Automatic employment to first-class graduates will worsen Nigeria’s dwindling education system -By Ambali Abdulkabeer

During a plenary on Wednesday last week, a member of the House of Representatives by the name of Emeka Chinedu Martins moved a motion titled ‘Need to Grant Automatic Employment to First Class Graduates’ meaning that all first-class graduates in Nigeria should be given automatic employment. He stressed that the move would minimize the rate at which intelligent graduates troop out of the country on daily basis in search of better opportunities abroad.

He also argued that Nigerians would be discouraged from seeking admission into universities abroad in the hope of getting decently paying jobs upon their graduation. Much as fabulous as this motion appears on the surface, it will lead to total collapse of Nigeria’s already battered university education. Here is why.

It is a simple fact that university education in Nigeria has changed from being a source of automatic access to decent jobs. In the past, people with university degrees were begged to take up well-paying jobs right from their time in schools. Upon graduation, opportunities surfaced in numbers because there were already places in both government and private institutions in need of their priceless knowledge and skills. In Nigeria today, given the terribly saturated labour market due to government’s continued irresponsibility, graduates, including those with first class, roam the streets in search of good jobs that are not available.

This reality is worsened by the culture of ‘job sale’ which affords well-to-do individuals and politicians the illicit opportunity to buy jobs for their children and those of their mistresses, usually at the expense of brilliant but poor graduates. As this continues to drive the philosophy of employment in Nigeria’s public and private institutions, graduates seek chances elsewhere because they no longer believe in the system.

Should this motion transmogrify into law, the entire university system will completely pass as where everything goes only for students to graduate with any class of their choice. In other words, one of the dangers of the thoughtless move is that the university certificates will become ruthlessly commodified. Students that know their way will graduate from settling lecturers for good grades to going at any length to secure a class they don’t deserve, thereby rendering university education more irrelevant than it has been.

Consequently, recruiting empty-headed first-class graduates into severally sensitive government institutions means that the country will be in more disaster. After all, it’s no longer news that Nigeria is notorious for the culture of placing wrong hands in right places or vice versa. That’s why both federal and state civil service systems are rife with people that constitute a threat to the progress of the country.

Automatic employment to first-class graduates, needless to say, isn’t a bad idea at all, but that is in a country with serious, trustworthy and top-class university education system. Nigeria’s university system is grounded in systemic crises ranging from corruption, paucity of human and material resources and others. This is manifest in the ongoing closure of universities as a result of ASUU strike emanating from government’s poverty of sincerity on public education and lack of interest in the welfare of lecturers.

In lieu of giving automatic employment to first-class graduates, the government should be strongly advised to start fixing our dwindling education system first. They should start placing a premium on genuine education as the foundation to the prosperity the country urgently demands. The fixing should begin with a cosmopolitan review of university curriculum in order to make our university system 21st century–sensitive.

It won’t be a bad idea also for the government to learn from the education systems of developed countries of the world while working tirelessly and sincerely to strike an innocuous balance between our reality and what our education system deserves to be globally competitive. A university education that graduates cannot leverage to live a decently meaningful life is an embarrassment, if truth be told.

It is crucial that government cease being wasteful and corrupt. Huge amount of money diverted to fund irrelevant projects such as elections should rather be used to rijig our deteriorating education system. Nothing is as more depressing as the fact that most Nigerians don’t have a smidgen of belief in the ability of the county to make their dreams a reality. That is why they prefer staying in countries other than Nigeria.

On a final note, what kind of illogical plan deems a crop more important than the soil that produces it? This question analogically says a lot about the thoughtlessly greedy perspectives of our leaders who are supposed to lead us in the match to make our education system enviable and standard.