‘Effects of criminal neglect of sector negative, multiple, enduring’

Preamble

Nigeria has come of age and the education sector has several years and series of uncompleted attempts at viable growth. The founding fathers of the nation attempted with huge success programmes of free education in the early 1950s and up to 1970s. Before this time, the colonial masters pursued educational policies that were aimed largely at producing white-collar workers, for the railways and the public service. The objective of the pre and immediate post-colonial state was essentially to reduce illiteracy among the people, and prepare citizens who would be conscious of their civic obligations, and who could handle technocracies at the level of the civil service.
 
The appropriate curricula in those formative years were loaded with knowledge of the environment, civic responsibility, indigenous technology, arts and crafts. We are only just trying to reintroduce these ideals in what we now conceptualise as entrepreneurship. But why should we have stopped it in the first place?
 
Over time, the role and imperative of technology in the 1960s and 1970s, shifted the emphasis of the state to seek to prepare its populace for the global world of work that is driven by advances in technology. Curricula at various levels of the education sector were appropriately reviewed to reflect the imperative of technology. But ironically, arts, crafts, indigenous technology and farming were abandoned almost at all levels of the sector.
 
In retrospect, technology should simply have been added, rather than used to replace the highly functional and productive focus of the preceding periods. Today, the development needs of the nation have become fairly complex in the era of globalisation, insurgency and corruption, to mention a few of the challenges that confront us. Consequently, there is a need to review curricula.
 
The post-colonial state stubbornly refused to fund education as appropriate. During the colonial period, the colonisers recognised the futility of funding education alone as public owners, and therefore readily welcomed the ownership of schools by non-governmental missions. When it was obvious that the mission school owners needed assistance, grants in aid were made available aside from regulatory functions to assure quality.
 
On the contrary, post-colonial governments, especially the military provided poorly for the sector, took over private schools from their owners, and were extremely high-handed in the management of well-meaning objections raised by trade unions in the sector. In the 1990s, a deaf and dumb military government dismissed all university lecturers for daring to go on strike. The sacked lecturers went to town to look for alternative means of livelihood pending the resolution of the crisis, which lasted about nine months. Eventually government changed its mind and recalled the sacked lecturers, many of whom had already developed an unattractive attitude to their work, on account of the rubbishing treatment meted to them in the course of a legitimate request for improvement in, and the survival of the Nigerian educational system. They returned to the classroom, but not any longer with the zeal for service excellence, which consumed them in the preceding or pre-sack period.
 
The effect of that criminal neglect today is multiple, negative and enduring. As the nation celebrates 55 years of independence, we are now facing a number of challenges, many of which are traceable to the aforementioned neglect. Let me dwell on only one of such challenges:

Ill-prepared and ill-motivated teachers 

In the aftermath of the mass sack of the 1990s, teachers having developed a lower attraction to their jobs began to spend less time on their tasks, because of the search of coping capacities. In the consequence, students had more idle time on their hands, which were readily applied to vices such as prostitution among women, dangerous car smuggling expeditions among the men, engaging men of the Nigerian Customs Services in gun battles, and kindred unimaginable immoralities. 
 
Absentee teachers were handling pupils and students who had very little interest in their studies. Grades were sorted out by students according to the principle of the highest bidder in the case of internal examinations. Cases were rampant of students who were exploited financially and sexually. The result was widespread poor performance at external examinations. What is even more damaging and pointedly threatening is the fact that graduates released into the labour market during that period have now found themselves back in the education sector as teachers and administrators. 
 
It is a truism that: ‘what you do not have, you cannot give.’ Today, at all levels of education, there are several cases of teachers who do not know their subject sufficiently and are not ready to improve themselves. They were products of an era of student exploitation, and now that they have become lecturers themselves, they logically believe that their pay back time has come. In some very bad cases, I believe in what one of our colleagues recently said, in his description of our current situation. “We have combined animals with our people”. What this means is that we have brought on board operators who have no business being in the sector. 
 
How did this situation arise? We have the poor funding and poor handling of industrial conflicts in the education sector to blame for our current woes.

In the late 1990s when I was privileged to be in the leadership of ASUU at the University of Lagos, many of us saw this trend and made projections about where we were heading. I did warn that even if the trend was reversed at that time (1997), it would take the next two decades to improve the quality of ill-prepared teachers, and effectively minimise the negative multiplier effects on the entire economy. These warnings fell on deaf ears.

Those graduates who used straw in place of pipettes in science laboratories, those who received a degree in accounting without access or exposure to peachtree software, knowledge without deployable skills, and so on, have now become teachers operating at lower levels in the education sector.
 
Today, the situation is aggravated by serious levels of unemployment. Graduates who could not find jobs in the prime sectors of their first job aspirations viz communications, oil, and banks, have regressed into teaching in the kindergarten, primary, secondary and tertiary levels. They had no calling or preparation for this: reflecting in poor attitude to research funds, even when these are made available, and the penchant for self and vantage publishing, plagiarism, bullying students and attempting to corrupt superiors, and other unethical practices in the discharge of academic duties.
 
Again, I would offer some warning and advice. Even if the situation of inadequate funding is reversed today, we would now require about four decades before the desired quality of credible and relevant education can be achieved in Nigeria. It would take a very long time before those who have been brought on board in error can all be re-oriented properly or flushed out of the education sector. A solid foundation is needed today, for success that can only be achieved tomorrow. 

Way out

The sector requires a national summit. But in the meantime, the current government should seriously consider forms of assistance to the private sector owners of educational institutions as precedent in the grants-in-aid policy of the colonial administration to education. The National Universities Commission (NUC) is pulling its weight within the limits of available resources. Appropriate funding would make more funds available to all the regulatory agencies, at all levels, to facilitate a more credible job at assuring quality and meeting set standards.

Institutions should subscribe to international accreditations if the sector is to be able to attract foreign students and teachers, as well as international financial interventions.

Finally, concerted efforts must be made to develop staff at all levels, and those who can no longer be developed must be eased out of the system, as we are doing in Joseph Ayo Babalola University. But then, this effort is only a little drop in a mighty ocean, because we make no pretensions to downplay the magnitude of the problem.

Prof. Fajana is Vice Chancellor, Joseph Ayo Babalola University