There are undoubtedly, more schools today – primary, secondary and tertiary – than there has ever been in Nigeria’s history. This has translated to an ever increasing higher level of schooling for an individual Nigerian, measured by number of years spent in formal education. From a low of less than two years in 1950, the level of schooling for any random person in Nigeria has tripled to more than 6 years today. This increasing trend has marched on with a simultaneous explosion in the number of schools and colleges.
But this triple increase in the average number of years spent in school and the explosion in number of schools seem to have largely proceeded to the detriment of quality and relevance. While schools and schooling have expanded, quality, competence and relevance have progressively deteriorated, even becoming abysmal. The situation has become so bad to the order that a typical university graduate today has educational competence that sometimes rivals that of a 4th grader in 1976. The Economist in January argued that just 1 in 4 of secondary school students in countries such as Nigeria could reach the basic level of attainment in standardized international tests.
Deteriorating quality is unfortunately, not the only problem our education faces. As bad as it is, our schools are grossly insufficient to meet the demands of the teeming population that is 65% young people. So, even the bad school is not enough to go round. Although schools seem to have mushroomed out of every nook and cranny of this country, yet there seems to be a huge shortfall in availability and the gap between supply and demand looms large. It is on record that 2 out of every 5 Nigerian children aged 6 – 11 are out of school. According to a 2016 UNESCO report, Nigeria’s out of school children totals more than 10.5 million which accounts for 47% of total out of school children in the world – the largest in the world. To the North of the country, the dismal statistics is 2 out of every 3 infants out of school.
Alongside these trends is the increasing loss of confidence in public schools which has fueled the explosion of private schools across the three levels of education in the country since 1983. Between 2006 and 2016, enrollment into private secondary schools in Nigeria grew from 11% to almost 42%, a three-fold increase over a decade. The public secondary schools that produced the bulk of Nigeria’s current class of leaders have all but become an effigy of what they used to be. Their dismal state is evidently manifest in the Cowbell Mathematics competition which has been won by a disproportionate number of private secondary schools over the past 19 years of the competition.
Proceeding to the tertiary level, the University of Ibadan, ranked 801st in 2016 by Times Higher Education is the only Nigeria university appearing in the top 1000 universities in the world. Our universities have progressively become a mere totem and a rite of passage for young people. Trapped in antiquated teaching technologies and less than medieval conditions, they have become increasingly incapable of producing functional education. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education lag behind other countries in Africa. The recent World Economic Forum’s Human Capital Optimization Index shows that on a scale of 1 (worst) to 7 (best) Nigeria scores 2.6, below the global average of 3.8. Kenya, Rwanda, Mauritius, Cote d’Ivoire, Zambia and Ghana all score above 4. The conclusion to this is that Nigeria’s educational system is not able to compete in the new global system.
To underscore the link between university education and economic development, the Nobel Prize in Economics have been awarded 3 times to economists whose major contribution has been on the link between education or human capital and economic growth. Theodore W. Shultz (1979), Gary Becker (1992) and James Heckman (2000) made significant contributions to understanding the link between education and economic growth. Education can increase the human capital inherent in the labour force, which increases labour productivity and thus transitional growth toward a higher equilibrium level of output. Education can also increase the innovative capacity of the economy, and the new knowledge on new technologies, products, and processes promotes growth. Finally, education can facilitate the diffusion and transmission of knowledge needed to understand and process new information and to successfully implement new technologies devised by others, which again promotes growth.
It is therefore disturbing when the government continually decrease allocation to education and still make policy statements in the manner of boosting competitiveness, innovation, productivity etc., as if these can be conjured up out of outer space.
California as a state in the United States of America houses almost all the most valuable companies in the world today. Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Dell etc. are all based in Silicon Valley, California. It has been shown that the Silicon Valley technology cluster was attracted by California Institute of Technology and Stanford University – two academic institutions at the forefront of most advanced research and development in information and communications technology. These companies feed off the knowledge developed in these educational institutions in a mutually synergistic way.
Without sound educational system, all the talks about competitiveness, innovation, knowledge-based economy, productivity, economic diversification remain mere political rhetoric. There is a very strong positive correlation between country’s investment in education and its growth. Countries that have developed have rode on the back of the academic-industrial complex, whereby Research and Development is co-produced between the academia and the industry.
Our education will continue to lack relevance unless there is a connection between what happens in industries and what lecturers and their students do in the classroom and laboratories. Unfortunately, this linkage is completely non-existent in Nigeria today and there is no clear policy towards addressing this disconnect.
At the same time, the world of work is rapidly changing as new technologies and processes disrupt established ways of doing things. This calls for new skills-set to cope with rapidly changing workplaces. But before this can be achieved, there is the other necessity of building the infrastructure that would enable an adaptive system to ensure that trends are timely identified and requisite interventions made. It is said that today’s students need “twenty-first-century skills,” like critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and digital literacy. The ILO posits that an additional 280 million jobs will be required come 2019. Therefore, in order not to be left far behind, policies must be enacted to ensure that frameworks and incentives are installed so that those jobs can be created and filled. Robust education systems – underpinned by qualified, professionally trained, motivated, and well-supported teachers – will be the cornerstone of this effort. As new development unravel our oil economy and unveils a post-oil future, it will be tragic if we fail to anticipate these transitions whose necessity can no longer be denied.
Bongo Adi
