By Chris Enyinnaya

There was a time in the past when university and polytechnic certificates obtained in Nigeria was equally ranked, if not ranked higher than higher in quality than degrees obtained from foreign countries. That was a golden era when Nigerians who returned home with foreign degrees found it difficult to gain employment with those degrees, especially those returning from India and Pakistan. 

The general perception at  the time was that it is students who could not compete for limited spaces that travelled abroad where there is no competition for admission to study.

It was just like walk in with your ordinary or advanced level certificates, pay your fees and you are registered to pursue your studies. 

Using myself as a typical example if readers would not mind, I gained admission to the University of Nigeria Calabar Campus in 1973. There were only six universities in Nigeria at that time. I was one of the 154 pioneer undergraduates that commenced studies in a Campus that was Duke Town Secondary School, Akim Qua Town Calabar. 

I was admitted to read Chemistry in the faculty of Physical Sciences. We were 2500 students competing for 25 chances in each of the 4 departments in the faculty of Physical Sciences. I was number 24 in Department of Chemistry and was offered provisional admission on the condition that I obtained credits or higher grades in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics,  English and any other science subject in the May/June 1973 West African School Certificate Examination. That’s how competitive gaining admission into the university was. Admission into polytechnics was equally very competitive. 

Tertiary education in Nigeria had quality and anyone holding Tertiary Education certificate from Nigerian universities was given automatic admission into foreign universities and they did not disappoint. 

But in the present era, the quality of university and university graduates has dropped. Media reports have it that a popular digital bank claims that they have 500 unfilled vacancies because Nigerian graduates are unemployable. To avoid unnecessary arguments,  let us agree with them. We shall return to this later.

While establishing the University of Nigeria Nsukka, the late sage, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe said “By education I do not mean simply learning.  I mean training…the head, hand and heart.

Training in mind, in morals and in hand that helps make one socially efficient.” To a very large extent,  that is the principle on which the University of Nigeria established in 1960 as the first autonomous indigenous university is anchored. With time, other universities that were established in 1962 and thereafter adopted that education philosophy when pioneer graduates of the University of Nigeria Nsukka excelled in competitive Public Service Recruitment Examination. 

If the claim by the digital bank (name withheld) that 500 vacancies exist because graduates of Nigeria’s Tertiary Institutions are unemployable is correct, where did we get it wrong? I am asking this question because graduates of 1960,1970, up to middle 1980s on graduation were good to go. My well considered answer is that all of us including the digital bank got it wrong. Let me start with them before I move to the standard of education in tertiary institutions. 

The 500 vacancies exist because they do not want to vote money in training the graduates. 

For instance, with my BSc Accountancy degree, I joined the United Bank for Africa Ltd (UBA) in August 1979 as a Special Trainee after NYSC at the Central Bank of Nigeria, Maiduguri, Borno State Nigeria. UBA designed a 12-month training programme for all the graduates they employed. We were trained in all aspects of commercial banking—, savings accounts, current accounts, cash and teller, clearing and reconciliation, bills for collection, letters of credit  lending and securities for lending.  We capped it up with Head Office training, linking branch and head office operations. By the time we completed the training,  we were all round bankers, ready to be posted to any branch or head office department. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. That is why I hold the view that the digital bank that claimed they have 500 vacancies which they cannot fill because Nigerian graduates are unemployable are part of the problem. Needless to say that if they embark on staff training, a substantial part of the training cost is recoverable from the Industrial Training Fund. Why then the apathy in training the fresh graduates they employed ?

Let us now address the issue of the quality of graduates being produced by the universities and polytechnics. First, is the quality of teaching materials. I don’t want to go into the quality of the teaching staff themselves. It is a matter of what you give is what you get, garbage in garbage out. In my university years, 1973 to 1978 we use prescribed textbooks, which are products of intensive research to study. Not anymore.

University and polytechnic lectures have commercialised education. They now package “hand out” and sell to students at exorbitant prices. These hand outs are not products of rigorous and extensive research as it were. The lectures are downloaded from the Internet  packaged , and sold to the students. With all due respect,  this writer ,who is a published author of two professional banking books consider it an academic fraud. The lecturers are not even ashamed that their students browse the Internet and see these same materials they packaged and sold.  That is the root cause of the low quality of university and polytechnic graduates being produced. The only way to raise the quality of tertiary education in Nigeria is for the regulators of Tertiary Education – National Universities Commission and its counterpart in polytechnic education to ban lecturers from churning out and selling hand outs to students going forward. 

Unlike standard textbooks which are products of intensive research, evaluated by experts in the subject area and approved for publication, these hand outs are products of self publishing. No independent review and valuation. Standard textbooks may be expensive but that is part of the cost of education 

As the saying goes, ,if you say that education is expensive, try ignorance. The difference will become clear. The value and importance of quality education cannot be over emphasised. What we have these days in the labour market is quantity not quality. That is why unlike in the 1960s,1970s up to middle 1980s when home grown graduates are preferred to returning foreign graduates there is now a role reversal. Foreign trained graduates are preferred to home trained graduates by employers in the labour market. No country achieves greatness by producing half-baked graduates of  home Tertiary Institutions.

According to Thomad Scott, “A man cannot leave a better legacy to the world than a well educated family.” Need we say more?

Enyinnaya, Fellow, Chartered Institute of Bankers (FCIB), wrote via [email protected]