The most frightening thing about Nigeria’s future?

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children – Nelson Mandela.

One of the most disturbing failures of the regime of the president, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), is its attitude toward the education of Nigeria’s children. There’s been so much talk without action and retrogression in place of progress. I have two immediate prompts for this intervention.

The first is former President Goodluck Jonathan’s position at the opening of the Bayelsa state education summit on Monday. Delivering his keynote address at the event, Jonathan suggested that the most important panacea to Nigeria’s rising insecurity is mixing western education with the Qur’anic education that some children receive in the north. He explained that this was the philosophy behind his administration’s Almajiri school programme and that such policies would affect the psychology of children positively. Jonathan also said that “to develop a people, it must be based on education. The ICT revolution is the one you can’t forget, and our primary and secondary schools must be fully involved…”

On Tuesday, President Buhari was quoted as saying that Nigeria’s future depends on science and technology. A statement issued by his special adviser on media and publicity said Buhari told recipients of the Nigerian national order of merit award “…to serve as beacons of hope and aspiration for the younger generation of Nigerians, reminding them that our survival and collective future as a nation ultimately rests on our being active participants in global developmental efforts, especially in science and technology.”

Before dwelling on Buhari, since he is the one with whom Nigeria is currently concerned, we should dispense with Jonathan’s take. And the main thing to say here is that Nigerian leaders must realise some of the attendant characteristics of the Almajiri situation are now manifest in other parts of the country. Underaged children now litter the streets in Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Kwara, and other places begging for alms. Just as well, lines of children now queue up at parties waiting to grab remnants of foods and drinks. These children will vent anger and unleash vengeance on this society soon unless something is done. But that is just by the way.

As for the president, one must start by registering how heart-warming it is that he realises the importance of science and technology in the present and future of the world. But the question is: what is the president doing about it? Does he just want to rely on beneficiaries of national awards to encourage the young ones? And after the encouragement, what happens? There’s a strong sense that the president doesn’t really understand what’s at stake and that a big national effort is needed to make these dreams come true.

Here, an example will suffice. Once, after a conversation with President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea, former President Barack Obama expressed his concern about the United States of America’s backwardness in maths and science. Then, American students reportedly ranked 25th and 21st in those subjects respectively. He thought that this would put the US at a disadvantage when it came to important things like medicine, energy, and security and did something about it.

According to November 23, 2009, CNN report, Obama introduced ‘The Educate to Innovate Campaign’ which sought to bring teachers, parents, businesses, and even the Sesame Street gang together to promote maths and science learning. At the time, the private sector was said to have committed $260 million to the campaign, while corporate heavyweights like Intel, Xerox, Kodak, and Time Warner Cable had signed on. Specific programmes in the campaign included “a two-year initiative on Sesame Street to teach kids about maths and science, an after-school programme focusing on robotics and a national ‘lab’ day to provide millions of students with hands-on scientific learning”.

Obama said further that children will “have the chance to build and create, and maybe destroy just a little bit to learn the joy of making things, rather than just consuming things.” In addition, the White House planned to hold an annual science fair to publicise the top achievements of scientists as an incentive for children. Now, that is how to galvanise national action for change. But Buhari’s default deflection on this important factor to Nigeria’s progress is to refer you to the constitution and the fact that responsibility for primary and secondary education belongs to the state and local governments.

Of course, he is right but does the president understand that the failure of states on these fronts reflects on his overall performance? Now that he is saying that the future of the country depends on science and technology for instance, does that future depend on tertiary education, which the federal government superintends, or just a few products of the unity secondary schools managed by the federal government? In any case, what is the state of these federal government-owned institutions? Are they better managed than state schools? The answer is no!

While making this excuse, the president does not seem to realise that the country is in a state of emergency. That was something former President Olusegun Obasanjo saw over a decade ago when he would invite stakeholders from all over the country to discussions on education, health, and other such issues. Leadership in this century is a constellation of thoughts rather than buck-passing and shirking of responsibilities. The president must understand this. And the time to understand this for Nigeria is now when everything that can be possibly wrong with education is going south.

First, talk about the quality of teachers’ education and teachers that Nigeria produces. For decades now, those who become teachers are those unable to get into other courses. As a matter of fact, education courses in most tertiary institutions have become dumping grounds with the lowest and most ridiculous cut-off marks and entry requirements! Just as Nigeria seems to have eliminated teachers’ training colleges which those inclined to teach deliberately chose to attend instead of secondary school in those days. This may be the only country striving for greatness where teachers are either third-class brains or first- and second-class thinkers who have nothing else to do!

And then to make it worse, these reluctant teachers almost always remain poorly paid, unsupervised and unmotivated, hence the burden of loads of children going to school without learning! Add that to the millions of children of school age, which the United Nations Children’s Education Fund says is the highest in the world. So, you have millions of children roaming the streets with access to all sorts of psychoactive substances, and a nation sitting on a keg of gunpowder, far from the joy and comfort that science and technology afford people elsewhere.

The picture gets grimmer when a 2022 report on the UNICEF website informs that an estimated 35% of Nigerian children who attend primary school do not attend secondary school. In many instances recently, children who go to school get abducted by terrorists. Almost in all instances, the government abandons these innocent ones until their parents mobilise and pay ransom to these criminals. Yet, this same government is dreaming up a technological revolution to be championed by children it doesn’t care for!

But that is not all. What happens to children who complete and pass their secondary school certificate examinations. Does the county ever make adequate preparations for them? In 2021, the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board said 1,223,962 candidates registered for its Unified Matriculations Examinations into universities, polytechnics, monotechnics, and colleges of education. It also had 63, 586 direct entry candidates. Of these 1, 286,548 prospects, Nigeria’s 518 higher institutions take just about 520,000 though there are claims to a capacity of about 900,000 higher education spaces.

Assuming without conceding that the latter is the case, Nigeria would still have a massive 400,000 young people unable to access higher education in 2021 though they were qualified. The question to then ask is what plan do we have for this pool of young, agile, and active youths? Is there any deliberate way the country engages them, gives them hope, and free their minds from the manipulations of perpetrators of evil who are all over town?

Then again, there is the fact that very few of those who attend higher institutions in Nigeria aim for any impactful learning. Apart from the widely accepted fact that Nigeria’s educational curricula are outdated and static, this society places more value on the certificates, which people gain after their studies than on what they learn. As a result, many students will do anything to attain their degrees. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for the country, there are a plethora of misfits who have found their ways into the teaching cadre in universities. These ones, for a mess of pottage, sacrifice the integrity of scholarship and hand it over to the highest bidder. So, we have a crowd of graduates without knowledge or character.

This also results from the failure to understand that not everyone is endowed with the capacity for formal higher education. It is the reason we have played down the importance of vocational education such that artisans are either old and tired hands or migrants from neighbouring countries. The narcissist spirit of certificate acquisition has caused us to relegate the substance of education. So, even though Nigeria’s 2022 budget makes a significant 7.2% (still a far cry from the 15-20 international recommendation) allocation to education, there are so many questions to ask President Buhari about his dream for Nigeria.

These questions include: how is Nigeria preparing those who will lead us into the bright future of science and technology? How many technical and science-oriented schools have been established since 2015? What is the status of the laboratories in our schools? Where are the teachers who will teach science and technology in the context of appallingly poor pay for teachers? What innovations has his science and technology minister, Ogbonnaya Onu, engendered in this ministry? Or will all the future of this country rest on the passive dreams of men?

Adedokun can be reached on Twitter @niranadedokun