“By 2020, we may have a significant population of highly trained, skilled and motivated criminals.” – Obiageli Ezekwesili, 2006.
In June 2006, Oby Ezekwesili was appointed Nigeria’s minister of Education. By October, she had comprehensively diagnosed the sector, making mind-boggling discoveries and arriving at workable conclusions. During a presidential forum on the sector, she made the remark that serves as this essay’s opening line. Then we hadn’t yet been ushered into the harvest of corpses and blood in sole control of which Boko Haram is. We had not started witnessing the multimillion dollar business side of large-scale kidnapping, the type common in Nigeria’s South. Today, we are still seven years shy of 2020, but every element of that projection is resident with us now. And given the visible unwillingness of the present government to pursue a complete overhaul of Nigeria’s education sector, one can only predict worse outcomes as we near 2020. We will be successfully flooding our towns and villages with a significant proportion of “highly trained, skilled and motivated criminals.”
What dominated Oby’s time as education minister was “Privatization of Unity Schools”. The powerful interests in the sector – and like Patrick Doyle’s Dettol germs, they are everywhere, holding every aspect of our national life by the jugular – unleashed a media war on her quest for genuine reforms, while drowning the voice of reason which her profound diagnosis of the sector represented. Parents, especially those whose wards were in the Unity Schools, did not even hear what she was saying, neither did the press. All they heard was privatization, even when the real deal was the proposition of Public Private Partnership (PPP) model for restoring efficient management of Unity Schools for improved academic achievements and for return of Federal Ministry of Education to nationwide policy and regulatory competence.
While those voices competed for decibels, the public forgot to take a peek into the antecedents of the person behind the reforms, her stand on corruption over the years, her previous position before she was appointed Minister of Solid Minerals and later Education, the billions she saved the government from Public Procurement and contracts, and the unlikelihood of mischief given her past; a past defined by uprightness. It wasn’t that her past of transparent government dealings made her unlikely to derail in the future. Hers was a clear case of sound reason. Even if we didn’t want to gamble with the assumption of infallibility, we could have bothered to study her diagnosis.
What did Oby say? During the presidential forum mentioned earlier, she observed amongst other troubling facts that:
Nigeria had, as at 2006, 11000 Secondary Schools, out of which just 102 – 0.9% – were Unity Schools (or what you call Federal Government Colleges).
In other words, less than 1 per cent of the schools were Unity Schools.
Between year 2000 and 2004, only about 23.37% of students who wrote SSCE could make 5 credits, including English and Mathematics.
Between 1999 and 2004, 4.4m candidates sought admission into Nigeria’s tertiary institutions, and only about 0.4m –about 9% – got admitted. 4.0m were rejected. That is 91% rejection rate.
The population of our youths rejected by the tertiary institutions represented an alarming reality, especially as countries like Singapore had a total population, then, of 4.4m. Denmark had 5.4m, Kuwait,2.3m, Switzerland, 7.4m, Honk Kong, 6.8m, UAE, 0.8m, Sweden, 9m, etc. It meant that a proportion of Nigerians that represented whole countries were unable to obtain tertiary education.
The combined capacities of our educational infrastructure could not accommodate our huge population.
The picture painted above is still as stark today as it was in 2006. We haven’t moved an inch from there. Last year, only 38.81% of those who wrote WAEC SSCE passed. The year before, 2011, only 30.91% of those who wrote the exam passed. Our progress has been too gradual, too slow, for a nation in need of massive growth in human capital. And yet we can’t even be sure of this progress since we haven’t discounted the proportion of the passes which were made possible by ‘Special Centres’ and complicit teachers, invigilators, parents and students in examination malpractice.
With crises like this, the first direction Nigerians will want to point at will be funding. In fact, education administrators are the first to shout it. Oby Ezekwesili doesn’t belong to that school of thought that presumes problems are solved once money is thrown at them. She had declared at same forum, “But this crisis is not all about funding!”
And then she went ahead with more disturbing proofs:
Between year 2000 and 2006, a total sum of N622.62billion was allocated to the education sector.
Within the period under review, funding of education sector was increasing by an average of N23.95b annually while academic performance of students was taking a downward slide.
As funding increased, 76.63% of those who wrote WAEC between 2000 to 2004 failed.
But the Unity Schools presented a more hopeless situation. Oby couldn’t reconcile the facts below:
Between 2000 and 2004, 85% of Unity School students failed WAEC. In fact, as much as 61% of them scored between 0 and 9%!.
The average success rate for Unity Schools in NECO between 2000 and 2006 was just 38%.
NECO ranked the top 100 schools in Nigeria between 2000 and 2006 (in terms of performance) and the first Unity School was 54th. The School, surprisingly, wasn’t Kings College or Queens College. It was FGC, Ikole Ekiti.
Of the total 27,227 staff strength of the Federal Ministry of Education, Unity Schools took 23,110, that is 84.8%. Meanwhile, Unity Schools only accounted for 122,000 students. There were other 30.2million students nationwide to be catered for.
Between 2000 and 2006, a total of N5.5b was appropriated to Federal Ministry of Education headquarters for capital projects while N18.7b was allocated to the Unity Schools for the same purpose.
The Unity Schools were –and still are – simply drain pipes to Nigeria’s treasury. They have become the subsidy of the education sector, sustaining the greed and avarice of a rapacious few. Dr Ezekwesili saw this clearly, and dared to take a new management approach.
She particularly observed that the Federal Ministry of Education was a policy maker, and therefore should not be a micro-manager. She wanted the ministry to devolve and delegate implementation functions to implementers outside of the bureaucracy, instead of having it prescribe all details of programs, services and administration.
That was the point all hell was let loose. They unleashed the media war on her. The hoopla was generated by the key beneficiaries of the old order(which still subsists, anyway), and then attracted the attention of even those who didn’t know the issues at stake. Their shouts didn’t stop her. Time did. For she left for the World Bank in May of 2007 as the administration she served was exhausting its tenure. She was only the Education Minister for one year, a time too short for her reforms to be pushed beyond reversal. Yet those diagnoses she made of the ministry, and the prescriptions she gave, still remain unsurpassed.
Other ministers since she left have been playing by the Nigerian rules: do not rock the boat! They have been advocates of funding and increment in the number of Universities. And there have been both, yet we haven’t still been able to educate the majority of our people, neither have the educated been able to compete with their contemporaries in the world. Nothing has changed. Nothing will.
If we would get our education right, we have just two options left: the Ezekwsili reforms option, or the outright probe, prosecution and jailing of all the key players in the education Ministry since, at least, the days of Babangida.
It’s up to those in the right positions now to choose the adequate prescription for the cure of the ills of our education sector or allow us continue on this path of collective illiteracy.
ekekeee
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