After I had read the sub-chapter in Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa entitled "Education for Underdevelopment" where the author contended that the pattern of education which Europe bequeathed to Africa was meant to be, not an agent of development, but of further impoverishment and underdevelopment of Africa, I had seriously begun to critically examine that assertion vis-à-vis the system of education in Nigeria. I had not concluded my investigations when again I stumbled upon yet another classic, Rene Dumont's False Start in Africa. Dumont was a French professor of agronomy, but he was not an armchair professor; he was a thorough and committed field worker who dedicated his life to research on rural development in Third World economies. Somewhere in that discourse, Dumont had made a striking remark that "if your sister goes to school, you will have nothing to eat but ball-point pen." Immediately my mind went back to Rodney, and I had no doubt in my mind that the pattern of education we inherited from our European overlords was indeed education for underdevelopment; a pattern of education that gives its recipient a false sense of importance, a false feeling of being above all else, and, worst of all, a feeling that his rightful place is in a cosy, air-conditioned office, with fat salary attached, a company-paid apartment, a chauffeur-driven car, and other sundry privileges.
Literally, the educated Nigerian is like the proverbial "Eze ukwu eru ala" (a king whose feet do not touch the ground). He seems to feel that he has been elevated to a position where he can no longer relate at par with his kith and kin. In other words, he has been distanced from his roots. He feels he has no business with farming, even if he has studied agricultural science or any of its numerous allied disciplines in the higher institution. If at all he draws close, he believes that his place should be that of a supervisor shouting orders to local peasant farmers who are doomed to do the "dirty" aspects of the job. No wonder all the government policies on agriculture since independence have failed abysmally, from the various Agricultural Development Programmes (ADPs) through Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) to Directorate for Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI).
That feeling has also caught up with our secondary school students, many of whom now detest even the thought of being called sons and daughters of farmers. A visit to the rural villages of Nigeria will prove this point beyond doubt. Many Nigerian students stop going to the farm as soon as they enter secondary school because they think they are too big to go to the farm, and Nigeria continues to import most of its staples from overseas. But as Prof Onwuka Njoku, a leading economic historian of the 21st century, has observed, "external food dependence is the most pernicious form of national insecurity." It is easy to imagine how vulnerable Nigeria could be in a situation of a global warfare, considering Obafemi Awolowo's postulation that "hunger is a legitimate weapon of warfare". But that is beside the point.
Out there, graduates of Nigerian higher institutions running into hundreds of thousands are roaming the streets in search of non-existent jobs. The number continues to add up every year, and employers of labour continue to emphasise that Nigerian graduates are unemployable. Why is it so?
Between June and July every year, the Senior Secondary School Certificate Examinations conducted by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) comes to an end, and tens of thousands of young Nigerians are turned out into the streets. Usually, only a fraction of that number is lucky to go to any of the institutions of higher learning in the country, that is, if their parents can afford the prohibitive school fees. Even then, it might take many years of ordeal at the hands of the Universities Matriculation Examination (UME) organised by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) (as if there will be employment for them on graduation from college). Others not so lucky might have to roam the streets aimlessly for many years, or sometimes forever, as prostitutes, armed robbers, and other forms of social nuisances.
In the presence of the current global economic crunch, and in the spirit of the on-going re-branding Nigeria campaign, should the educational sector in Nigeria still be left the way it is? Should we not be talking about education for development rather than pure literacy education?
Just a little suggestion here. Rather than allow these young secondary school leavers to roam the streets aimlessly, their parents or guardians should send them to acquire some technical skills while they are waiting for admission into the higher institution. If admission comes within the period of training, that will be good. If it never comes, the child would have been well equipped to stand alone.
In the same vein, the government, through the Ministry of Education, could make it compulsory for every secondary school leaver to acquire a skill, say, for two or three years, before such a student could be considered for admission into a higher institution. And the emphasis should no longer be on a certificate of proficiency in such skills but on practical proof of proficiency. If this is done, it will be such that any student going into an institution of higher learning will already have a focus and will be sufficiently equipped to support him or herself through school by putting his or her skill into practice, and will most likely be set for self-employment after graduation rather than hoping on non-existent government jobs. This too is a step towards the industrialisation of Nigeria.
If education in Nigeria would be development-oriented in the nearest future, then the above must be done urgently. Unless and until it is done, institutions of higher learning in Nigeria will continue to churn out graduates who, instead of being creators of jobs and employers of labour, will come out to join the endless queues in the already overflowing Nigerian labour market, thus contributing to the unemployment and underdevelopment problems, and the Nigerian economy will be the worse for it.
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