Development, spiritual and material, is always contingent on the sound foundation of functional education. No nation, indeed no society, will prosper without the critical agency of education. At a glance, nations that take the business of education very serious are on all development indices beyond comparison with those nations that pay only lip service to the idea of providing quality education to its citizenry. The business of education has all alone been a problem in Nigeria. The very first problem that constrained our collective recognition of the centrality of education to the development of individuals and society was the system of education inherited from the British colonial administration, which is for all intents and purposes elitist, and is geared to produce neocolonialists (a poor copy of Europeans in manners and deeds) out of the former colonial subjects.
From independence to date, series of attractive national education policies were crafted, implemented, reviewed and abandoned for yet other fresh false starts that often become mere exercise in futility, ad infinitum. In the past, there was some semblance of sanity, a sense of purpose inscribed in the earlier education policies that evidently attempted to address genuine needs and aspirations of a developing Nigeria, but not any more; not any longer. Right now, nobody is sure of what the current education policy targets to achieve. Our system of education is riddled with myriad crises that underscore the existential contradictions weighing Nigeria down. To say that our system of education needs nothing short of declaration of state of emergency is an understatement. In fact, our system of education is an unmitigated disaster waiting to happen. The dwindling state of education has truly captured our predicament as a precarious nation. As a matter of fact, nobody is sure about what government is doing to ameliorate the collapse of our education industry. Again, nobody is sure of what everybody is doing to avert its repercussions.
Like all what they did to all other social sectors, those whose responsibility it is to steer the ship of state have grossly and criminally neglected education. Unlike in the case of other sectors, education is one industry that no nation aspiring to become great, promising or anything worthwhile in the world could afford to ignore. Serious nations that are set to make their imprints on the sands of time are those that spend fortune on their system of education. Therefore, those nations must have since realized that the education of their children and young people is the only means of atomically or collectively securing the future of their own society. A country like Japan spends about 40% of its annual revenue on public education. Nigeria does not seem to understand the primacy of education to human endeavor, specifically to development or whatever it desires for itself as a postcolonial nation struggling to create its own niche. In material time, the problem of education may perhaps not be unconnected with pressing socio-political crises that ensnared Nigeria, which culminated with military junta at the helm of our affairs.
Our nation has since lost its essence through the unspeakable corruption of successive military rulers. Education begins to suffer irreparable damage in the hands of soldiers in politics who convinced themselves through their hierarchy of priorities that education is least important. Hence the running battles that ensued between the military junta on the one hand and Nigerian students and academics, on the other hand, over not just neglect of the education sector but draconian decrees and policies they imposed on Nigeria. The military rulers that imposed themselves on Nigeria, sometimes with the tacit approval of western powers, have accepted externally packaged unpopular social programs and policies without question. They were quick to accept all kinds of prescriptions through bilateral agreements with international institutions and donor agencies. Failure of our military rulers to see through the intricacies of the game of catch played with our system of education has obviously landed the country in a mess.
The transition period between the military regimes and civilian democratic administration has accentuated the total collapse of public education as well as the astronomical rise of private schools in Nigeria. This is one of the unviable legacies inherited from erstwhile military rulers by our elected civilian administrators, which they happily perpetuated. Again, the situation progressively deteriorates with public school system taking the heat from further acts of ineptitude and the pervasive corruption of the democratically elected officials in handling our dwindling system of education. At this stage, public schools in Nigeria have virtually been either on a life support or comatose. It had to take the grace of the second coming of President Olusegun Obasanjo with his introduction of the World Bank inspired Universal Basic Education Scheme to attempt to redress the deplorable situation of education in the country. Even with that, many state governors, especially in northern Nigeria, have defaulted in the agreement of counterpart funding of basic education they have willingly entered into with the federal government.
To compound issues, our elected political office holders are everywhere demonstrating complete lack of appreciation of the strategic importance of education as the quintessential pillar of human capital development. Education is indeed a critical sector in the growth and wellbeing of human society. Otherwise, how do we explain our lackadaisical attitude to education, especially in some dire situations where education is not even considered as core value? In a number of northern Nigerian states there exist an instrumentalist notion of development in which human agency is grossly ignored, in which good education has no role to play. In instances where such perceptions predominate, development only means investment in infrastructure as roads, culverts, buildings and other essential and non-essential amenities. Even in their little investment in education, they would rather concentrate on erecting classrooms all over the place without commensurate provision of instructional materials or adequate, qualified, highly motivated and remunerated teaching staff. Working for the people in the estimation of some elected politicians with such instrumentalist orientation is all about the development of physical infrastructure. That is, in circumstances where their inexplicable corruption allows it.
Definitely, the problems of education are many and multifaceted. The biggest threat is however in the attitude of most Nigerians towards our deplorable system of education. While a significant number of us do not know the value of education as a whole, those that know it are everywhere abandoning public school as a place to send their wards. This explains the proliferation of private schools all over the place. This trend has not only affected public interest in what happened in public schools, but it led to total negligence of public education by those whose responsibility it is to guarantee and safeguard its quality. Sending Nigerian kids to schools within and outside Nigeria has now become a multi-billion-naira enterprise, and the staggering amounts could be used to turn education around at home. The elite themselves are the major culprits on this turn of events, because they are directly responsible for the mess in which education and other social sectors have been put. In some states, specialist committees have been set up to look into the decline of quality education. As part of their assignment, they were expected to determine the extent of rot and proffer far-reaching solutions.
However, some chief executives would set aside reports by those committees they set up themselves and be chasing shadows. Politics is in fact the major consideration behind policies and programs in all sectors that directly affect the wellbeing of the people they governed. In short, there is no consistency or continuity in either successive policies on education or in faithful implementation. There are, for instance, situations where enrolment and performance indices have been identified as the key problems of education, but some governors would still ignore those specific recommendations, as they would always prefer to follow their political whims. They would always prefer to address only those items that can be visible to the naked eye. And there is no law or edict promulgated by the National Assembly to safeguard continuity of education policies or development projects that affect the wellbeing of the people. Regime after regime in states and the federal levels are caught up in this anomaly.
This is the context upon which the current controversy on plans to sack or redeploy about 22,000 teachers who have embarrassingly failed to supply correct answers to primary four level examination questions, administered by Kaduna state government, is glimpsed. Who is to take the blame for the deplorable performance of teachers in the state and elsewhere in Nigeria? Do we blame just the teachers or even the pupils and their parents? Do authorities at all levels share responsibility for their neglect of public education system? And, what needs to be done outside blame game that is going on currently? For sometimes now, we only mouth how our displeasure with an education system that is degenerating by the day without taking anybody taking concrete measure to arrest the situation. For the first time, a governor has decided to take the bull by the horns. But has the governor comprehensively addressed the actual issues or is he just engaging in window dressing? I strongly believe that reducing the problem of education in Nigeria to that of unqualified teachers is entirely missing the point. No matter your good intentions, you would never expect the best brains to take to teaching profession in a society where teacher’s self-worth has been completely eroded, where the salary you give to teachers is not enough to feed them and their family, etc.
In the midst of the controversy, I was a little bit flabbergasted when President Muhammadu Buhari threw his weight behind governor El-Rufai’s so called teachers reform when Nigeria as a whole is not serious with its investment on education. The federal government of Nigeria could not even honor the United Nations’ obligation of the education expenditure benchmark of 26% out of its annual revenue. With less than 8% of budgetary allocation to education in the last four years, could meaningful education reform have been possible in Nigeria?
