Education: Nigeria Still Lacking as Buhari Clocks 2

L

LequteMan

Guest
buhari inaugurate.jpg


Contrary to popular opinion and belief, education is what makes the world go round, not love or money.

Without education we won’t be this knowledgeable about gravity and we’d still be ignorant about the importance of research and the application of knowledge. Smartphones won’t be in existence, malaria will still wreak havoc and the world generally won’t be this developed if education was treated with brevity by the US and Europe.

The exact opposite is the attitude of the Nigerian government towards education. Both the federal and state governments see little need to invest in education or to train their leaders of tomorrow. For decades, the country’s budget for education has been less than the 26% benchmark recommended by the United Nations for developing countries.

Nigeria has failed to educate its growing population due to this lackadaisical behavior. It has also given birth to ubiquitous illiterate graduates and ignorant lecturers abound.

This is the situation President Muhammadu Buhari met on ground when he assumed office in 2015. Not an educational enthusiast himself, Buhari has continued in the footsteps of his predecessors, putting square pegs in round holes in the process.

Despite his publicized commitment towards the education sector, Buhari spent less than 8% of the 2016 budget on education, a paltry N367.73bn which was the lowest since 2012. To make matters worse, most of this fund was spent on bureaucracies of education ministries, while primary school students sit on the floor and universities laboratories remain under stocked. The ministry also doesn’t have tangible capital projects. In 2017, N50bn was budgeted for capital projects while N62bn was set aside for amnesty, an unsure bid to pacify militants.



Also, Buhari after his election victory in 2015, took ample time searching for the perfect candidates to handle the country’s education sector and six months later appointed Adamu Adamu, an “accountant-turned-journalist”, as the Minister of Education. He also appointed Prof. Anthony Anwuka, a man who was convicted of administrative racketeering in 2009, as the Minister of State for Education.

Adamu Adamu is touted to be an ardent writer about education who is exposed and knowledgeable but he has failed to transmit this knowledge and other relevant skills to his new portfolio. The education ministry, which is supposed to enlighten the country, is silent and morbid. It has no presence whatsoever on social media and its moribund website mirrors its lack of activities and achievements.

Furthermore, Mr. Adamu doesn’t seem to have a plan for his portfolio. If there was one, it hasn’t been made public. The ministry is characterized with a lack of action and Adamu himself has been accused of nepotism and cronyism, allegedly doling out appointments to friends and families in a ministry that needs total upheaval and restructuring.

The ministry recently estimated that 50 percent of in-school children in Nigeria are not learning because they cannot read or write, yet little is being done to arrest the situation. Instead, there’s a loud half-hearted effort at feeding them, with a lot of money involved.

Secondary schools aren’t doing any better. Unity schools are tough to get into, with tuition fees so high that the average Nigerian parents can’t afford them. School administrations are known to be lax towards their duties- over a thousand girls at Queens College recently were hospitalized due to a water infection. There has also been an increase in cultism and hooliganism amongst male secondary school students.

The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has its own share of controversies. Its registrar, Ishaq Oloyede is not suitable for the position according to the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU. His success in stemming the proliferation of arranged exam centres is drowned by JAMB’s lack of coordination and transparency. Despite raking in billions of naira through form sales yearly, the body fails to hold an error-free Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) every year.

Understaffed and underfunded are two apt adjectives that describe the nation’s tertiary institutions. ASUU and other unions are still crying out for funds. Teaching facilities at universities are scarce and inadequate, with research institutions in squalid conditions. Most graduates aren’t employable. The brilliant ones aren’t retained and most of them leave the country in search of greener pastures abroad.

The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) is a shadow of what it once was. Many people see it as a waste of time. Graduates endure a 3-week orientation at camps with mediocre health facilities. After then they are posted to institutions where they don’t utilize most of the skills they learned in school.



In a nutshell, President Buhari has neglected the education sector for the past two years. This sector needs proper funding and investments to work well. The ministry has an allocation of N540bn in the 2017 budget but it is still a drop in the ocean.

President Buhari needs to do more for the education sector. Apart from proper funding, the president needs to put square pegs in square holes. The educational system needs to be restructured. Its success, replicated year after year, can move the country forward. Nigeria isn’t lacking for want of brilliant minds, it is lacking in infrastructure to train its brilliant minds.
 
Back
Top