High varsity Fees as Our Education is defined in Humour
By Bello M. Zaki
Whenever the tittle of ‘Minister of Education’ is mentioned, what comes to my mind is the erudite scholars that previously held that tittle, such as Late Professor Aliu Babs Fafunwa, the first Nigerian Professor of Education; Professor Jibril Aminu, an eminent professor of cardiology; late Babalola Borishade a professor of electrical engineering and member of the prestigious Institute of Electrical Engineers of the United Kingdom and the American Nuclear Society, who was in 1975 selected to train at the Nuclear and Power Engineering Station at Texas A&M University and at the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, Austria in 1982 respectively; Professor Iyorchia Ayu, a Sociology professor who was the Chairman of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), University of Jos chapter; Professor Fabian Osuji, a professor of Zoology and a visiting Scientific Fellow at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) respectively; Professor Tunde Adeniran, a professor of Political Science, a former staff of United Nations, who retired as a political science lecturer at the University of Ibadan after many years of lecturing in Nigeria and America and had authored a number of books and journal articles: Therefore, when in 2015 President Buhari appointed Adamu Adamu, a columnist who humorously defined humour at the back of Daily Trust newspaper for ages, as our Minister of Education, I, from then, knew that the nation’s education sector would become something else; I couldn’t help thinking of our education sector in the hands of a comedian.
I was amongst the Nigerians that kept vigil in the last six months of 2015 and awaited the wonderful set of ministers President Buhari would appoint to deliver his ‘Change Agenda’, and finally when our tedious wait came to an end in November that year, we were landed with the humour writer as our education minister; I was baffled and conferred with a knowledgeable fellow traveler with whom I had worriedly awaited the ministerial appointment, a Director of one of the federal agencies in Jigawa State where I was then invited to serve as the State Governor’s Spokesperson, we were living in the same estate. Director, as we simply called him, is a version of James Herdley Chase’ Al Barney; he has an ear to the ground; he sees, he hears and get told, and he adds two and two together to come up with an analysis that reveals hidden reliable facts. So I asked Director, why on earth did the president decided to give the humour merchant the ministry of education upon all of those he appointed minsters?
Malam Bello, Director responded to my question, saying most of President Buhari’s ministerial appointees from Northern Nigeria were nominated by Mamman Daura, Buhari’s nephew who had unofficially assumed the position of the president’s Special Adviser on all matters, and was then living side by side with the president at the presidential villa: And that these Daura nominees were the flotsams and jetsam that hanged around him, from distance relatives, sons and daughters of friends and well-wishers, errand boys and other hangers-on. Daura was one time Editor of the New Nigerian newspapers, so when the legacy media went down over twenty years ago, some of its staff loyal to Daura pitched a niche with the power broker.
Adamu was a correspondent of the newspaper and loyal to Daura, and a homie in the Daura family home; he became a Special Assistant to President Buhari, then chairman of the Petroleum Trust Fund, (PTF), and later, the secretary and member of Buhari’s APC Presidential Transition Committee. The education ministry is the largest among all the ministries at the federal level, with over 200 parastatals and agencies, many of which receive foreign fundings, therefore a place wide enough to accommodate the entire Daura tribe who may curry favour from a clan member.
This is the result of this contraption to the education sector of the country: “Education in Nigeria, at least in the public sector, is in a state of dysfunction. Its human capital is in disarray, so is its physical infrastructure. The nation’s standard of education totters as the government continues to talk more about the crises facing it rather than act on resolving them. The students are disillusioned with public education. Their teachers are frustrated in the face of poor motivation and ramshackle facilities. As the rot deepens, so does the attention paid to the sector wanes.” The Guardian newspaper Special Report on Education in President Buhari’s First Four Years in Office (The Guardian 29 May 2019).
In 2015, President Buhari had inherited Nigeria’s education sector that was battling with corruption, inadequate funding; low enrolment of students in basic education with over 10 million out of school children; low quality of teachers at all levels of education, and poor performance of students in public examinations, among others. In his presidential campaign, he had promised that, if elected, his administration would bring the long-awaited positive changes in the education sector such as drastic reduction of out of school children, providing free education and one free meal a day to students of primary and secondary schools, and improve the quality of teaching staffs at all levels as part of other promises.
On assumption to office, the government had promised to address the issues of out-of-school children, strengthen basic and secondary school education, capacity building and professional development for teachers; increase quality and access to higher education and pay more attention to basic education; ensure 30 million Nigerians become literate within three years; re-negotiate the 2009 Agreement with unions in tertiary sector; achieve academic stability at all levels; attract best brains to the teaching profession, among others.
But within the period, the education sector has gone into an autopilot with no coordination among the various strata of the sector, its agencies, and stakeholders, as every compartment of the system operates in isolation: Diligent execution of policies was lacking, while focus on performance and quality monitoring and evaluation is being neglected: Failure in Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination has become the order of the day, so it is in the Nigerian Law School.
Seeing the rapid rate of deterioration in the sector, stakeholders presurised President Buhari to meaningfully address issues in the sector; he therefore promised in 2017 to declare an emergency on the education with a view to effectively salvage the situation; a retreat on education tagged ‘Federal Executive Council Retreat on Education’ was held on November 13, 2017, but the emergency on education is yet to see the light of the day.
The government’s inability to re-negotiate the 2009 Agreement with the university lecturers as promised, in addition to the very fast deterioration in the sector, led to the re-emergence of labour disputes in 2018, with all the various unions of the sector embarking on industrial actions, culminating into the longest university staff strike in history, that lasted eight months in 2022.
What supposed to be free education as promised had turned out to be very expensive one that goes beyond the reach of an average Nigerian family, as university authorities started to increase tuition fees last week, to such an astronomical amount that no one had ever imagined in the history of public schooling in the country.
The under-development status of Nigeria could be linked to the loathsome disregard of the educational institutions responsible for human capital development.
Success stories of developed nations of the world are replete with efforts in human resources development: The story of Japanese development started with the era of “enlightened rule”, or “Meiji Restoration” when Western education was introduced to Japan in 1872: Germany and Taiwan have education as the backbone of their development, as India is using knowledge of ICT to bail millions of its people out of poverty, reflecting on how the Chinese are using various aspects of technical education to ease their people out of poverty; South Korea that is now amongst ten richest countries of the world was the second poorest country in 1964, next to Niger Republic, before it embraced education; Nigeria and Singapore were in the same income bracket in early 1960s, when Indonesia expunged it as a basket case, but see where it is today with education. In Africa, World Bank has severally cited success stories in Mauritius and Botswana that have resulted from visionary investments in human capital development.
Though, in a statement of the administration’s seven years achievement released by the presidency in May 2022, it was stated that President Buhari had granted Presidential approval for: A new (extended) Retirement age of 65 and Length of Service of 40 years for Teachers in Public Basic and Secondary Schools in Nigeria; a new Special Teachers Salary Scale; a new Special Teachers Pension Scheme, and the establishment of the National Senior Secondary Education Commission (NSSEC) to regulate secondary education in the country.
Other achievements according to the statement are: The establishment of special purpose universities in the fields of Transportation, Maritime, Army, and Aerospace; Two new Federal Universities of Technology; Six new Federal Colleges of Education; Eight new Federal Polytechnics; six Federal Science & Technical Colleges, and five additional Federal Science and Technical Colleges, etc.
Education managers and keen observers of the sector have pointed out that there is no need to establish more public varsities in the near future after the ones established by the previous administration, though there are growing number of students seeking admission into tertiary institutions; efforts should have been concentrated on adequately funding and equipping the existing ones to function very well; the concept of mega universities should have been revisited to absorb more students that could effectively be trained; having more institutions without equipment and adequate teaching staff will aggravate the problem.
Nigeria’s literacy level has not improved, there were over 65 million illiterates in the country as at the end of 2018, according to UNESCO, and this has not significantly reduced to date; one out of every five out of school child in the world lives in Nigeria, making the country the highest in the world; funding of education as percentage of total annual budget has deteriorated, far below the international standard of 15% to 20% proposed by the UNESCO: It was 10.79% in 2015; 6.7% in 2016; 7.38% in 2017; 7.04% in 2018; 7.05% in 2019; 6.7% in 2020; 5.68% in 2021; 5.39 in 2022%, and 8.8% in 2023.
UNESCO had criticised this abysmal funding of education with the year 2022 allocation being the lowest percentage allocation to education by the Federal Government in the last ten years.
Quality of education has unabatedly plummeted to an all-time low in the period: The teaching profession is in decline, with over 40% of the teachers said to be unqualified to teach as they do not possess the requisite qualification to teach.
It will take the savviest world-class education minister at least another eight years to cleanse this rot and turn-round the education sector to 2015 level.
