Nigeria’s Dying Education Sector, A Call For Sympathy -By Usama Abdullahi

Following JAMB’s announcement of this year’s cut-off marks for public universities, some people have taken to the media to poke fun at the board as well disparage the entire country for the continued decay in its education sector. I’m sure what informed the idea of reducing the cutoff marks to the minimum of 140, is the terrible performance of the students. Even though this reduction calls for sympathy for the nation, yet those people have gotten it wrong by deriding the board and gloating over the students’ poor performance. 

We cannot get it right when we only decide to laugh off this dysfunctional system. Obviously, we are experiencing an embarrassing failure in our education sector, which will take us long before recovering. Some believe that students of nowadays don’t read hard. And that they usually “cheat” their way to the tertiary institutions. This could be true to some certain ends. While I agree with that, I also agree that the teachers are quite blameworthy too. 

It would be a grave injustice to attribute the failures of the students to their teachers. But there’s a point we all must consider before leaping to conclude that the blame lies with the students alone. Like I have said earlier, students tend to do worse beyond what their parents and teachers expect today, thanks to the advent of TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook reel among other misleading apps. Yet the parents and teachers are partly the causes of such poor performances. Reason is some teachers don’t deserve to teach because they are either not properly trained or unfit for the teaching profession.

Many of them lack teaching methods. While some of them just got themselves into the profession accidentally. Whenever you hear of accidental teachers, we have a number of them at our public and private schools. They don’t teach because they want to transform the students, but because of the chicken feed they usually take home as salaries.

When you go to those schools being run by such unqualified teachers, you would see them wear fancy clothes and flaunt their expensive phones before their students and promote unlawful student-teacher relationships. Unknowingly, such kind of prodigal and nasty attitude helps compromise the already sensitive students. The problem is the students would be seen emulating what they saw those teachers doing. Within the blink of an eye, the students would be wild and tough to tame. 

On the hand, most of our parents seem to exhibit a kind of devil-may-care attitude toward the upbringing of the children. They mollycoddle their children to the extent that they begin to forgive and forget all what the children do, be it good or bad. Well, this type of parental neglect is another major cause of the backwardness of the children at school and in the society. Because when they get home, the parents won’t care to ask them about their studies, nor find out how they’re really performing.

When they’re invited for PTA meetings to discuss important things and chart the way out to help improve their children’s education standard, they barely attend or they give out frivolous excuses for their irresponsibility. These are the things parents need to correct in order to prevent their children from descending so low or getting petty scores in their results. 

However, the government too contribute woefully to the retrogradation of our education sector. It’s not just saddening but painful that we’re cruelly ruled by people who are apparently unconcerned on what become of the nation. They are only good at forcing half-baked policies on the regular citizens, which will only favour them and their families. 

Looking at the precarious state of our public varsities, plus the long but unresolved struggle with ASUU, you will get to understand that this government is doing next to nothing to refine our rotten education sector. We should, instead of making noise or taunting the students for their low performances, grieve, assist in our own little ways and hope for the best.