by Ikemesit Effiong
London-based ‘newspaper,’ The Economist, lamented the grotesque dimensions of Nigerian education in a scathing July 9 article.
This week, a letter from an acquaintance joined the daily chorus of emails buffeting my inbox. It was a stunning piece of prose, not for the right reasons. Two thoughts took a hold of my mind – the actual content of the letter, and how the sender managed to scale through at least sixteen years of Nigerian education and still terribly express himself on paper.
The real tragedy is this, that guy’s experience is the norm in our beautiful country.
I won’t be writing much today, not for want of what to say, but because a lot has been said (and written) on this issue – the sorry state of Nigerian education.
London-based ‘newspaper,’ The Economist, lamented the grotesque dimensions of Nigerian education in a scathing July 9 article. The damming facts are set out in this excerpt:
Nigeria is facing one of the world’s worst learning crises and desperately needs to rethink education. Thanks to rapid population growth, there are now more than 10m out of school children here—one in five of the global total. And being enrolled in a Nigerian school does not mean you’ll receive a decent education either. UNESCO estimates that in 2008, almost a third of men aged 15-29 with six years of education were illiterate. That’s mostly due to the lack of books and inept teachers. AUN reckons that at least 300,000 teachers working in the country do not have adequate training. On top of that, the UN says that Nigeria needs almost 400,000 new teachers by next year, just to achieve universal primary education.
The article didn’t mention the other composite factors strenuously yanking our educational system into the morass of mediocrity, under-performance and mass failure – debilitating infrastructure, the start – stop nature of intellectual instruction in the country (or to use a simpler term, strikes), the omnipotence of examination malpractice and even more noteworthy, the cake meal share education enjoys in our national financial priorities.
Nigeria’s adult literacy rate – defined by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics as the percentage of people ages 15 and above who can, with understanding, read and write a short, simple statement on their everyday life – was 61.3% in 2010.
Our functional literacy rate, which I would roughly define as the ability to, with understanding, read and write enough to APPLY same to their everyday life, is a lot less (cue in the handsome dude who asks you to help him fill his bank slip).
Indeed, the scale of the task needed to reform our education is better imagined than tackled. But tackle it we must. We risk shooting ourselves in the foot (we already are, ladies and gentlemen) by merely perpetuating the status quo.
Nigerians are not dumb. We possess some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. From the phenomenal Oloruntobi Dare who aced prize after prize since pre-school and earned herself a $350,000 scholarship to get a doctorate degree courtesy of Bill Gates, to this brilliant college student who wrote this elegant take down of university education being the gateway to a more enlightened existence, and these students from Lagos and Benin universities who made a solar powered car that got international raves, this country is brimming with raw brain power.
And like all forms of power, it must be harnessed and channelled properly. We need to have a plan, not some hogwash daydream wrapped in grandiose language, but a policy statement with targets, estimates, a timeline and a step by step, nationwide, geographic and need specific implementation roadmap.
It is unconscionable that at the turn of the second decade in the 21st Century, five decades after Obafemi Awolowo wrote, “Any system of education which does not help a man to have a healthy and sound body and alert brain, and balanced and disciplined instinctive urges, is both misconceived and dangerous”, one in four Nigerians cannot express themselves in any form of modern sophistication.
Our primary schools are producing compliant, confused ‘yes-men’, our secondary schools, rascally, impatient and under-informed wannabes and our universities, glorified, grade hungry hustlers armed with a irrelevant paper tickets (what we fearlessly call degrees) which condemns the vast majority of them to a rat race of hope shattering job interviews, crime contemplation and nepotism – even when they cannot write a simple four paragraph application letter.
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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.
The sour irony of this piece is that I am a product of that system.
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