings worth in Naira and Kobo?

 

I had decided to take a recess, temporarily though, away from the political comedy that Nigeria has turned into and discuss of the moment be it Alams, PDP, MDD, Dariye, Obj, third, fourth term and all the comedians we have the misfortune of possessing as leaders. Access to free education is one, which the Nigerian citizen is entitled to as a fundamental right. It is the greatest investment in our human resources, as well as a means to enlighten society to enable it overcome its setbacks and obstacles to social and economic development, education is the one great objective that the nation should spare no effort in funding. Elementary to secondary education should be free and compulsory, let ability become the determinant, while still remaining free. The political will should not be lacking, as a precondition for finding the economic way. But we have leaders who think otherwise in the name of autonomy and privatization…to the point we can as well privatise our children.

 

The new craze for private school, “pay for education at cut throat price” that is the present rave in Nigeria and the explosive increase of unemployed graduates is why I am doing this piece, maybe some of our crooks on top will listen. If we have got to the point that schools charge, as much as N800, 000 for tuition alone in a session then something has really gone wrong. Everywhere now it is one private school or the other from elementary to tertiary. Every tom, dick, Atiku and Obasanjo is a school proprietor. Even Chris Uba one day may establish his own University with Chris Ngige as Pro Chancellor

 

Our public schools are dying, the same public schools that produced great men and minds. Often I ask where are the public schools that produced the Soyinkas, Chike Obis, Jubril Aminus and their likes…teachers are absent without leave…children are scattered all about playing soccer with sucked orange waste and then you ask yourself where is the future of this nation. All over the world with emphasis on Europe, public schools are the real deal, in Holland, UK, Sweden, their leaders are products of public schools, a vast majority of the populace attend public schools. Public schools are good enough so who needs private schools, whoever wants, can and do attend or build private schools.

 

I have come to the conclusion that as long as private school remains the way it is now, they will continually have an edge on public and state schools. The rich will patronise the private school with monies they have looted and strangely the poor would not be able to even afford the public schools. Education in Nigeria has become a lucrative business for the rich who open these schools as a means to launder some of their ill-gotten wealth, hence the cliché is private school, every here and there, housewives with no experience in education open small chop shops and call them private nursery schools as if they schools have become saloons. Every politician wants to own a University…

 

Is it possible for there to be a paradigm shift, yes, but by only one means necessary, our universities funded by the government need to be looked into, not just pumping billions of Naira that disappear even before it gets to the university. Our public schools should be made to be better than the private schools through proper funding and monitori ng and evaluation.

 

Most parents even when they cannot afford it opt for the private school because their kids would be given computer education and excursion trips to Calabar to see Charles Taylor as against what is obtainable in public schools today where after wasting several years they can barely spell their names. You do not need to close a restaurant that is dirty and giving bad service to her customer, rather the alternative of a clean restaurant with superb services does the killing. The essence of private school is because people who put their kids there believe they are getting the best of what they want in education for their children. On the other hand the essence of public schools is because there are no options not necessarily because they are for the purpose of educating the masses

 

Our education is as expensive as being alive or moribund as the amount of patronage it receives from the public. I have one said with the so many “Tokunbo” children, Nigerians are producing outside the shores of this land and many more thousands opting out for a foreign education, the problem is on the increase because the truth is how many of us can afford this education; forget the surge in population, once upon a time Nigeria could afford to give her citizenry qualitative and economical education, books were free, libraries were well stocked and studying was a thing of joy and pride. Now the tides of events have turned, government for the rich by the rich, so they do not care that they are governing over a largely illiterate populace. Education for the rich, by the rich…. and the class divide rather than narrow down is widening in leaps.

 

After going through untold hardship children now dropout in primary school to hawk products in traffic hold up, not because they choose so but because they cannot afford a square meal how much more an education. When some out of sheer drive, focus and push go through doing odd jobs and what not, they are discriminated at, for possessing a Diploma Certificate, a certificate that cost the young man or woman thousands of Naira in sweet, toil and money. If that is not the case he is asked for 1st class. If everyone made 1st class Nigeria would not be where she is today and hence it is 1st class they want, and then let it be by all means necessary, as the students have learnt the trick of age reduction.

 

Right from the elementary level in so called public schools, if the parents are surcharged peanuts as Baba Iyabo levies, the parents have to buy cotton to sew school uniform, contract Sule the carpenter to make a bench and table for the child to sit in school, also the parents would buy books and be taxed for chalk, black paint for blackboard and everything, yet the teacher would be away selling shirts, shoes and earrings to her colleagues and the children will term the future of tomorrow suffer. Although I have been able to discover long ago that these definitely are not the leaders of the future, such kids are in Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge, while the masses battle with their children in “Havenot Polytechnic” scavenging for Ok in Oxford Biscuits as Chemistry lab specimen for experiments, others are in “Slave ton and in Cain Bridge” colleges of (mis)education.

 

At the University level, it’s a no-go area as teachers have become experts in plagiarism, pirating authors like the Pirates on Treasure Island to sell to their students; you either buy and pass, or refuse to buy at your own peril. The truth is that our education for sale in Nigeria mentality is costing us because it has translated to what Tai Solarin once referred to as “certificate at any price” This is the sweetest song and the amount of humiliation which scholarship has suffered in this decade in the hands of the government, student and teacher, particularly since the so called measure of academic autonomy is unfathomable.

 

Surplus University Graduates.

If the present trend continues then we are in for a l ong walk because the thieves in government would continue their looting unperturbed and the masses would certainly suffer as there is just a tiny ray of hope. We cannot afford a sound health system, no good roads, and an appalling educational existence. By the time the poor man manages to see his wards through public education there are no jobs even the so called civil service openings (public jobs) are still reserved for graduates of the private schools.

 

Because everyone rushes to see how the available can be made preferable as the preferable is not available what we get at the end is a labour market with surplus graduates irrespective of how they are baked, cooked, and served …half, semi or fully baked. On the 4th of July 1970 the late Tai Solarin wrote an essay in the Nigerian Tribune on the rising volume of University graduates, and then Nigeria was already shaking in her shoes as it had started the cry of unemployed graduates.

 

As at then the literacy figure for the whole of Nigeria could not be more than 20%, and only 5% of all literate Nigerians had attended or were attending secondary schools then. Barely 1% of Nigerians had gone to university then, with that figure we were grapping with unemployed graduates.

 

Today some 35 years after those percentages have increased so also has the rate of unemployment because more schools have been established and the population has increased, with tertiary institutions battling with over admission, over crowded and poorly ventilated lecture halls… the truth is bitter.

 

Something is significantly wrong with our educational system. As we have established that the only way to get to the top without looting and being in government is to acquire academic qualification, this like a friend once said the higher you ascend on the academic ladder the softer your work becomes and if you climb really high you stop working and start advising “those who work” you become an adviser emeritus.

 

What we are getting in Nigeria is scarcity of sinecurism; every graduate wants to work in Shell petroleum, MTN, Diamond Bank or the Presidency. There is a dearth of the type of work, which every graduate that want through school should be able to do. Our graduates lack entrepreneurial skills, very few of them can do anything on their own.

 

That is why I propounded a rustic solution, if we want to get everybody to work and reduce unemployment, let us educate as few as possible because the only Nigerian that does not ask anybody to give him work is the uneducated. An educated Nigeria need I say a fresh graduate’s first use of his acquired literacy is in writing application letters for jobs that exists only in the pages of newspaper or because one connected uncle somewhere promised to help.

 

The unavailability of these jobs and the quality seeking the few is a topic on its own. But then if a nation gets as goods a leader that it deserves, the quality of graduate we get is a function of the kind of education, the type of te achers, the government’s posture and commitment at their disposal. When kids got to school to ‘belong’, wear designer clothing and have boy and girlfriends this may be a rash generalisation but off course it is the truth and it should hurt because it is indeed bitter. Most of us in the new age are tired of the charade called in the good ole days when things were really good for the Nigerian Student, Teacher and schools generally, then the phrase was academic prowess of the Unity Schools of which admission was strictly on merit, then those who attended the very few private schools was because they could not get into and possibly were not good enough for the great Igbobi College, Saint Finbar, Queen Amina, Federal Government College Keffi and such.

 

The present mistake that we call a government has been promising provision of jobs since inception but it has only succeeded in pouring more people on the streets. It is obvious that there was no plan put in place by this government for provision of quality public education and employment, other than the naked dance of UBE, NEEDS and PAPS before it. If a government cannot provide security in terms of jobs and affordable education for its citizens then government should bow its head in shame. If indeed the statistics, which are reeled out as index of improvement then why, are there no jobs or better still where are the jobs?

 

Away from the lack of jobs, the reliance of our young men/women on paid jobs also speaks volume of the type of education they get. Although a school of thought would argue that the environment is not conducive for any serious entrepreneurial endeavour the question is how many want to really be on their own. Government work has become an easy and sure way to wealth or better still become a professional politician in essence a trained thief, looter, thug and liar.

 

A nation that has no blueprint for its youth and young persons of schooling leaving age is a nation in trouble Nigeria is such a nation and that is why we are witnessing all sorts of drain from brain to skull and prostitution and child trafficking drain.

 

We gradually are sliding the pa th of self-destruct, as we would wake up and realise that we have been breeding criminals. The thousands of graduates that leave school year in and year out have nothing on ground to hold their grip unto. Very few get any thing tangible, they are not groomed in any way to face the realities of the world having for the better part of their lives depended on pocket money from aunties, uncles, relatives and parents. These unemployment graduates are easy prey for all manner of vices and we as a whole are worse for it.

 

We do not operate any for of social security and that me thinks is even better because it would have been mountain of fraud as Nigerians will beat the system to pulp with abuse and scams. I laugh in anger most times because ones emotions cannot be described as little and unimportant things like the one I am discussing is left as any other business while our leaders stroll in and out smiling like a child seeing the Tom and Jerry cartons flick for the first time. It is saddening because the unemployment is just the lot of the masses, the poor whose parents do not have a kiosk; shop not to talk a company, those who attended public school and could not buy a 1st class certificate and result.

 

This unemployment is strange to the rich and mightily of the society, they have it all figured out, the poor man’s son has been a contract staff for years pending when Oga’s boy would finish the university and come to his job.

 

Our corporate world do not make matters any easy with the very laughable requirements, Applicants should be 26 as at October 1st,  a 1st Class Deg ree from a First Generation University, NYSC discharge certificate and two years experience. Some one should tell me which University teaches experience as a course, besides how many Universities run a standard uninterrupted calendar year without strike, closure and what not. Our situation is bad. Our graduates that go abroad for 2nd and 3rd degrees are made to attend lectures for undergraduate students because they have spent six years for a four year course yet they studied a course known as “economical nothing” as in 1st class in “Scientific foolishness”. Empty headed graduates smiling like newly wed.

 

Though my thrust is not on the quality of the graduates as that itself, is a major concern but can one close his eyes to these situation and issues. There is hardly a family in the middle and low class that does not have at least two to three unemployed graduates sitting at home. Our young people are experts at filling JAMB form before they can sneak into the University, afterward saying bye to the four wells of the University they spend several years acquiring knowledge in the art of “CV formation and application letter writing”. This particular course may take another four years depending on the candidate’s proficiency and not forgetting connection to the right people who are willing to help. Only Almighty Allah will come to our rescue.