7523
Abimbola Adelakun
How much of Nigeria’s budgetary
allocation should go to the education sector? The answer should be a 100
per cent – and that is only a start. This, of course, is not
practicable for obvious reasons. Besides, we know that reducing the
problem with education in Nigeria to funding is dubious diagnosis.
Notwithstanding, education in Nigeria – at the federal, state and local
levels – needs every kobo it can get. It is heartening that education is
getting a sizeable chunk of the 2016 budget – N369bn – but other
factors considered, this is short compared to the past few years when
the sector received more: 2011-N306bn; 2012-400bn; 2013-N427bn;
2014-N493bn; 2015-N492bn.
Worse is consideration that the depleted value
of the naira makes the amount worth far less than in 2014 when
allocations to education peaked. We should therefore expect to be
squeezed around the belt area in every sector of the economy in 2016 due
to further anticipation of fall in the price of oil.
When President Muhammadu Buhari
presented the 2016 budget recently, he mentioned a few initiatives that
were supposed to improve the quality of education in Nigeria. One was to
recruit 500,000 unemployed graduates and National Certificate of
Education holders as teachers and deploy them to mostly rural areas to
solve the lingering problem of unemployment. As an emergency measure,
this idea is laudable considering that there is a global shortage of
teachers especially at the primary education level. A 2014 study by
UNESCO posited that the world needed four million teachers by 2015 and
12 million by 2020.
This lack of qualified teachers is worse
in sub-Saharan Africa and Nigeria is one of the badly hit cases with
studies indicating that the country needs to spend $1.8bn to shore up
her teaching force. Nigeria doubtlessly needs teachers urgently. If the
Federal Government will indeed work with state and local governments to
train and deploy those teachers, then they can ensure that they meet the
needs of localities at the required levels.
There is however some problem with such
audacious recruitment drive of 500,000 people without a timeline.
Logistically, it is impossible to effectively recruit, train and deploy
that number of teachers in a year. That kind of massive recruitment
should be in phases – probably spread out over a five-year period so
that the process can evaluate itself as it goes on, reflect on
shortcomings and adjust accordingly.
Another problem is that gunning for
“unemployed” graduates is not exactly a tactful thing to say. (How will
their recruitment dragnet even separate the employed from the
unemployed?). Obviously, the Federal Government is using this proposed
recruitment as a double-edged sword to cut through problems in the
education sector and also mop up the rising mass of unemployed
graduates. However, reducing teaching to a job for people who have
nowhere to go – whose dreams are evaporating due to the country’s dire
situation – is indiscreet and likely to create psychological issues for
the teacher to be recruited and the students to be taught. Teaching
should be treated as a profession, not a measure to salvage those who
are dead-ending so they can at least eat.
The only thing worse than not having a
teacher is having a shoddily trained one entrusted with your future.
Already, what is called public education in Nigeria these days can do
with a lot of regular teacher retraining; piling up deadwoods will only
do more harm. The end goal should be to revamp education, not merely
distributing employment letters.
For 2016, it is highly important that
the intervention in the education sector be not limited to showy
strategies such as recruiting a staggering number of teachers and
feeding schoolchildren. Education needs far much more – from
rehabilitating structures to provision of certain amenities like
libraries, laboratories and decent classrooms with desks and chairs.
These are things that many public schools in Nigeria have learnt to
forgo while raising generations of children who have neither the memory
nor imagination of these basic infrastructures.
They were born after the
year the locust began to pillage the Nigerian plantation and they have
grown accustomed to rot, as if inhabiting pigsties called classrooms is
their destiny. To begin to dig these children out of the hole the
country long dumped them requires concerted and creative efforts
especially in view of Nigeria’s economic woes.
The other part of intervention in
education as indicated by Buhari is the proposed free education for
students in science, technology and education programmes. For one to
make a reasonable critique of this plan, it will be useful to have a
comprehensive blueprint of Nigeria’s education plan. The government
should produce a well-mapped out plan of proposed policies and what they
are meant to achieve in about two-, five-, and ten-year phases. For
instance, what will making tertiary education free for the above named
categories of students achieve? If this policy will affect only federal
tertiary institutions, what will be the point considering that those
schools are practically tuition-free?
What students pay for that shoot
up their school fees are supplementary costs which include acceptance
fee, registration and accommodation among others and in a place like the
University of Nigeria, Nsukka, the N75,000 imposed on people as cost of
laptop. From my experience, those who pay the bulk of money in federal
universities are actually postgraduate students. Will this free
education extend to them? Or they are the prime consideration?
The idea of free education at the
tertiary level has uses for a programme like education considering it is
not primarily a course of choice for students. Studying education
predetermines your career – that you will almost always end up a teacher
and not everyone considers this a desirable fate. To boost education,
students should be enticed to the programme with incentives such as
scholarships, bursary and job opportunities.
That way, Nigeria can have a
guaranteed supply of rightly motivated teachers in the pipeline rather
than one-time recruitment of an army of unemployed people. If, however,
the idea is to encourage more students to study science or technology
courses, then it is largely needless considering that those programmes
in Nigeria are already oversubscribed and a sizeable number by students
who should be elsewhere. If the point is to boost the study of science
and technology in Nigeria, then it is merely tokenistic.
For starters, the “smartest” countries
in the world in science and Maths design their education from the bottom
up. Today, Asian countries like Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Hong
Kong, China, and European countries like Finland, the Netherlands,
Switzerland, have made progress that far outstrips reputedly smart
countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and France.
This is
neither coincidental nor arbitrary. Apart from concerted efforts to
boost their education (which includes heavy funding), they built their
pedagogical approaches on cultural, historical and social factors. While
I will not advocate a wholesale borrowing of their strategies, I say
there is a lot Nigeria can learn from them.
To be an educationally smart,
science-oriented country – not the one where students massively fail
every year – Nigeria will need the help of subjects like art and music
that boost creativity and work their learning into the curriculum at
elementary and secondary levels.
Boosting science will hardly happen
through an undue privileging of science over the arts or humanities such
as giving a section of students scholarship and overlooking others when
all are disadvantaged by a lopsided educational system.
Anyone who
schooled in Nigeria will testify to how rigid the pedagogical approach
can be, stifling and orienting towards cultivation of existing knowledge
rather than critically advancing it. Nigeria currently lags far behind
on indices that measure national educational progress, ranking behind
countries like Ghana and South Africa. That alone should propel us to be
better, working on various aspects of our teaching methods to promote
independent thinking and stimulate creativity.
Happy 2016, Dear Reader!
Source:Punch News
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