The problem is systemic. It begins from primary school level where apart from expensive private schools, there is no education at all. Children of the poor who are in the majority go to dilapidated buildings that go for schools. These are just empty halls sometimes without chairs where the vast majority of our children are taught by tired, underpaid, or unpaid bedraggled teachers who in their frustration and anger inflict corporal punishment with little or no provocation on the unfortunate young children who are too scared to complain or report the harassment to their parents.
At a point, politicians decided that the buildings were too bad and they decided to improve on them. Rather than build structures that were attractive and edifying, they built something like chicken sheds without any aesthetic attraction for the children and they built this all over the country defacing public places in our cities. The contracts for these buildings became a stampede among politicians who were the builders. No standard was maintained and young children were herded into them like cattle. There were no chairs and no teaching tools. Primary schools all over the world are made so attractive that children would always like to show up in the morning. I have traveled all over Africa and Nigeria’s primary school buildings are the worst and constitute a standing disgrace to the so-called giant of Africa. These schools are not equipped for learning at all. It is generally known that you have to catch those who will be geniuses early. Young people in other countries are already playing with computers and using educational tools to make simple constructions that challenge and nurture the children’s creative genius. Apart from playing with sand, singing and jumping around like monkeys, our little children are not mentally challenged in government and voluntary agencies primary schools. But for the private schools, there would be no schooling to talk about at the primary level of education. The result of this is the wastage of human capital and release into the society, those who will constitute the lumpen proletariat of the future. This is the class of street people, armed robbers and those euphemistically referred to as area boys. Those of them who manage to enter secondary school would already be disadvantaged and would have to strain themselves before they can catch up with those coming from private primary schools. Thus two classes of Nigerians are emerging.
What exists at the primary school level of education is replicated at the secondary level. Most government secondary schools left by the British have been destroyed by the inheritors of power after the British departure. Out of ideological premise of state control of education, the schools left by Christian missions were taken over by the state and they suffered destruction as the government secondary schools. There was the case of a political party in the Second Republic which turned all boarding schools to day schools thereby ensuring the collapse of discipline and eventual undermining the excellent academic traditions of many schools. But for the coming into being of many high fees paying private secondary schools, there would have been a total collapse of the secondary education sector.
The upshot of this long preamble is that once the root is rotten, the tree would eventually die. No building can stand if the foundation is faulty. If we are serious, the repair to our educational system should start from the early years of a child’s educational experience. We must build good schools and tear down the existing wretched primary school buildings dotting our various landscapes and ensure their proper equipment. It is a fallacy to imagine reform of our educational system would begin at the apex of the educational architecture. This has been the problem in recent years.
It is obvious to me that a radical approach has to be taken to put the educational system on sound footing. To begin with, do we really need all the universities we have? I hate to suggest merging some of them, which we have done in the past. We had to do this in Ekiti where for political reasons, a governor increased the number of its universities from one to three. This in a state that is virtually dependent on federal monthly allocation. Under Kayode Fayemi, we abolished two of these so-called universities outright and yet the state now is not able to fund adequately the one university left. In neighbouring Ondo State that could not adequately fund two universities, the governor went ahead and created another one, a so-called University Of Medicine. There was no thought about where the funds will come from. This cases of Ekiti and Ondo states is the more sad because the governor who started two new universities in Ekiti and his present counterpart in Ondo State are educated people – one an engineer and the other a physician. What sense does it make to have several universities that are not only poorly funded but in some cases not funded at all? In Ondo State, the so-called University of Science and Technology, Okitipupa received no capital vote for four years and yet the same state, apparently for political reasons, has gone ahead to establish a new university. It is a mad man who keeps doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. The problem is that universities are now status symbols of either wealth or development. They are now founded on the basis of federal character and their principal officers are appointed on the same basis irrespective of their suitability. The rapid expansion without adequate consideration of staffing, funding and equipment is a disaster for the country. The fruit of this haphazard expansion will haunt us in the future.
NATION
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