About nine months ago, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) started an indefinite strike action, making a range of demands one of which is a re-negotiation of 2009 FGN/ASUU Agreement under the International Labour Organisation’s collective bargaining principles.
The social cost of the lack of consensus between the Federal Government of Nigeria and ASUU that led to the current strike is huge, ranging from the pain of students whose graduation from the university has been suspended indefinitely to parents groaning under the financial burden of extra costs to see their wards through tertiary education.
This is fuelling the need for parents who can afford it to send their children abroad or to a private university. It also means that being the poverty capital of the world, according to the World Poverty Clock, majority of Nigeria’s young population comprising more than 60 percent of the country’s population, would fail to access the learning required to function productively in society since they can neither study abroad nor go to private universities.
The world has become borderless and the products of Nigerian educational institutions have international competition, a global labour market that rewards high quality professionalism.
Employability and Skills survey by Phillips Consulting showed that many companies and employers of labour in Nigeria believed that foreign universities produced graduates with better employable skills than those produced by tertiary institutions in Nigeria. As such, employers in the oil and gas and consulting sectors prefer them to graduates from Nigerian universities.
The report noted that the collaboration between employers and tertiary institutions in curriculum design and graduate recruitment processes appeared to be inadequate.
An ex-officio of the Human Capital Providers Association of Nigeria has stated that, in terms of quality, Nigerian graduates cannot match their foreign peers and that companies are looking for the best because they know that what they are looking for is human capital. It is not machinery, nor finance.
What makes the difference is human capital. Companies, especially multinationals, are looking for the best human capital to help them achieve results. The human factor is vital, therefore anywhere employers can get it, they go for it.
However, an uncertain academic calendar breeds mediocrity because it impairs proper planning for both the universities and parents. A student admitted into a university expects to graduate at 22 years but this cannot be guaranteed in Nigeria. It is also a waste of young human talent.
There is no systematic way of harnessing these raw talents and converting them into productive units for the benefit of the economy.
Some of our universities were rated high last year based on the 2018/19 session. Now we have started the 2019/20 session, but have nothing to show for it. There is no way that Nigeria’s ranking will not drop this year. If you want to attract talents within or outside the country, this ranking is one of the key variables that will be used.
It is pertinent for us to note that while the Federal Government goes back and forth with the 40-year old union of Nigeria’s academics, the collateral damage to Nigeria’s ability to build an educational system that produces human capital that can flourish in the 21st Century is worsening.
Twenty-Twenty data obtained from the Human Capital Project, a World Bank initiative that compiles figures across 174 countries show that Nigeria, regrettably, has a similar Human Capital Development Index range with countries such as Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Sudan and South Sudan.
The Human Capital Development Index (HDI) is an aggregate of six sub-categories that include probability of survival till age five, expected years of school, harmonised test scores, learning adjusted years of school, fraction of children under five not stunted and adult survival rates.
It is baffling to note that Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, scored 0.36 on the HDI in 2020, behind Rwanda which scored 0.38, Sierra Leone 0.36, Sudan 0.38 and South Sudan 0.31.
Some of the characteristics African countries in this range share in common are a civil war, genocide and social unrests. But Nigeria is in none of these, meaning that, although the country has enjoyed sustained relative political and social peace, it has failed to develop and improve the wellbeing of its citizens through education that translates into high-quality human capital stock, a productive base for economic development. This, in our view, is quite unfortunate.
The country’s failure becomes all the more poignant given that Ghana has an HDI score of 0.45, South Africa 0.43, Kenya 0.55 and Algeria 0.53 while similar emerging economies such as Nigeria worth mentioning are Brazil with an HDI score of 0.55, Indonesia 0.54 and India 0.49.
It is important for Nigeria to know that investing in human capital, particularly early childhood education, to develop high-order cognitive and socio-behavioural skills in addition to foundational skills have become pivotal in today’s knowledge and technology-driven world. That it makes all the difference between that leap up to wealth and those that race down to poverty.
In Nigeria, a major reason the government does not invest in human capital is the lack of political incentives. Few data are publicly available on whether health and education systems are generating human capital.
This gap hinders the design of effective solutions, the pursuit of improvement, and the ability of citizens to hold their governments accountable. These, arguably, are the kernel of disagreement between ASUU and the federal government. For us, time to resolve all the issues in contention is today.
