A current craze in Nigeria today is for government to establish all manner of higher institutions in the name of tackling our educational deficit. It is rather the case that these mushroom universities and tertiary institutions are only established for political reasons. Legislators see ability to convince their colleagues to pass a law establishing a tertiary institution in their constituency as part of their contribution to community development as they argue in their political meetings that this will attract inflow of new residents into their constituencies. They do not see the need for establishing an educational institution for the purpose of solving problems. The result is that we have all manner of mushroom institutions dotting the entire landscape without adequate training manpower for them. While individual investors see obtaining a license to establish a private university a mere business opportunity in a nation where there are millions of youths hungry for tertiary education, the government agency responsible for issuing the licences and regulating educational input and output, does not seem to realise that the essence of education is its ability to provide a practical and practicable solution to the challenges confronting the people.
In a situation where the economy is having perennial challenges and is in constant crisis, most well-trained lecturers in the tertiary institutions have relocated abroad in search of the proverbial greener pastures. Our institutions have been depleted of quality hands to help train the youngsters millions of whom sit every year to write admission examinations and the institutions have suffered from what has been termed ‘brain drain’. Failure of government to provide a permanent solution to the agitations of lecturers in the higher institutions leading to the constant strike actions has led to a situation where many brilliant minds have left the country and are using the trainings we gave them to positively develop those foreign lands. We train people here only for them to be out to serve a foreign land. The reason for this cannot be located elsewhere but government’s failure to realise the essence and reasons why education ought to be placed on the pedestal of utmost priority.
No nation can develop beyond its educational prospects. Lack of funding for the existing universities and other tertiary institutions has rendered our institutions a theatre of strike actions where ignorance is developed to the admiration of soulless governments of the past. When existing institutions cannot be adequately funded and a brain-dead political office holders at the helms of affairs decide to multiply higher institutions by locating them for political reasons, the nation is definitely doomed.
With lecturers having been depopulated in our institutions of higher learning, emergency recruitment of teachers became the order of the day and this has has led to all manner of ill-equipped individuals taking up lecturer’s jobs due to lack of employment. Many choose to be lecturers out of frustration in the unemployment market and the net effect is production of half-baked graduates all over. I have watched several video clips posted on social media where many university students did not know what their discipline was. Many could not give the meanings of the acronyms BSc, HND, ND etc. You wonder what manner of intellectual contributions we are making to a society which youths only run after admission into tertiary institutions without knowing what actually they are doing there. I know that the syllabi that some higher institutions were running more than thirty years ago are still what they are teaching till today. That brings to mind a query as to the essence of our engineering, sciences and technological departments in the face of their failure to provide solutions to our technological challenges.
No nation, modern times, can make substantial progress where its academia is populated by mere theoreticians whose scope of knowledge is to repeat what is in the books without adapting them to creativity and provision of developmental solutions. This shows the deficit in our ability to contribute to technological development and earn the much-needed foreign exchange. By now, our food security challenges ought to have been solved with technological innovation, government and private investors’ commitment. Where are we? We still import agricultural implements from abroad and this has contributed immensely to our backwardness as a nation that is incapable of feeding itself. In the field of Law as a course and profession, Nigeria produces more than five lawyers every year whereas there is no market to absorb them. It is not about population per se as often argued, but the capacity of the economy to absorb them.
Many of them graduate with good results but without any firm to employ them and learn good practice as they are too many in the market. A dwindling and nose-diving economy cannot cater effectively for its graduates once it has no means of absorbing them. Many of them new lawyers turn to business since they cannot secure a foothold in practice. It should not be a matter of producing many lawyers where we do not provide for the means of putting their knowledge to adequate and positive use. And one thing that has contributed to this nauseating problem is the establishment of Law Faculty in every University.
What remains is for Polytechnics and Colleges of Education to start having Faculties of Law. Many of them have seen it as a means of increasing their earnings by providing substandard education that may not even be registered or recognized by the Nigerian Universities Commission (NUC). Shortly thereafter, a Nigerian Senator was proposing the establishment of many Law Schools everywhere without thinking of where the products would go after qualifying. Even National Open University of Nigeria offers Law as a course and all efforts to point out the deficit in its system has been resisted. You now have a graduate of Law whose grammatical construction baffles the language of English itself. While she asserts that her BSc in Law was a product of concerted and disciplined efforts, the language by which she sought to celebrate her success unsettles any listener whose orientation is not degraded like the self-celebrating graduate of Law.
Where we do not pay attention to the purpose for which we need education and the goal is merely to have mushroom institutions in every nook and cranny, we are just a bunch of self-deceiving people lavishing resources to accumulate waste. In terms of providing solution, we need to re-orientate ourselves about the type of education we need and how to go about securing it. The whole world is moving technologically and digitally. In what way have we endeavored to solve our problems of low earnings and make life better for ourselves?
Depending on foreign products produced by intellectual investment of foreign lands cannot bring us to the promised land. I read of a statement reportedly made by a senior official in the North Korean government that while his nation lacks all natural resources and most importantly oil, they concentrated on developing refineries knowing that there is a visionless nation like Nigeria that is well endowed with oil but has no capacity to refine it. They will then buy crude oil from us at rock bottom prices, refine it and sell back to us at exorbitant prices. They make heavy returns on their visionary investment while we deplete our scarce foreign earnings through visionless policies. That is bound to be the fate of a nation whose educational standing and vision are bereft of a meaningful focus. One would think that the appropriate way to go is to rather make our tertiary institutions to be focused as to particular fields where their competences can be of assistance to society.
While we have a school like University of Lagos that is reputed to be better in the training of Law, we can have a State like of Osun concentrating on production of better farmers and agricultural engineers by running a College or University of Agriculture that offers no other course. Our Country ought to have developed a robust policy on how to turn the Computer Village in Ikeja and the counterparts in other parts of the country to our own Silicon Valley by investing in how thousands of youths exploiting their informal computer literacy for evil purposes of scamming people. We can create educational opportunities from the practical knowledge of those young men in the Computer Village and other areas where they solve all manner of computer damage.
We can lure the criminal elements among them away from their illicit lifestyles by exposing them to better opportunities and assist them in developing their knowledge and competencies better.
Coincidentally, I had already put in this intervention when I stumbled on a conversation around the subject by the Chairman of the Economic and financial crimes commission, Mr Ola Olukoyede, on the technological ingenuity of a 17 year old boy geared towards criminality and the effort of the commission in steering him back to normalcy. The conversation aptly captured the message I was struggling to pass across above. Again, I commend his initiative in this regard and commend same to other political leaders. Anti-corruption is not about prosecution but largely prevention.
This much he seems to have a clear grasp of. Ride on brother! It is not enough to make quick cash from their tax returns alone without seeing how best we can assist them to solve our technological challenges. It is imperative we start thinking how best to make our educational system more functional and productively progressive. Where we proliferate educational institutions all over the nation without any tangible returns in terms of contribution to solving our problems, we are just lavishing scarce resources to create monsters that will later come to consume all of us. The problem of adequate funding of the existing tertiary institutions has not been well addressed.
The postulation of independent councils for the tertiary institutions is still hanging in the air. It will be most insane to create more higher institutions without having the capacity to fund them. We need to empower and expand the capacities of the existing ones to meet the needs of our wobbling economy. Our failure or inability to earn foreign exchange which depletes our dollar reserves and results in depreciation of Naira is as a result of our failure to be a productive nation but a consuming one. We need to be productive. Our higher institutions have a lot to contribute in this regard and that is why they are required to be more purposeful in orientation and course content. The educational leadership must shape them into line.
We know of universities abroad that produce quality goods from which they earn income while their society is the better for it. Our governments, at all levels, need to be more practical and altruistic in thinking than to engaging in self-serving and self-aggrandizing policies of establishing higher institutions for political relevance and popularity. No sane people think that way and expect development to come. This is my one-penny intervention this week.