Hello. Here is an interesting piece about the falling standards or should I say low quality of graduates from our tertiary institutions, by Omojuwa com. Read and enjoy. Who cares about education in Nigeria? punchng/opinion/who-cares-about-education-in-nigeria/AUGUST 7, 2013 BY JAPHETH OMOJUWA 4 COMMENTS There are two major ways to keep a society down: keep the majority poor and keep their children away from striking that Nigerians asked for democracy and got it but the things we did not get and have yet to get from our oppressors are just as important as society may look like a free one but can one say Nigerians are free? How free is a society where children either schools, at best, in certain cases or even choose death in worst case scenarios like it is in the North-East part of the country? Over the years, we have got accustomed to closed universities we have come to expect them. The Academic Staff Union of Universities has become more synonymous lecturers are synonymous with groundbreaking researches. commonplace researches before we even talk about breaking knows that democracy and the freedom that comes with it is too risky to be left in the hands of a people with knowledge, so the powers-that-be have ensured Nigerians are as far from acquiring knowledge as they are from attaining prosperity. destruction. Forget about universities; worded speeches every Children’s Day; instead, always remember this: class wants the status quo to remain. Do you know why they have their children studying outside Nigeria? It is not because they want to throw money around; it is because, of a truth, the Nigerian education system is dead and finished! What happens in our universities are barely rituals. Students mostly go to the halls, those who are early to arrive get to sit, others have to hang around, as facilities cannot hold the population of students. When the lectures hold, students are forced to “take down” notes from lecturers using notes from their own days in the universities where the lecturers who taught them lecturers. Computer programming students are spending days learning COBOL and FORTRAN, engineering equations in poorly assembled notes as there are no resources to get the tools for practical lessons. One was privileged to be at one of the most respected universities in Nigeria last May where a year student confessed he had yet to work on any computer as a student. It was all paper and pen stuff. How sad does it get? As we speak, Nigerian university students are at home. Not for holiday but home because the Academic Staff Union of Universities and the Federal Government are not done negotiating a difference that has taken almost as long as Nigeria’s 14-year pseudo ASUU went on its current strike, its polytechnic counterparts, Polytechnics, had been on same for months. Expectedly, the ASUP strike did not garner as much attention as the ASUU one because the has nation education to should help drive teaching and research in industrial development post-secondary school centres of note-taking. Nigeria has about 124 universities, a few of them just good enough for learning, the bulk of them are just beautiful gates, empty land and knowledge-deficient have focused on the development of existing ones but we secondary schools and called them universities. Since we are obsessed with quantity rather than quality, we’d rather have 100 useless and poorly oriented universities than have 24 world class ones. Mediocrity has since become our culture so where else would we have expressed it if not our supposed institutions of learning? We are paying the price and we will pay more in the coming years. Prof. Nimi Briggs, a former Vice-Chancellor of University the sometime ago that Nigerians spend as much as N160bn in two Ghanaian universities. If this is incredible to believe, rest assured we spend at least that amount in altogether every year. The Federal Government allocated N426.53bn to education in the 2013 budget. The bulk of this will go into paying the salaries of Unity School teachers and those of lecturers. Little development. We spend money for our health in India, we entertain ourselves with South Africa-provided Chinese people to build our roads, and now our students have become wanderers across Africa and the world education. More often than not, the education they get does not even come close to what used to be world-class education in Nigeria in the days of yore. Everything has since gone to the dogs. Not only do we have to deal with leaders cannot who Amanpours of this world when we had the likes of Sir Ahmadu Bello dazzle other world leaders, now we must make do with poorly funded universities where we had Nigerian leaders give blank cheques for the development of university education to other nations. Were our Gross National Intelligence Quotient per capita to be measured today, you can bet it would be less than what obtained in the days we had universities that were rich and diverse in terms of students’ population, as we had students from far and wide across the world. Is the average Nigerian graduate today anywhere as good as Independence up to even the 1980s? If four out of five Nigerian graduates are unemployed, you can bet at least three of the four unemployed are unemployable. organisations have to spend months training their new graduate they should have been put through at the university? Grammar no be our language but if we spent all our school years till year one at the university learning English, why is it that an average Nigerian graduate has as much issues speaking English as the country itself has fixing itself? Where do we go from here? First, we must know that it is not in the interest of the ruling class to fix the educational system. Educated people ask too much questions and they are likely to be able to earn more. These are two combinations because of a pack of noodles very difficult. Even if our votes start counting, what will anyone do about the hungry ones in our midst? Anyone who has issues with hunger is likely to treat that first before anything else. It then means that whoever solves that problem is likely to control the direction of the hands as to how to vote. Educated people, even if poor are smart enough to know that voting for anyone because of petty gifts are momentary decisions that could have generational impacts. We really must begin to see the challenge of education in Nigeria as teachers, lecturers and students; it is about Nigeria today, tomorrow and in the years to come. Nigeria has some 10.5 million children out of school tomorrow’s terrorists are today? - Omojuwa, a social media entrepreneur, is editor, mr.omojuwa@gmail @omojuwa.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 04:54:52 +0000
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