If you are planning for one year, plant rice; if you are planning for five years, plant trees; if you are planning for the future, educate your children.

Each time I muse on this Chinese adage popularised by late Dr Tai Solarin, I am always faced with the riddle of answering which of these three things Nigeria is exactly planning for. Is it rice? Is it trees? Or is it the future?

This is becasue Nigeria  neither plants rice nor trees. And with the current standard of education in Nigeria, it is doubtful if Nigeria is planning for the future.

Yes, we may be quick to latch on to the self-eulogy that, despite the caricature of what we parade as education, we still have some talents who go ahead to best their counterparts in Europe and America. Indeed, we can point to the likes of a Rivers-born Mavi Val-Ugboma, a 12-year-old Junior Secondary School student who joined the league of authors last Friday. But the truth is that the rank of these few ‘geniuses’ is vitiated and absorbed by the multitude of others whose faculties have been corrupted by institutional decay.

Every man true to his conscience, including the unlettered farmer in the village knows that Nigerian education is in a dire strait. It has surrendered to institutional rot. The scorecard of our schools, from primary to the tertiary level, presents a grim picture. Today, we have university graduates who can barely express themselves in simple and correct tenses; computer engineers who can hardly move a mouse, mechanical engineers who cannot fix a bicycle pedal and electrical engineers who are always at the mercy of road-side electricians to detect electrical faults in their houses. The signs of collapse run the whole gamut.

But how did we come about this sorry state? Every time this question comes up, we often reach for a hackneyed rationalisation of our individual and collective incompetence. The goal post of blame always shifts. We blame the students; students blame the teachers; teachers blame the government, and government in turn heap the blame on the society, especially parents. Parents insist that the incompetence and inability of students, teachers and the government to play the noblest roles makes the rot in the nation’s education inevitable. A ping-pong of some sorts.

In truth, we are all responsible for the mess in the nation’s education, but the bulk of the blame goes to the teachers, most especially those at the primary and secondary school levels. Primary and secondary school education is the foundation upon which the future of a child  is built.

As Sam Omatseye rightly observes, “we learn everyday, but when (and what) we first learn helps us unlearn a lot of distortion.” It may not be out of place therefore, to insist that the shaky foundation at primary and secondary schools is responsible for the rot we are all witnessing today in our ivory towers.

This assertion was recently accentuated when some State governors, obviously convulsed by the appalling fall in the standard of education in their respective States, insisted on conducting aptitude test for their teachers, ostensibly to probe the faculties of those saddled with the responsibilities of moulding the students in learning and in character. From Kwara State where the teacher test first came to public attention under former Governor Bukola Saraki to Ekiti State which is regarded as the fountain of knowledge, and down to Bauchi, the results of the teachers test turned out to be an absurdist echo of late Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s popular song,  ‘Teacher don’t teach me nonsense,’ as Omatseye put it. Most of those we parade as teachers and under whom we place the education and destiny of our children are themselves in need of tutorials.

It is sad, however, that similar things are already rearing their ugly heads in our tertiary institutions. Beside the already known vices like financial crimes, and abuse of female students that have become the lots of tertiary education over the years, many lecturers, including professors are now indulging in unholy attitude of plagiarism and publication of their research works in clone journals. This reads like a fiction too surreal to believe. But that is the level to which Nigerian education has sunk.

It goes to say that the ruins in the nation’s educational system owes its origin not just to government’s insensitivity alone, but to pervasive moral decadence in our society, which in turn breeds all forms of corruption and ineptitude. The implication of this is that, it is the whole nation, not just the youngsters in the classrooms, that is imperfectly educated.

The way out of this mess is the total overhauling of our educational system. Beside injecting more funds into the system, the sector requires a corrupt-free regime such that both the students, teachers and parents would see education as the greatest driver of the nation’s development, not just as an instrument of self-actualisation.

But more importantly, the sector requires adequate training and re-training of teachers, as well as good incentives for them in such a way that they will not be manipulated by students and parents, or distracted by something else other than the job they are paid to do. In other words, the government should not make the teaching profession a ticket to poverty.

But again, the teachers themselves should not see their profession as a ticket to sudden wealth. Teaching profession is a call to service, and a service to humanity.

Boye Salau