Related:  Education in Crisis, Public Service in Peril-By Atiku Abubakar

(Protocol)

 I will like to start by expressing my sincere appreciation to JESAC for inviting me to address this occasion.  I know that we have three broad categories of education systems in our country - the indigenous system, Quranic schools, and formal European-style education.  However, my speech today will dwell exclusively on the latter.

Why Education?

Education, as some of you know, has been a subject very much after my heart, even before I went into politics. By God’s grace, I have over the years awarded numerous scholarships and bursaries to people across the length and breadth of the country to help them complete various levels of education. I have also helped to build schools and academic institutions, including the highly regarded ABTI Academy and the American University of Nigeria, Yola.

It may at this juncture be germane to pose the question of what I gain by being an almost fanatical supporter of education. Well, the simple answer is that I consider education as part of a person’s human rights. In fact, the Declaration of the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) which was made in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990 stated clearly in Article 1 that every person – child, Youth and Adult – shall be entitled to benefit from educational opportunities designed to meet their basic needs.

I also believe very strongly that education not only benefits the person being educated but also the society at large. Education also improves the productivity of individuals. Researchers have, in fact, found that schooling not only leads to the self- empowerment of individuals. It enables them to make better informed decisions, including on issues concerning their health. It also makes them more active participants in the democratic process.

Based on the above, it is easy to see that an investment in education is not only an investment in human capital development but also a worthy investment in the society and its future.

The Crisis in our Education Sector

Though Western-style education came with the Christian missionaries only in the mid-nineteenth century, by the 1950s, the country had developed a three-tiered system of primary, secondary, and higher education.

By the time of political independence in 1960, Nigeria had gone through a decade of exceptional educational growth.  In the North for instance, primary school enrolments went from 66,000 in 1947 to 206,000 in 1957. In the West, it grew from 240,000 to 983,000 in the same period, and in the East from 320,000 to 1,209,000.

Secondary level enrolments went from 10,000 for the country as a whole in 1947 to 36,000 in 1957 – with, of course, some regional variations.

It is remarkable that despite the growth in education during this period, the graduates of these institutions were very high quality, perhaps comparable to what you got anywhere in the world. This growth in quantity and quality continued until the early 1980s, when the collapse in oil prices led to the introduction of Structural Adjustment Programme, which in turn led to sharp reductions in spending on education.

As economic hardship began to seriously undermine many sectors of our society - with teachers’ salaries often unpaid for months, and university lecturers serially on strike - the quality of our education, nosedived. The gains achieved over the years in literacy rate also virtually disappeared.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates more vividly the embarrassing decline in the standard of education than the increasing rate of failure at the National Examination Council (NECO) examinations. For instance, in November/December 2009 only 1.8 per cent of the candidates who sat for the examination passed with five credits and above, including English and Mathematics – the necessary requirement for gaining admission into university.

 The poor performance has continued as evidenced in the recently released figures by NECO for the June/July Senior School Certificate Examination (SSCE). We have in fact reached a point where most of the products of our current education system struggle to write simple correct sentences.

This level of embarrassing decline in the quality of our education must not be allowed to continue. Unless the crisis in our education system is urgently addressed, our hope of becoming a developed country in the near future will remain a pipe dream.  

Our Education Policy

The key goal of our education policy should be to ensure that Nigerians, both children, youth and adults, are given access to quality education.  This will not only effectively empower them, but will also adequately help the country to meet its current and future human resource needs.

One of the fundamental premises of this policy is that inadequate funding remains a major factor, though by no means the only problem, of the education sector.  There is no doubt that the education sector is grossly under-funded.

Allocations to the sector has been fluctuating between  5.9 per cent in 1999 to 13 per cent in 2008 – compared with 26 per cent in Ghana,  21 per cent in Botswana and 22 per cent in Namibia. This ugly trend must be reversed so that education is adequately funded with a goal of reaching the UNESCO standard of 26 per cent within a short period of time.

I also believe that the decay in infrastructures at all levels of our education system– primary, secondary and tertiary – must be urgently addressed if we are serious about stemming the crisis in that sector.

Short and Long Term Components of Our Policy

Short Term

Our education policy has to have both short term and medium term components. In the short term, the priorities of the policy must include:

• Putting in place a policy, under which it will be the primary responsibility of the government to provide qualitative education to individuals up to the age of 16. 
• Setting up skills acquisition centres with a City & Guilds-type of certification.

Under this scheme, the government would train a minimum of 100,000 artisans per annum and encourage unemployed graduates to embrace it as a re-training programme.

• Re-defining the federal government’s role in education to make it a more effective regulator and enforcer of standards.
• Ensuring funding for education of not less than 26% of national budget, in line with UNESCO recommendation.
• Instituting a scholarship scheme for bright and indigent students across the country.

Medium term

In the medium term, a key measure will be to institute a 3G partnership scheme.

 Under the scheme the responsibility for education at various levels will be shared between the federal government, the states, local governments and the private sector.

Some of the objectives of the policy in the medium term will include:

• To empower the various levels of government such that primary education will be the responsibility of local governments and the private sector while secondary education will be the responsibility of both state governments and the private sector.

Under this plan, the federal government will gradually return the higher institutions it currently owns, including universities, to either state governments or trustees – with, of course, corresponding resources to run them. 

The Federal Government will, however, own one university in each of the six geopolitical zones to serve as centres of excellence.

• To embark on quality teacher training and re-training programmes
• To encourage greater interaction between our educational institutions and the private sector so that our graduates will be better tailored to meet the human resource needs of the economy.

Greater interaction will also ensure that innovations and applied researches at our educational institutions will be more easily patented and commercialised by the private sector.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is true that our education sector – just like most sectors of our society – faces monumental challenges.  However, I believe strongly that all hope is not lost. With a committed leadership and the right roadmap, this crisis can be overcome and our education will reclaim its lost glory.

With all humility, I believe that my proposals will be a very effective way of reversing the cancerous rot in our education system.