- This is what our education sector requires if graduates cannot write correct sentences in English
For about three decades, Nigerians have complained incessantly about increasing decline in the quality and standard of education, especially higher education, the level that leads to academic, professional, and other employment.
Such complaints resurfaced after a lull in complaints about governance deficits in respect of education because of the distractions and tensions from the 2020 pandemic at the instance of Chief Afe Babalola, founder and proprietor of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti, Ekiti State, and Mallam Adamu Adamu, second-term minister of education in charge of the three levels of education—primary, secondary, and tertiary.
Babalola complained about poor preparation of graduates for the world of work: “Today, Nigeria produces graduates who cannot write simple and correct sentences, graduates who do not understand the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs, graduates who cannot defend their certificates. Whereas our towns will only be better if we have quality education, our nation will be better if we have quality education and the world will be better if we have quality education.” And Mallam Adamu re-echoed Chief Babalola in a similar tone: “Some graduates of tertiary institutions across the country cannot read or write application letters.”
Arguably, Babalola has a more noticeable reputation through the kind of investment he has put into university education than the kind of concern Adamu as minister of education has shown to solving the problem of poor quality of education. It is an irony that a minister of education in his second term does not feel worried about complaining of low quality of university education in his sixth year as minister in charge of higher education.
Certainly, decline in quality and standard of university and other forms of education started with previous governments, as far back as three decades ago. But Adamu’s tenure of over five years as minister should have been long enough to, if nothing else, ensure that graduates are able to read or write application letters and recognise the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs in Africa’s largest English-speaking country. Mallam Adamu does not have the moral right to wash his hands off or wring his hands about current manifestations of inadequate preparedness of university graduates.
Given his aloofness or reticence during the just suspended nine-month strike of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) because of failure of the Federal Government to honour agreements made with university teachers in 2013 on funding of revitalisation of federal universities, and later on payment of academic allowances due to teachers, it is not unlikely that other stakeholders–parents and students in particular — would be shocked by the minister’s one-dimensional solution of calling on teachers and students to sit up and face their responsibilities.
Undoubtedly, Nigerians across the social spectrum have complained about the failings of the education sector long and loud enough. For example, in 2013, the Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, warned the nation about some of the problems of the education sector: “Nigeria is churning out thousands of science and technology graduates each year but several of them are under-employed, going into the banking and non-scientific sectors.” And tonnages of newspaper editorials, research articles, and conference keynote lectures have drawn attention of government and other stakeholders to this social cancer for over two decades.
A time that the entire world is strategising for the new normal after the pandemic is one that should not be wasted on buck-passing or simple-minded solutions to the mounting problems of education in the country. The need to face the cold and hard facts of this important sector is not just about failure of some graduates to read or write job application letters. It is also about inadequate attention of stakeholders to primary, secondary, and tertiary education. We believe it is myopic for any stakeholder to view failings in the tertiary sector as specific to one of the three levels. Many of the problems at the tertiary level grow out of the inadequacies of the lower sectors, and these need to be addressed frontally.
We believe it is about time to heed the saying, “a desperate problem requires a desperate solution” in relation to education. Nothing short of a surgical approach to solving the hydra-headed problems at every level of education in the country is what should concern the president and governors; teachers and administrators of educational institutions; students and their parents, etc. Re-inventing or restructuring the country’s education for the century of globalisation requires more investment or energy than has been doled to the sector in the last 20 years.
For example, despite the UNESCO advisory that developing countries need to spend 15 to 20 per cent of their annual budgets on education, Nigeria’s allocations to education in the last 10 years illustrate the hope by political leaders that serious problems in any sector can go away without proper investment. Governments in the country need to watch the investment culture of their competitors and peers on an area that Horace Mann once described as the great “equaliser of the conditions of men” (and women) in the century of gender democracy.
Incontrovertibly since 2011, budget allocation to education by the Federal Government that receives over 50 per cent of funds available to the federation has been falling more than rising, with the 2021 budget being the lowest since 2015 (N398bn) 9.3% of budget for 2011; N468.3 (9.86%) for 2012; N499.7 (10.1%) for 2013; N494.7 (10.7%) for 2014; N484.2 (10.7%) for 2015; N369.6 (7.9%) for 2016; N550.5 (7.4%) for 2017; N605.8 (7.05%) for 2018; N620.5bn (7.05%) for 2019; N671.07 (6.7%) for 2020; and N742.5 (5.6%) for 2021.
With the preceding profile of allocations to education since 2015, what further evidence of under-investment in the education sector project should Nigeria look for or ignore in its search for solution to rising problems in the education sector? Correspondingly, with a culture that can tolerate one academic session of strike and feels unruffled by new threats of strike from non-academic unions in the universities, what further illustration of the danger of more nonchalance at various levels of the country’s education sector should bother patriotic stakeholders?
The basic truth about the decline in education needs to be told. Lack of enthusiasm for provision of high standard of education on the part of stakeholders from government up has always been a major problem in the country. For years between the 1950s and the 1970s, several decades before UNESCO’s recommendation, allocation to education was never below 30 per cent in Western Nigeria. Similarly, for decades during the colonial rule and 40 years after independence, there was no time that Nigerian graduates in any university at home and abroad were cited for lack of capacity to learn. If Nigerian graduates in 2020 cannot write job application letters, then the problem is too obvious for government to miss or ignore.
We believe that now is the time to heed Karl Marx’s advice, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Put simply, enough complaints have been made about lapses in the education system to move to righting the wrongs in the sector. We urge the governments in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, to refrain from doing otherwise.
