EDUCATION AND CAPACITY

“A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad.”  – Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1882 – 1945.

The biggest problem militating against Nigeria’s education sector is management. With recurrent expenditure at 80% of the annual budget, perhaps the best thing is for us to look inwards at our capacity to run all the various sectors that make this country tick and start to understand how to run them in a more efficient manner.

Perhaps we should stop looking purely to corruption and understand that the causes of our mediocrity and failure may boil down to simple ineptitude in many areas and the dangers that this may cause. With regard to our education sector, the government should hearken to the axiom that a country which deliberately refuses to adequately set up and manage its schools should be ready to fund its prisons. 

Rather than looking for creative ways of solving the perennial problems of strike action due to inadequate academic staff, infrastructural decay and a poor quality of education at all levels, we keep recycling the same ineffective methods that are lethal to the future of our youth and the country. In the 2012 budget, N400.15 billion naira was allocated to education (second only to security with 921.91 billion naira) still, the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) have gone on strike, whilst abysmal results were recorded in WAEC and NECO examinations. As we speak, government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have failed to come to a resolution that would end months of strikes, keeping university students idle and doing the devil’s work on our streets. It has almost become an annual festival to which with each passing year, the government becomes more complacent – a frightening state of affairs. 

In the 2013 budget, education got the lion’s share with N426.53 billion naira. However, as a percentage of the entire budget of 4.9 trillion naira, the education sector got less that 10 percent. That is a far cry from the 26% advocated by the United Nations. In a World Bank 2012 report, Annual Budgetary Allocation to Education by Some Selected Countries, Nigeria ranked the least (20th) with a paltry 8.4% annual budgetary allocation to education. Top on the list is Ghana with 31%; Cote d’Ivoire second with 30%; and Uganda third with 27%. For those who wonder why Nigerians who can afford it flock to Ghana for tertiary education, there you go!

Instead of strengthening our institutions, we have decided to weaken them. In 2010, the Federal Government announced plans to establish additional universities. The following year, the universities took off in Otuoke, Oye Ekiti, Dutse, Ndufu Alike, Dutsin-Ma, Kashere, Lokoja and Wukari. In all, over 20 billion naira was allocated to these 8 new universities in the 2012 budget, in addition to the two billion naira take-off grants handed to each of them in 2011. However, their purpose was not really to advance education, but to “correct” the inequality in the “location” of federal universities! This has only led to resources being spread even thinner, making our universities citadels of improvised learning churning out hollow shells of “graduates” lacking in the capacity to compete in today’s global job market. Would it not make more sense if the funds were spent expanding and upgrading existing universities that we can have something to write home about?

What we should be striving for is for our education sector to be amongst the top ten of the world. We can expect nothing better than mediocrity if all we can do is play the “federal character” card with education like all other sectors of our national life.  It is clear that government cannot manage education to attain those minimum standards of excellence.  We should admit that the present model of funding education has not worked, and that a new one is urgently required.  Education should be wholly privatized with grants or scholarships given to indigent students. In the UK for instance, there is education tourism, where foreign students pay the highest fees (up to three times what British students pay), whilst the poor receive grants, loans or scholarships from government and various institutions.

A private sector-driven education sector (whereby those who can afford to pay will pay and government will pay for those who cannot or are exceedingly clever) is capable of engendering a sustainable uniform standard because both the rich and poor will enjoy the same facilities.  The quality of education in our schools will significantly rise and healthy competition among students will propel a new era of meritocracy.  The strikes will be a thing of the past and this new asset will contribute to our economy in a positive manner.