EL-RUFAI ON FRIDAY
Why Education Cannot Wait
As undergraduate students of Quantity
Surveying at Ahmadu Bello University in the mid-1970s, one of our
greatest sources of pride was not just the fact that ABU was the
largest in Sub-Saharan Africa, but the only university in the whole
world that offered honours degrees in QS. Our closest competitors were
two polytechnics in the United Kingdom. The University of Reading
joined the league much later. The quality of scholarship was highly
rated; researchers and students from all over the world jostled for
places. Only those who could not secure places in Nigeria went abroad
for studies.
Today, a ranking of the top 8,000
Universities in the world done last year showed only 5 Nigerian
Universities in the first 100 in Africa. Our top universities were:
Ilorin (55th – Africa, 5,846th - World), Obafemi Awolowo
(61st – Africa, 6,265th – World), Ibadan (63rd – Africa, 6,396th –
World), Jos (74th – Africa, 7,000th, World) and University of Lagos
(79th – Africa, 7,246th – World). What happened? Why and where did
things go wrong? And how can we revive the most critical component in
human capital development?
At independence, Nigeria’s 56 million
people had 15,703 primary schools with a total enrolment of about
2,912,618 pupils. We had 883 Secondary Schools, 2 Federal Government
Colleges, 315 Teacher Training Colleges and 29 Technical/Vocational
Schools - all with a total enrolment of 169,019 students. We had one
university college at Ibadan. By the time we became a republic in
1963, we had 4 Polytechnics and 5 Universities with a total of 2,445
undergraduate students.
In those days, Nigeria spent an
average of 40 percent of her budget on education (compared to today’s
2 percent). The Old Western Region under Chief Obafemi Awolowo's
visionary leadership devoted 55% while the Northern Region under an
equally committed leadership of Sir Ahmadu Bello spent 46% of its
budget on education.
Things went relatively well until the
civil war. By 1970, shortly after the war, a period designated for
reconstruction by the Federal Government, a few things occurred, which
subsequently opened the floodgates drowning education today. The
Federal Government rolled out a national policy on education, which
among other things introduced universal primary education, leading to
the takeover of all primary and secondary schools previously owned by
non-state actors, particularly missionaries. The period coincided
with oil boom – and the misconception that throwing money around was
the panacea to national development rather than sustained discipline
and upholding standards. The educational sector, like all others also
got infected by the “oil boom bug”.
By 1980, primary schools had increased
to 36,683 with a total enrolment of 13, 760,030 pupils nationwide.
Post-primary schools increased to 5,003 with a total enrolment of
2,366,833 while we had 42 Colleges of Education, 24 Polytechnics and
17 Universities with a total enrolment of 154,392 students. Public
spending on education even then averaged about 25% of the budget or
7.5% of GDP, and the quality of education remained generally
acceptable. It was also an era when the authorities tried to refocus
educational policies within the purview of the constitution which
placed education on concurrent list with responsibilities shared
between the Federal, state and local governments.
The 1980s also witnessed a significant
upsurge in the establishment of secondary and tertiary institutions.
Within that decade at the onset of the 1990s, the population of the
country had increased to about 80 million, and public expenditure on
education had collapsed to about 8% of the national budget, or less
than 1% of GDP. The establishment of new tertiary institutions was
motivated by political considerations rather than qualitative
development. Even at the post-primary school level, there was an
incessant proliferation of secondary schools without due attention to
quality of facilities, entrance standards and teacher-training.
When the oil money dried up in the
mid-1980’s, and the introduction of IMF-like austerity program
appropriately called SAP, funding to education was cut, quality
suffered, good teachers fled and entire structure collapsed. The
budgetary attitude to education is yet to recover from this reversal
of fortunes. Since 2007, Nigeria spent an average of about 0.7% of GDP
and about 3% of the budget on education - among the lowest 5 ranked
countries in the world!
And so we are where we are today. The
percentage of enrolment at all levels of education has increased, but
the overall performance is down. The British Council/Harvard School of
Public Health Next Generation Report describes the situation: “…three
out of ten graduates of higher education are not working. A highly
educated Nigerian is not significantly more likely to find work than
one with no education at all. Many are also forced to accept jobs that
do not use their qualifications to the fullest. Many educated men and
women can only find marginal employment in sales, agriculture or
manual labour….”
Compared to other African countries,
Nigeria has a lot to do in providing accessible and qualitative
education. Oil revenues may have bounced back, but we still have over
eight million children out of primary school. According to a survey by
the British Council, Nigeria was supposed to have 16 million students
in secondary schools by 2008, but the number enrolled was 5.8 million,
suggesting that only 36% of children of secondary age were in school.
Out of 1.3 million candidates who wrote the unified Tertiary
Matriculation Examination in 2010, less than 10 percent secured
admissions into Nigerian public universities!
On October 2, 2006 the then Education
Minister and my sister Oby Ezekwesili raised the alarm about the then
only 20% pass rates (including Math and English) of WAEC and NECO, the
cabinet then thought things were so bad that with "We Can" reforms she
proposed things would only get better! The reforms stalled under her
successors, and the situation has expectedly worsened.
That universities no longer have faith
in the results of JAMB and now insist on post-UME examinations mirrors
the inconsistency in the sector, but nothing underscores the issue
more than the 2009 secondary school examinations result released by
WAEC and NECO. Both bodies showed that almost 98% of the candidates
failed to clinch five credits, including English and Mathematics and
only about 2% got five credits with English and Mathematics.
As present, Nigeria has about 117
Universities - owned by the Federal, some states as well as private
individuals and organisations. Available data indicate that most are
poorly equipped and grossly understaffed. According to the Consortium
for Advanced Research Training (CARTA), instead of an academic staff
requirement of 45,000 teaching staff, there are 33,000 – a shortfall
of 12,000 academic staff in our universities. Worse still is the fact
that about 12% of the existing manpower is aged and may soon be
retiring, while the quality of replacements are falling.
At the primary level, there is
proliferation of privately owned schools charging exorbitant fees but
mostly lacking competent teaching staff and quality infrastructure.
In a study by the World Bank in which attainment of education
milestones in 22 countries in Africa were compared, pupils in Nigerian
primary schools were rated lowest with national mean scores of 30%
compared with 70% in Tunisia and 51% in very poor Mali. More worrisome
is that the Nigerian girl-child is worse off, particularly in the
northern states. Comparatively, while the average Nigerian teenage
girl in the south (example, in Lagos) has the benefit of 10 years of
early education, a similar teenage girl in northern Nigeria only has
an average of one year! If the northern governors had invested more in
education in the last decade, some of the current social and economic
crises we face today in the region and the country as a whole, might
have been averted.
True, Nigeria has been acknowledged by
the World Economic Forum to have capacity for innovation (ranked 47th
out of 133), our overall public expenditure on education which is
about 3% of the current annual budget is abysmal, particularly when
compared with about 40% at independence. Nigeria is placed 128th (WDI
– 2009), 91st in Internet Access in Schools, 97th in Quality of
Mathematics and Science Education,115th in overall Quality of
Scientific research institutions, 90th in Networked Readiness Index,
102nd in percentage of Internet users, 117th in Broadband internet
subscribers. (ITU – WTI, 2008 -2009)
Given that education is a tool for
human capital development, how well and fast a nation develops is
dependent on its literacy level. The accumulation of intellectual
capital can help a nation strengthen its technology and become
prosperous. Even though oil, gold and diamond may generate wealth for
some countries, it is evident that they are no longer determinants of
wealth - intellectual capital and technology rule the world. It is
easy to neglect education because the consequences are not immediately
felt. But if we bear in mind that the current decay are the results of
policies of the mid-1970s and spending cuts of the late 1980s, it
becomes imperative for Nigeria to urgently review and refocus
educational policy, and spending priorities to ensure quality of
output.
Apart from reviewing spending levels
on education, we must enhance supervision to ensure strict adherence
to standards at all levels. The states and local government areas must
take up more responsibilities in educational development. More private
sector participation should be encouraged with the right incentives -
access to free land, single interest-long tenor loans, subsidised
teacher training, etc! Political considerations should not be the
yardstick in establishing tertiary institutions. Teachers’ education
and welfare must be improved as priorities. At personal levels, those
of us that have had the benefit of affordable and quality public
education should all offer to teach voluntarily at the Nigerian
university and public secondary school nearest to where we live. I
have already done so. If we do not act now, consider what will happen
in a generation, when today’s semi-literate students will be teachers
and professors.
I will conclude with just three facts
to reflect on: There are over 60 quality universities in the Boston
area - about half of what we have in the whole country. The United
States (with roughly twice Nigeria’s population) has a total of 5,758
higher education institutions, an average of 115 per state. One
private university – Harvard has an annual budget that exceeds the
2011 FGN investment in education, and its endowment funds were worth
$37 billion in 2008! As you read this, Nigeria’s total external
reserves is about $33.5 billion. We
have work to do. The earlier we start, particularly in the northern
and other educationally-backward states, the better. And this will
only start when all public officers and political office-holders are
compelled by their oaths of office and terms of appointment to enroll
all their children in public primary, secondary and tertiary
institutions in Nigeria. That will be some really fresh air indeed.
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