Ife Adebayo: Secondary education – Another important need for Nigerians (Y! Politico)

by Ife Adebayo

Ife Adebayo

Oil will not make Nigeria great, agriculture will not make Nigeria great, tourism will not make Nigeria great – Nigeria will only become great when we harness our human resource potentials and they in turn maximise the possibilities that arise from their abilities.

For my Y! Politico series I’ve been writing about the basic needs of Nigerians. I wrote initially that the most basic of needs for Nigerians to survive are (in no particular order) food, electricity, shelter, roads, education, employment, healthcare. Last week I wrote about primary education, this week I’ll write about secondary education.

I will not go into details of how many children who are supposed to be in secondary school are not in school. In a country where we have over 10 million children of primary school age out of school I cannot even start to imagine how many children of secondary school age are out of school. I will focus instead on what I think the government should be doing and the approach I will love the APC to take towards secondary school education in Nigeria. I will focus on the section of children of secondary school age who are not in any formal school but are doing a different sort of learning.

In Nigeria we have many children and teenagers doing apprenticeships in mechanic workshops, tailoring shops, shoemaker kiosks, hair dressing salons etc. These children get to learn the trade and after some time get what they call “FREEDOM” from their bosses and then go ahead to start their own business. Some of these bosses give them some money to start their trade, but in other cases they actually pay to learn the trade and do not get anything during their freedom celebration. These children miss out on an important part of their formal education and this generally affects their mode of operation and their abilities to actually build up from one shop entrepreneurs to owners of large scale businesses.

Nigeria needs a proper policy framework for education; this framework should capture this group of children. They should be mandated to register in education centres where they’ll go to receive lessons in English, Mathematics, History, and General Knowledge once a week. Their bosses should be registered as mentors. They should spend the remainder of the week working with their mentors. There should be time tables so that we have some children attending lessons on Monday, others on Tuesday etc. This will help to avoid overcrowding of the education centres. As they get older courses on entrepreneurship and management can be added to their curriculum. They should be allowed to take exams that qualify them for entry to polytechnics, colleges of education etc.

With this we will be getting a large section of children and teenagers that are currently unaccounted for in our educational system and ensuring that they get some basic level of education. Imagine having all our roadside mechanics equipped with basic knowledge of Mathematics, English, Management etc. Imagine your shoemaker being able to grow from a roadside shoemaker to the owner of a brand bigger than Nike and Adidas just because he had access to entrepreneurial education.

Nigeria’s greatest potential is our human resources. Even though it is heart-breaking that we currently mismanage our oil, land, agriculture, water etc, the worst form of mismanagement is the mismanagement of our human resources, it is an absolute catastrophe that we mismanage our human resources –the biggest loss to Nigeria in our 53 years of existence is the loss of human resource potentials. We have a vast army of intelligent, agile, strong and hardworking people who toil very hard to do their jobs daily, if we could just equip them with a little more education the sky will be the starting point. 99 percent of these people go to their graves without utilizing one-tenth of their abilities. They take their talent to the grave leaving their children to continue in the cycle of under-utilization.

Oil will not make Nigeria great, agriculture will not make Nigeria great, tourism will not make Nigeria great – Nigeria will only become great when we harness our human resource potentials and they in turn maximise the possibilities that arise from their abilities.

“Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.” – John F Kennedy

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Ife Adebayo is an IT Consultant with work experience in Germany, United Kingdom and Nigeria. He currently runs his own IT firm in Lagos, Nigeria. He is an ardent believer in the Nigerian project and encourages all Nigerians to become actively involved in making Nigeria a better place.

Ife is a registered member of the Action Congress of Nigeria, Epe Local Government, Lagos State. He was an active member of the UK branch of the party, holding the post of Youth Leader for the year 2010/2011.

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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