SSSCE: Averting Mass Failure Through Adequate Funding

Sometime in March 1990, Nigeria and other nations met at a conference in Lomtien in Thailand to promote “Education for all by the year 2000.” All the 160 nations pledged to work hard towards the achievement of this noble goal.

Twenty years after the historic conference, Nigerian government, apart from failing dismally to make this agenda a reality, has left most of its children of school age in the streets, with poor school environment and declining teachers’ morale. Both students and teachers are not committed. While the students abandon school, their teachers engage in petty trading during school hours, menial jobs after school hours and an outright lackadaisical attitude towards the teaching profession.

The effect of the shortcoming in the education sector became the subject of a national discourse recently when the National Examination Council, NECO, released the November/ December 2009 Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination, (SSSCE), result in which 98 per cent of students who wrote the examination failed.

The registrar of NECO, Professor Promise Okpala, said only 1.8 per cent that represents 4,223 candidates passed with five credits and above including English and Mathematics, which is the requirement for entry into university out of a total of 234,682 candidates that wrote the examination which was held in 1,708 centres across the nation.

Hon. Farouk Lawan, the chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Education, recently described the development as the worst in the history of public examination at secondary school level in Nigeria. Against this backdrop, the House has begun investigation into the matter.

Even though everyone in the country knows the circumstances and reasons for this type of result, investigating it may not be out of place, particularly when it could be recalled that this ugly trend happened in the last two previous examinations conducted by the council in varying degrees. However, what is more surprising is the fact that in spite of the mass failure, the government is yet to declare a state of emergency in the education sector.

Thinking along this line, Dr. (Mrs) O.B Owei, a lecturer at the Rivers State University of Science and Technology (RSUST), Port Harcourt, says: “The fact that there is no national uproar after 98 per cent of the students who wrote a national examination failed, shows the hopelessness of the country.” The university don who could not hide her feelings, said it was shocking that 98 per cent of the students that wrote the examination could not pass five papers and “we are all sitting down as if nothing serious had happened. The situation calls for national debate, uproar and analyses. A serious country would try and look at what has gone wrong and how it could correct the situation,” she added.

Right from the era of the military to the current democratic dispensation, education has never been made a priority in the country. In the nation’s spending priorities, education does not rank among the first five. This is a nation that can afford to spend billions of naira on a foreign coach to take our national team to the World Cup, while our education needs receive no attention. There are many industrialised countries today that have not won the World Cup, yet they don’t invest so much on sports particularly to the exclusion of vital sectors.

Mr. I.R Lawson, a retired principal from a government school, regrets the situation. According to him, “our children can not compete with children from other countries in the competitive global market. We seem to have no priorities in the country let alone get them right and this is what has made us hewer of woods and drawers of water for other countries. We have left what matters most which is education and dwelt on mundane issues like sports and politics.”

Mass failure phenomenon in public examinations like JAMB and SSSCE is no longer an eye-opening event. What would have been most appaulling is the reverse of the phenomenon. Nigerian students are not intellectual-minded. Most of the time when they should be  at their reading tables, they are busy watching home video on cable network television or they are playing video games for hours. Many more engage in things that are not academically useful to them.

Besides agreeing that students of all categories indulge more in activities that would profit them little academically, a former lecturer at the then Rivers State College of Education (now University of Education) Port Harcourt, Ms B. Inko- Tariah, thinks the absence of the enforcement of relevant laws on examination malpractice in the country  is the chief culprit. According to her, if examination malpractice is not sanctioned severely, students would not make adequate preparations for examinations. “Government should re-visit our relevant laws on examination malpractice and enforce them, failure will result in students using all manner of methods to pass examinations including “soughting.”

When students are not engaged in things that will increase intellectual capacity, the result will be that they will become veritable materials for ethnic crises, militants, armed robbers, kidnappers and of course, cyber criminals, who will unleash terror on the society in the fullness of time.

What should be the role of corporate institutions in all of this? Curious enough many of these institutions do not contribute to the education sector. Some of them prefer sponsoring dancing competitions with millions of naira and pretend as if they were not aware of the decay in the educational sector.

Dr. A.G Warmate, a lecturer at the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt, agrees with this position. He says: “Most of the big firms in this  country are evil. They give millions of naira to winners of their shows, while winners of debates, science and quiz competitions get paltry sums of money. These firms promote singing and dancing competitions with millions of naira, while public libraries have no books.”

The funding of education in the country is so poor to the extent that it does not in any way come near the recommendation of UNESCO which prescribes about 25 per cent of the nation’s budget for education. Our leaders have deliberately refused to fund this sector thus denying the average Nigerian student the needed quality education.

The poor NECO result is the consequence the nation has to face for neglecting education. Until the nation goes back to the drawing board and tackles the issue of education holistically, nothing positive will come out of the sector.

Arnold Alalibo