Date Published: 05/11/09
The State of The Nation: Rot in the education sector (2)
By Temple Chima Ubochi
An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all. (Socrates)
The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth (John Fitzgerald Kennedy)
Education has to cultivate humility and discipline, but today it is yielding a harvest of pride and envy. (Sathya Sai Baba)
The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present. (Ellen Key)
The father, the mother and the teacher are the three primarily responsible for moulding the future of the country. (Sathya Sai Baba)
Unless knowledge is transformed into wisdom, and wisdom is expressed in character; education is a wasteful process. (Sathya Sai Baba)
Humility, reverence, compassion, forbearance, sacrifice and self-control are the qualities that reveal the outcome of the true education. (Sathya Sai Baba)
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. If we retrench the wages of the schoolmaster, we must raise those of the recruiting sergeant. (Edward Everett)
As of now, I am concentrating only on the government institutions. Later in subsequent parts of this article, I will look at the private universities, many of which do not have a space more than a three bedroom apartment.
The Nigerian educational system is catastrophic and the reasons why it is that way are endless: lack of adequate funds, examination malpractices, students and parents bribing the teachers or examiners for marks, unemployment, the dilapidated conditions of the institutions, lack of interest on the part of the teachers to impact quality knowledge due to lack of motivation, a government that is in self-denial as to what the problems are and how to tackle them and on and on. No one seems to have the “magic wand” to the problems. This government that cannot get anything rightly done is lost and is groping in the dark. The president claimed that he was a university lecturer, but, does not know the problems facing the education sector, or, he is just feigning ignorance due to lack of the will to effect the needed changes. The minister of education was once a university lecturer and still does not know how to tackle the problems confronting education in the country, he is only good in passing the blame and giving suggestions he should be implementing himself as the minister. God have mercy! The kind of education in Nigeria now will lead us to nowhere and cannot imbue the students of today with the requisite leadership qualities for tomorrow; the greater tomorrows of today cannot take Nigeria to any enviable height. Those running things in the education sector and infact in Nigeria as a whole, are condemning Nigeria to a life of diminutive leadership now and in the future.
Do you know that it is hard for students to read when it is dark because of the unreliable nature of electricity in the country? Recently, students of the University of Ibadan rioted because they didn’t have electricity and water supply in their hostels for almost 48 hours. So any student that fails to read before dark, will not be sure if there will be light in the night. How can students excel under such a condition? The electricity problem is something this and previous governments have failed woefully in tackling despite the trillions of naira said to have been invested in that sector.
Do you know that many students can no longer afford hostel accommodation due to the exorbitant cost of securing a campus accommodation and the fact that there are fewer accommodations as the student population has outgrown the hostel accommodations? When those hostels were built, those incharge were myopic in their thinking as to know that the numbers of students will never be static as time goes; they made no plan for expansion or to accommodate higher numbers of students in future, and new hostels are seldom built. Students are forced to live off-campus and sometimes, far away off and have to be moving back and forth from home to campus, thereby wasting the time that should’ve been invested in meaningful academic exercises. The off-campus student can be ensnared in the traffic and might miss his or her lectures in that process. Again, off-campus accommodation in Nigeria might be too distracting and might not afford conducive environment for reading as good as the university environment. How can one expect the students to excel?
Many Nigerian students are just in the university for the sake of it; only to acquire the good-for-nothing certificate as they are well aware that there are no jobs out there upon graduation. This can be very demoralising and is making some of the students not to put in their best as tomorrow is not assured. Rather the student get into transgressional behaviour to get the certificate that will not be a passport to good life in future. How can a student excel with such a thought in the back of his or her mind?
Some of the lecturers are also in fact aiding the demise of qualitative education in Nigeria: They give the highest scores to those who can afford the price, be it in cash or in kind, while the brilliant students that struggled so hard are denied the high scores they merited. In such a situation, hardwork is not rewarded; so many brilliant and average students see no reason again to work hard since at the end of it all, the bests do not get the highest scores; that means rewarding mediocre and not meritocracy and that cannot augur well with our standard of education.
Nigeria and its leaders, lectures and parents are toying with one of the most important sectors that should be producing future leaders of this country. Since everybody has failed, the end result will continue to be the mediocre who have been leading this country since independence and it is not hard to understand why Nigeria is where it’s today. It’s what you give that you get; no real leader has risen in Nigeria and also none through merit and these have been the reasons why Nigeria has been a country barely struggling despite all it is blessed with. Unless we start now to put things right in that important sector, tomorrow might be worse off than today; and in future, all we might have about Nigeria will be only a memory of it or to point at the map where a country once called Nigeria was. I am very serious about this. Things cannot continue like this, the leaders of Nigeria are snuffing the life out of the entity and it might die in their hands. Just pray that the worst of the worst does not happen.
The education sector has deteriorated and is in a near collapse conditions and still at that, nobody is taking the blame or responsibility for all these, rather one group blames the other; Yar’Adua blames the lecturers and university administrators, the minister of education blames the lecturers and students, the lecturers blame the government and back and forth. That’s not what we want to hear, we want the will and resolve on the part of the government, teachers and parents to put things right here. Yar’Adua sent in very inflammatory addresses to the Convocation ceremonies of the University of Ibadan and that of the Obafemi Awolowo University recently, depicting himself through the addresses, as a man that lacks a comprehensive understanding of the problems in the education sector despite the fact that he claimed to have been a lecturer before diving into the untested waters of politics.
Who doesn’t know that the universities are incapacitated by paucity of funds, to the extent that those running the institutions have virtually nothing to carry out their academic assignments? The government seems not to know why the universities were established in the first place; that those institutions need money for research, training, maintenance etc. The previous governments tried to stifle all voices of opposition in the universities and kept a tight control over the institutions without allowing them freedom to operate and develop the way an institution should have. The governments used blackmail and intimidation to kill the academic sprit that should have been pervading and flourishing in every high institution of learning in the country. The governments tried so many times to gag the ASUU and NANS instead of providing the needed funds and support for academic excellence to the universities.
Some parents are also not helping the growth of education: Looking at primary and secondary schools which are supposed to lay the basic foundation for the future university students, one can see that some parents help their children or wards to the next class when unmerited by bribing the teachers. Many teachers are inundated with bribe, harassment, blackmail etc to get them to alter the marks of indolent and dull students. Not only that some parents do also give graft to examiners in order for them to help their children or wards, some of them do also hire other people to do exams for their children and wards. These children and wards who are helped out by others to pass their exams right from primary through secondary schools, will finally end up as university undergraduates and there too, they will start looking for means to pass their exams by paying the lecturers in cash or kind or through other illicit means and at the end, the universities will churn out half-baked graduates who did not merit the degrees they are brandishing.
There are many teachers, whether at the primary, secondary or tertiary levels, who are not supposed to be where they are today. Some teachers or lecturers do leak exam questions, some who are chose as examiners do assist students in bringing in answers to questions into the exam hall, some look the other way while exam malpractices go on in the exam hall. The teachers of yesteryears that were strict and were all out to impact quality knowledge and to help students pass their exams on their own efforts and will never have anything to do with cheating or aiding and abetting exam malpractices, are today in the minority; the society and hard life have neutralized their line of resistance making them to loose their moral uprightness and boldness of those days, so many of them have joined the fray. Nowadays, it is not hard to see people taking up teaching because they have no alternative choice, they are in the teaching job, but, their hearts are not there and they are not giving their best thereby contributing significantly to the death of qualitative education in Nigeria. Think of it: What if those half baked graduates who made it through the university by cheating in one way or other end up later as university lecturers? They will place little emphasis on integrity and hard work and the result will be the churning out of more and more half-baked graduates and the circle will continue going round and round.
To drive home my point and to end this part of the article: It is unbelievable that many teachers in Kwara State failed the examination meant for primary four pupils. That will show you how bad things are in the education sector in Nigeria. Here are excerpts from Punch Newspapers of Feb. 13, 2009. The Paper wrote about “How Kwara teachers failed primary four pupils' examination”:
“Kwara State Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology, Alhaji Bolaji Abdullahi, is a journalist by profession. He spoke with Sunday Aborisade on why his ministry conducted a primary four examination for teachers in the state. Excerpts: Why did you ask teachers in your state to write an examination meant for primary four pupils?
When that child completes primary six, we will measure the performance to see whether he or she has been able to know what he or she should know. We divided the primary school system into two; Primary one to three (lower) and primary four to six, (upper). We designed it in such a way that pupils who had completed lower primary would begin the upper section at primary four.
The proficiency of lower primary would be taken to upper primary. So primary four was used as a benchmark! According to the policy, by the time children complete primary four in Kwara State, they should be able to read simple passages and answer some questions; write simple and correct sentences to express their ideas; participate in class debates on simple issues; identify vowels and consonant sounds; count in tens, hundreds, and thousands up to one million; differentiate between proper and improper fractions; Add, subtract, multiply and divide whole numbers, decimals and fractions and measure and solve problems on length, area, weight and capacity of a given object/ shape. A child leaving primary four in Kwara State should be able to do all these. We thought of the resources that we would need to achieve all what we had promised the parents. We need to provide books and good learning environment.
However, the most important factor that would determine whether the children could produce the results expected of them is the quality of teaching that the child will be able to receive. In auditing these different factors, we ask ourselves whether the teachers are capable of teaching them to achieve the results. Since the entry point into upper primary is primary four, we now said a teacher who will teach primary four should be able to know what a primary four child was being asked to do. What you don't have, you cannot give!
Conducting an examination for 19,100 teachers in one day was a lot of rigour. It was a serious logistic nightmare but we did it successfully. We had promised that the results won't be used to sack any teachers that failed but that anyone who refused to write the exams would earn an automatic sack. I received the result of the test with a big shock, in fact it paralysed me.
I could not get out of bed. Only 75 out of the 19,100 teachers passed the exam when the average score for the four papers were analysed. Just seven of them had 80 per cent and above in each subject. This means that 0.4 per cent scored 80 per cent. We brought the cut-off point to 30 per cent since we thought 80 per cent was too high but we still could not get 50 per cent of them that passed. We were confused. We contemplated whether to kill the result or publish it because we were concerned with the image of the state and how it would portray our educational system.
We invariably decided to publish it so that other state governments would know that there was a problem in their own educational system because Kwara is one of the leading states as far as the standard of education is concerned. We then called all the stakeholders in the education sector and announced the result. Everybody was shocked. At the end of the day, we arrived at one critical condition that the teachers did not fail primary four tests because they were dullards; they failed because their own education also failed. It is the outcome of the 20 or 30 years of collapse of the education sector in this country. Their primary, secondary and tertiary education had obviously failed. It is a known fact that those who ended up in the teaching profession were those who could not meet up the cut-off point to read law, medicine, accountancy and so on, they fell by the way side”.
To Be Continued
STILL ON LATE COMMISSIONER OF POLICE HAZ IWENDI:
I want to share with you these two feedbacks from Tony and Offiong: They will take you through their memory lane because they had one-on-one encounter with Haz many years back and from there one can understand who Haz was, the more.
On another note, I learnt from Haz´s family that they are setting up a foundation in his (Haz´s) name. They are putting the finishing touches to it. I will keep my readers informed whenever the foundation gets rolling. Many of us will be more than willing to get involved in it in one way or the other. Giving at least, a little to Haz´s honour will be worth it, Haz gave his all to Nigeria and Nigerians, we can at least give only our own little to his name.
TONY ELUEMUNOR WROTE:
Ubochi,
Thanks for this tribute to a wonderful man - the late Hyacinth Azubuike (hence HAZ) Iwendi. I was blessed enough to have known him from childhood, from St. Stephen's Primary School, Ubulu-Uku, where he was a wonder in "concert shows" and later at St. Anthony's College Ubulu-Uku, where he was finishing as I was coming in. Again, he was a leading actor in the dramatic society, I still remember him acting the Judge in "A man of Character" by Ene Henshaw (I hope I am right about the playwright).
St. Anthony's was a Catholic school and Iwendi was in the forefront in religious activities, leading in the Stations of the Cross (the depiction of the 14 points of suffering that Jesus the Christ underwent on Good Friday - just for non-Catholics). He was not a footballer, but he was a leading member of the supporter's club.
One day, I ran into Iwendi at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He had just finished at the then Calabar campus of UNN, and was awarded a University of Calabar certificate. Iwendi said he had nothing against the University of Calabar certificate but that the right thing to do was to award him a UNN certificate since he applied to, was accepted by, and matriculated at UNN. The School authorities thought otherwise. Iwendi went to court and won.
Iwendi was not just a Chevny Scholar, he sincerely loved education - just as he loved his police job. Yes, he was in love with life; and he lived a life of service.
It is touching that Haz's mother is still alive; I will try to see her as soon as I can. I last saw her in the late 1970's, at Mokola section of Ibadan, I think.
Yes, he was a second in command of the Mobile Police Unit in Benin a long while ago- I visited him there. By then, nobody had written about the Gwoza camp where the Mobile Unit was trained. One day Iwendi visited me in the office and said he could not understand why the story about that Gwoza desert camp had never been told - just like the story of the Mobile Unit... Then he just gave me the story and dared me to publish it. His aim was to get the public to like the MOPOL and also to humanise the MOPOL.
One of Haz's greatest joys as Police publicist was the chance the post offered him to improve on the Police magazine. He just loved to fuss over every new copy! And oh, he was against injustice; so he would flare into a rage any time police high-handedness was reported to him.
Haz was a remarkable human being; full of zest, full of laughter, full of seriousness. With Mr. Solomon Udele, who has now left the Police Force, Haz, tried all he could to see that all police stations are computerised and interlinked so that once a case is incident at any police station in Nigeria, it could be accessed at any other police station. And once someone has been arrested at any police station, that information would be available at all police stations.
Mr. Udele, had picked up the idea at a World Police forum in Boston, M.A., USA and wanted to replicate it in Nigeria. The moment Udele mentioned the idea, Haz bought it. Unfortunately, their bosses did not see the goodness the duo saw ever so clearly.
May Haz's soul rest in perfect peace.
Tony Eluemunor.
OFFIONG AQUA WROTE:
Temple,
I am writing to express appreciation on the memorial piece you wrote about Haz in one of the Nigerian papers. My memory of Haz was at UNICAL in 1978 (when it was still a UNN campus) where we contested elections among a group of 7 students for the presidency of our then student's union. I placed first, and he was 2nd. Haz surprised me by not only coming to my room to congratulate me, but actively supported me during my one year term which was truncated by expulsion during the Ali Must Go strike of 1978 . Haz was on my side even during this trying period.
May his soul rest in peace .
Offiong Aqua
THE THANXS IS ALL YOURS!!!
You can access Part 1 of the article through this link:
Temple Chima Ubochi writes from Bonn, Germany through ubochit@yahoo.com
