Nigerian Education: An Elegy

Boye Salau

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 mused on  this Chinese adage popularised  by the late Dr Tai  Solarin, I was 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 because Nigeria neither plants  rice nor trees. We import rice and we pay little or no attention to afforestation. And with the current  standard of education  in Nigeria, it is doubtful if Nigeria is planning for the future.
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. 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 in-competence. The goal post of blame always shifts. We blame  the students;  students blame  the teachers; teachers  blame  the government, and  government in turn  heaps 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 pingpong  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 teacher, 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 tower.
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.’ 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 extortion 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 sureal to believe. But  that is the level to  which Nigerian education has sunk.
It goes  to say that the ruin  in the nation’s  education 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 education system. Beside injecting more funds into the system, the sector requires  a corrupt-free regimes 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 retraining  of teachers, as well as good incentives  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. This explains why the Federal Government should, as a matter of urgency, address their grievances of university lecturers who two days ago embarked on indefinite strike action and their polytechnics counterparts who have been on strike for almost two months now.
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.