The other day, a respected Nigerian reacted on his twitter handle, saying foreign education was never the bane of Nigeria’s foreign reserve or her economy in its entirety.
He went further to state that our forefathers including Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Chief Obafemi Awolowo invested in foreign education, thus the practice shouldn’t be seen as an economic menace; rather, ought to be celebrated.
According to him, Nigerians and Nigeria needed to continually invest in foreign education with a view to bringing enhancement in the country’s educational system and its economy at large. In other words, Nigeria needs foreign education if she must grow.
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I strongly sensed a lack of patriotism in his words; needless to say that the unpatriotic nature of most Nigerians, particularly the so-called stakeholders, remains the bane of Nigeria’s education industry.
The last time I painstakingly checked, without mincing words, the survival of any nation as a people depended solely on the health status of its educational sector. In line with this singular fact, the inevitable role of education in the development of any society has been vastly documented in a series of global academic journals.
Presently, Nigeria being widely regarded as the giant of Africa is unequivocally still uncertain where she’s headed regarding her educational system. Suffice to say that, her destination is yet to be known by the concerned citizenry. It is against this backdrop that the minds of many of our young ones are preoccupied with the intention of leaving the country for elsewhere for their respective academic pursuits.
It is no longer news that most educational programmes initiated by the Nigerian government, have ended up serving as mere siphons to transfer money to the bank accounts of the corrupt political officers and their allies.
To start with; since the commencement of the Universal Primary Education (UPE) in 1976, the programme has failed to perform effectively as anticipated as a result of lack of funds necessitated by corruption, among other related factors.
Furthermore, the Universal Basic Education (UBE) initiative launched by Chief Olusegun Obasanjo in Sokoto State precisely on 30th September 1999, which was intended to be universal, free and compulsory, has in the long run seemed incapacitated due to the ongoing troubling revelation of shortage of teachers as well as employment of half-baked tutors in our various schools, also attributed to the aforementioned socio-political cankerworm known as corruption.
These and a lot more similar programmes taking place in Nigeria’s educational sector have been hampered by corruption, thereby crippling the nation’s socio-economic system at large.
It’s obvious that most of the country’s school structures are currently in a dilapidated state, which shows that Nigeria has a weird value system whose revitalization requires only a candid measure.
Indeed, Nigeria is a society where priorities are considered to be less-important. For example, the monthly wages of the less/non – educated local government councillors serving in various political wards are far greater than that of university professors. Of course, something is apparently wrong with any society that doesn’t take its educational system seriously.
As the disgusting culture of corruption persists, the public tertiary institutions have been left to rot away. Some of the loans received from the World Bank and other related institutions towards the revitalization of the nation’s education industry, were rather used to purchase inconsequential equipment that could not be properly installed or sustained, and several institutions received irrelevant books and journals in this regard, thereby making the universities that were meant to be research-oriented centres seem not unlike mere hockey pitches.
Due to this anomaly, each year, the tertiary institutions in the country send-forth hundreds of thousands of half-baked graduates in different fields of endeavour to the nation’s labour market.
Sincerely, to restore the Nigeria’s economic sector, there is an urgent need to revitalize her education industry, and this measure can only be actualized by revisiting all the factors that currently affect the industry in question, such as lack of infrastructure, teaching facilities, social amenities, poor wages and incentives, substandard teaching curriculum, high tuition fees, just to mention but a few.
First and foremost, the governments at all levels must begin from the grass root. They ought to, as a matter of urgency, rehabilitate all the dilapidated technical colleges situated in various locations across the country as well as provide adequate facilities required to run the schools, and sufficient funds to sustain the said structures and equipment.
The truth is that the country’s anticipated technological development or enhancement shall remain a mirage if the grassroots are not properly addressed. There are no two ways about it.
this piece is completed here.