Educational Issues
Nigeria At 61: The Education Perspective -By Efosa Taiwo
Borrowing the wisdom of the English, they say, “You don’t bring coal to Newcastle”. The last thing we need in this country is not one more school. We have our brim already. A brim with no effectiveness. A brim with no substance. A brim with no direction. That alone is enough to inform you that rather than have this brim imploded with more layers of brims, why not shift the focus to calibrating the brim for maximum effectiveness, ideal substance and notable direction?
If we count our woes as a country and still count education as part of them, then that is enough to not only describe the Nigeria of today, but depicts what future we are heading into.
61 it is today just like it was 16 some years back, the common denominator still persists: myopic and selfish leaders making distaste of the country we should ordinarily call home but here we are calling hole.
One of the indicators of a growth-minded country is always traceable to its educational system. The moment there is a freefall in that sector, then the future of the country is infallibly and palpably predictable.
For years on end, the drop in our educational system has not only been conspicuous but disturbing only for our leaders to perpetually turn deaf ears to the cries reverberating the sector, making their hands rather busy plundering the economy in a bid to have their kith and kin jetted abroad to escape a system they contributed to its disgust.
The poor masses are then left to toil to send their children to the mess of schools they have bequeathed to us, with a process that makes admission a prayer-request for a future the government has pillaged away already, such that these young Nigerians come out of school, and it is almost as though those years in the classrooms, chasing lecturers, tearing foolscap sheets, checking portals, going hungry to bed, burning midnight candles, all those years were painfully a waste. Hence, they have to start from the scratch, and build without any form of support whatsoever for ingenuity, creativity and talent – human resources left to waste where other countries would pay to have them.
There is also the self-sabotage we are bringing on ourselves from the misconception of our leaders, deluding themselves thinking they are tricking us to believe that they are putting in efforts to resuscitate the “dead” educational system in the country. Almost every now and then, you hear the mooting of a bill in the National Assembly, proposing an establishment of a tertiary institution in the country. It is almost as though the only panacea our so-called leaders have to the dirt in our bin is to keep on mounting more dirt into it, such that we are now left with an overspill of the dirt, making our environment an eyesore. In other words, they keep giving us schools when we are overwhelmed with enough already.
Borrowing the wisdom of the English, they say, “You don’t bring coal to Newcastle”. The last thing we need in this country is not one more school. We have our brim already. A brim with no effectiveness. A brim with no substance. A brim with no direction. That alone is enough to inform you that rather than have this brim imploded with more layers of brims, why not shift the focus to calibrating the brim for maximum effectiveness, ideal substance and notable direction? Why should we even have a brim when we could have diversification to take care of the brim, contextualizing the various potential of these young ones in line with nation building, such that we have institutions expedient to groom their respective potential to give them a rewarding future, and bring pride back to the country.
Our athletes were in Tokyo and came back with a dismal report. Juxtapose our preparation with that of other countries that excelled at the Games, you would come to discover that the preparations are miles apart as a result of the fact that these countries understand the need to have potential identified from a young age, and have them stratified into the necessary institutions that refine their skills while giving them education, such that they don’t become educated alone, but also skillful to hand them a future and channel to the country value in return. That is a thinking country. That is a country that recognizes and appreciates the diversity in human resources and goes all out, providing funds to have them catered for having understood that leaders don’t make the country, rather the people do, as such when you leave them to suffer, the country suffers.
Every day we hear of young men and women jetting out of the country on scholarship this, scholarship that, to countries such as Kuwait, Indonesia, Finland to have better education acquired. That goes a long way to tell you of how much faith the people repose in our educational system having been through it and have seen that it holds no value whatsoever for them in comparison to what those abroad hold for them. It is no gainsaying that our government is abreast of this, and yet unperturbed to change the game, comfortable with the fact that we keep losing our best talents to countries around the world.
Like someone said, just like we had in the 80’s, we are currently having right now a mass exodus of Nigerians getting out of the country of which education ranks highest as the reason for such exodus. The exodus experienced back in the 80’s invariably has its role in the underdevelopment currently swirling the country, and if we are having a resurgence of such today, then 81 will be here, and maybe I will be writing this again, from “the abroad.”
