Education
is very costly and quality education is even more expensive. Our people
certainly know better when they say: “If you think education is too
expensive, then try ignorance.” Anyone with a modicum of intellectual
capacity would not need further explanation as to the direct connection
between national wellbeing and the quality of education in place.
It is no accident that all the
successful countries of the world today are those that have invested
heavily in the education of their children while the most underdeveloped
ones are those with the lowest per capital investment in education and,
sadly, Nigeria is one of them.
I must confess my embarrassment by the
present Academic Staff Union of Universities strike which has seen our
campuses shutdown for weeks with no hope in sight for immediate
resolution. The case of ASUU is an old one; but for a willful disregard
of scholarship, the last thing anyone who has the interest of the nation
at heart would like to
see is the closure of schools, the real source
of energy for the eventual development of the country from a backward
import-consuming society to one that can sustain herself with her own
resources.
If ASUU has proved in any way unwilling
to bend on its demands, the rational expectation should be that the
government will voluntarily meet them at the middle and then seek some
beneficial way forward. Unfortunately, any hope of a mature and
altruistic approach to the problem diminished last week when the
Minister of Finance, the de facto but unelected Prime Minster of this
administration, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, announced that the government cannot
afford to meet the N92 billion being demanded by ASUU as the minimum
requirement for the termination of the ongoing strike.
To uneducated Nigerians, the figures she
quoted would sound too much, thereby painting the academic union in a
bad light. But for those who are educated enough, they certainly know
that no amount is too much to be invested in the education of the
nation’s youths who are indeed the future of the country. The
opportunity cost of massive investment in education is the promotion of
massive ignorance, poverty and societal underdevelopment.
My little surprise is occasioned by the
fact Dr. Okonjo-Iweala is a beneficiary of some of the best education
money can buy. As a Harvard educated lady, I need not remind her that
the figure she has quoted fiendishly to scare Nigerians will clearly
pale into nothing when compared to what is poured into Harvard alone
every year by way of endowment and research grants. As a beneficiary of
Harvard’s esteemed education, I cannot but personally feel ashamed that
anyone who has seen the way other nations have invested and are still
investing in education could stand up and say that too much is being
invested in our youths.
If indeed it is that meagre N92 billion
that is needed to bring back our campuses to some degree of
functionality, then we should all be ashamed that we have opted for
ignorance as a nation because education is “too expensive”. My
understanding of the situation on ground is that we actually need to
spend multiples of that sums annually if we are to minimally get near
what universities should be. It is Economics 101 that in no time we
shall be reaping bountiful results in such investments in the form a
better society peopled by knowledgeable citizens.
I am stunned that we are not bothered
that we are lagging behind in all fields of modern endeavours except in
the crude politics of stealing the little that is available and venting
our hopelessness through disgraceful actions like the internal
deportation of fellow citizens.
It is no longer a secret that the
nation’s education system is in deep crisis: There are no supporting
environments for serious learning. From primary to secondary up to the
tertiary levels, what we are operating are ill-equipped and badly
staffed institutions churning out poorly educated graduates who are
wholly incapable of performing at their expected levels of skills and
competencies. There may be pockets of excellence here and there but the
reality is that no nation can develop under such an extremely variegated
level of competency disparities. We must develop a mass of educated
people who would assume the inevitable responsibility of
nation-building.
The other day, Comrade Oshiomhole
paraded on TV a primary school teacher in Edo State with over 20 years
of teaching experience who couldn’t read a text in English! She has been
“teaching” children over the years and one can only imagine the idiocy
and misinformation that she must have propagated all along. Authorities
must have noticed her incompetence but because this is Nigeria where
anything goes, they kept her and she probably enjoyed undeserved
promotions. It must however be stressed that she is just the tip of a
huge iceberg.
All across the nation’s life, be it in
the academic or other professions, there are quacks everywhere. There
are people who claim they have higher university degrees but cannot read
a document in English or write anything worth reading. Even on
campuses, there are people who have managed to ‘ride the system’ to
become “professors” even if, for all intents and purposes, they are
barely literate. You will never read them anywhere they cannot go
anywhere outside their campuses but they thrive all the same and society
erroneously applauds them. Greet them without the prefix “Dr” or
“Prof”, you are in trouble. Their students are subjected to all sorts
of anti-intellectual abuses.
The greater disaster however is the
emerging reality that a whole generation of Nigerian graduates may not
be able to compete with their peers who were educated elsewhere because
the government could not make available the money needed to revamp the
universities while it has so much to waste on hedonistic projects that
only soothe their egos or facilitate their perpetuation in office. I
think both ASUU and the government must confront the reality of a doomed
nation occasioned by inadequate education funding, incessant school
closures and disdain for scholarship.
My wish is that the union should rise
above the obvious short-sightedness and greed of those in power and take
the patriotic road by tactically calling off the strike because it is
obvious that government does not have the capacity to see the ultimate
outcome of their policy that sees education as “too expensive.” They
don’t understand or simply cannot. But we all know that, compared to the
oil subsidy loot, N92 billion is just mere peanuts.
by Mike Ikhariale
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