Top economic stakeholders have expressed grave concern over the nation’s educational sector and concluded that the sector has indeed collapsed.
In a situation where over 70 percent of Nigerian graduates are unemployable and no Nigerian university featured in the world’s best 500 universities. Even in the African continent, the best Nigerian university trail universities in some countries like Kenya, South Africa and Ghana only goes to show that ‘our education has collapsed’.
The stakeholders who are saddened that the Federal Government have consistently failed to tackle the issues in education especially the lingering industrail action by Universities lecturers that have for over six weeks running crippled academic activities in our citadel of learning
‘It is shameful and appalling that the largest oil producer in Africa and the sixth in the world would find itself in this mess. We cannot even boast of any strong sector, this is shameful’, they regretted.
Speaking separately to BusinessDay, they all condemned the present situation ‘we find ourselves and emphasized that no nation can develop without strong educational base’.
Maurice Onyiriuka, a lecturer at Imo State University, Owerri who was not particular, blamed the poor governance of various governments over time. ‘The problem was that we had used people who were not successful in their private lives to run important aspects of the nation’.
In his assessment, Onyiriuka recalled that before now, ‘to be an undergraduate conferred a distinctive status on a person. University undergraduates were cultured and refined intellectuals in making. But all that is no more.
He attributed the present decay in the education sector to underfunding of universities.
‘This reduction in government financial commitment to the institutions marked the threshold of a major crisis which was the forerunner of many others that have today unbearably overwhelmed the entire system’.
He believed that the problem was further aggravated by the anti-intellectual posture of the governments, mismanagement of the economy and pervasive corruption which was almost elevated to the realm of national value.
Today, the compelling reality of the situation, according to Onyiriuka, is that the entire system is bogged down in a state of morass that some stakeholders are asking that a state of emergency be declared.
On his part Babatunde Folami, an educationist in Lagos said it is regrettable that the academic attainments are judged to be well below international standards, for reasons which are quite obvious.
More worrisome is the moral tone in the institutions which is a cause for concern, Folami said.
The educationist agreed with Onyiriuka that the university system has been starved of funds.
‘It is an unfair system to have a lecturer so poorly paid, paid even less than the graduate he produced. At a time, a lecturer had a take home pay of less than can hardly take them home again while the student he produced that got a job in a bank started with a take home pay of about N120, 000.
Folami said what is obtainable is poor funding to the extent that the university staffs are poorly paid, and in this condition universities would only secure mediocre, average brains, those in the lower division while people in upper division and first class were absorbed by the private sector.
He recalled that in his own days the bright chaps went to the university and average chaps went to the private sector. So we really need to increase the conditions of service of our university staff in order to bring in the brains, he said.
All the speakers called for adequate attention by all stakeholders to be given to the education sector if the nation must reverse the decadence in the sector considered as backbone of the economy.
Folami called on the private universities which seem to be heading in the right direction to sustain the tempo and disallow the virus of decadence from affecting them.
KELECHI EWUZIE
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