PREAMBLE
The totality of the experiences garnered, studies conducted, lessons learnt, behavioural changes initiated as a result of experience, and the skills and competences acquired to cope with tne myriads of challenges of life on earth, from the cradle to the grave, encapsulate the education of a human being. Education is ipso facto a lifelong enterprise. According to Joseph Addison, “Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy, no enemy can alienate, no despotism can enslave. At home a friend, abroad an introduction, in solitude a solace, and in society an ornament It chastens vice, it guides virtue, it gives, at once, grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage.”
The primal agent of a child’s education is the mother. In contemporary society, however, the state plays a commanding role in the education of youth from childhood to adolescence. According to Diogenes, “the foundation of every state is the education of its youth.”
Educational Values Of Government In Colonial And Pre-Independence Nigeria
The precursory seeds of western education were planted in the nineteenth century in the tropical African territory which evolved as present day Nigeria by Christian missionaries as critical components of their evangelical endeavours. They had to establish primary schools to produce indigenous missionary staff who could read and translate portions of the Bible necessary for the conversion of native pagans to the imported religion. The synergy between religious indoctrination and primary education was so compact that a mission staff could serve as a cathechist on Sunday and a teacher on Monday. The curriculum of those early mission schools were replicas of those of the missionaries’ home countries, with high premium placed on Christian doctrine and the English language
In academic quality and practical functionality many of the products of the early mission schools were superlative. Apart from excelling as devoted school teachers and church workers, they also occupied low cadre manpower positions in government offices and commercial enterprises with remarkable competence. A number of them held intellectually and professionally demanding positions with astounding efficiency. My late father, Jeremiah Okorafor, for instance, was only armed with a Catholic Mission primary six certificate when he had a spell of tutelage under British engineers of the colonial Public Works Department With this background, he rose to the position of Works Supervisor (now Town Engineer) of the Pristine Owerri County Council. In that capacity, he constructed most of the colonial roads, bridges, culverts and public buildings in the present Owerri zone which then included Ohaji, Egbema and Oguta. In 1950, he constructed WETHERELL road Owerri to decongest traffic on Douglas road. With the same primary school educational qualification, the late James Kamalu Nzerem of Naze, emerged as the Pioneer Senator from Owerri. He held the upper legislative chamber in Lagos spellbound whenever he rose to speak. Many other dignitaries in pre-independence Eastern Nigeria had similar academic backgrounds. It is therefore no untenable hyperbole to assert that many standard six certificate holders in colonial Nigeria were better functionally educated than many first degree certificate paraders in Nigeria today.
One of the functions to which the British colonial administration in Nigeria paid cardinal attention at the dawn of the twentieth century was education. The government initiated enactments to enthrone order in the near chaotic education enterprise run in the territory by diverse missionary agencies. A primary school curriculum was developed and circulated; school supervisors then designated as African Travelling Teachers, were appointed and deployed to ensure qualitative teaching and learning, and a nationally recognized end of primary education evaluation and certification process was introduced. The most glaring manifestation of the high premium placed on education by the colonial government was the release of periodic grants-in-aid to voluntary agencies to assist them in the financing of their educational endeavours. This financial investment by Government in voluntary agency schools was an endorsement of the inveterate fact that the education of the child is the primary responsibility of government in any country.
\N\n\\e subventing the voluntary agencies to dominate the primary education domain, the colonial government established Middle Schools for producing prospective junior civil servants, and
secondary schools for producing candidates for higher education. These colonial post-primary institutions maintained the same academic standards as their counterparts in Britain. Products of the middle school took the Junior Cambridge Certificate examination while those of the secondary schools took the Senior Cambridge Certificate examination, which qualified them for admission . into Britain and other overseas universities.
The leading religious denominations also established high quality secondary schools, maintaining the same academic standards as the colonial government institutions. As a result of this tac\i contest for quality in post-primary education, products of mission colleges like -St. Gregory’s College Lagos, Methodist Boys High School Lagos, Christ the King College Onitsha, Methodist College Uzuakoli, Dennis Memorial Grammar School Onitsha, and St. Patrick’s College, Calabar, were as good as, if not better than products of colonial government institutions like Kings College Lagos, Government College Ibadan and Government College Umahia. The products of these first rate government and mission owned secondary schools were rated as equal in all subjects to products of secondary schools in Britain and Ireland. They had no academic trammels in gaining admission to leading universities in Britain and Ireland.
The colonial government subsequently established the Yaba Higher College for the production of middle level manpower for the civil service. In 1948, the University College Ibadan was established as a college of the University of London, to produce senior civil servants and professionals for the country. The quality of education at Ibadan was the same as that of the parent institution in London. This fact was underscored in June 1959 when a bachelor of science, mathematics, candidate from the University College Ibadan, lya Abubakar, had the best result in the examination world-wide, in the University of London.
As the struggle for Nigeria’s political independence gathered momentum, self-governing Regional Governments emerged in the territory, as a prelude to total political freedom. Realizing that education was the most potent catalyst for economic development, the Regional Premiers placed the highest premium on education, especially at the primary and secondary school levels. There was palpable inter regional contest for excellence in education, especially between the Eastern and Western regions. The Premier of the Western region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, towered above his peers, mainly because of his successful free education programme, which gave the Yorubas an edge over other ethnic groups in the country, in
Western education. All the regional governments endeavoured to maintain the high standards in primary and secondary education inherited from the colonial administration, but this was compromised by high enrolments and teacher inadequacy in government schools. The new political leadership in the country treasured the role of voluntary agencies in the education enterprise and continued to assist the Christian Denominations with grants-in-aid for financing their schools, as was done by colonial officials.
The Regional Premiers did not limit their educational development horizons to primary and secondary education. They also invested in higher education, culminating in the emergence of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in the Eastern Region, the University of Ife in the Western Region, and Ahmadu Bello University In the Northern Region. An indication of how highly the founding fathers of the Nigerian nation valued education, is the fact that in the nineteen seventies, the campus of the University of Ife, in lle-lfe, which was personally designed by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was the most alluring university campus in Africa.
After independence in 1960, education continued to occupy the pride of place in governmental activities both at the regional and Federal government levels, and education standards remained
respectable until the military incursion into the governance of the country in 1966.
I have deliberately embarked on this circuitous voyage into the annals of western education in our country so as to arm my listener with a corpus of information germane to the objective appraisal of the status of education in contemporary Nigeria.
Government And The Status Of Education In Contemporary Nigeria
Apart from the total collapse of public morality culminating in a cancer of massive corruption, dismal failure of public education ranks next in the hierarchy of domains in which the present leadership of Nigeria has betrayed the sublime ideals of the nation’s founding fathers. Section 18 (1) of the 1999 constitution states that “Government shall direct its policy towards ensuring that there are equal and adequate educational opportunities at all levels.” The Constitution included education in the concurrent legislative list so that the Federal and State government shall all be totally committed to the education of the Nigerian child. In the fourth schedule of the Constitution, Local Governments are also mandated to participate in the Government of a state as respects “the provision and maintenance of primary, adult and vocational education.” The National Policv on Education C4tn edition) states that “Education in Nigeria is an instrument “par excellence” for effecting national development.” Section 1 (5) of the Policy states that Nigeria’s philosophy of education is based on:
the development of the individual into a sound and effective citizen the full integration of the individual into the community; and the provision of equal access to educational opportunities for all citizens of the country at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels both inside and outside the formal school system.
On paper therefore, the Nigerian Government values education as a priceless jewel anchored on an elegant philosophy. The implementation of the country’s education programme has however turned out to be a looming disaster, compelling urgent attention at the highest level.
A key flaw in educational administration in Nigeria is planlessness. The innovative 6-3-3-4 system has been a monumental failure because Junior Secondary classes 1-3 students have not had the opportunity of being equipped with the vocational
skills encapsulated in the introductory technology component of the curriculum. Between 1970 and 1980, all government owned secondary schools in the country were flooded with introductory technology equipment ordered from Europe, but not a single introductory technology teacher was trained to utilize the equipment in teaching the students. Consequently, the tools disappeared from the schools and the career options meant to be facilitated by teaching the subject eluded the students. When the Universal Primary Education scheme was introduced nation-wide in 1976, there were no trained teachers to cope with the massive pupil enrolment generated by the programme. The emergency teachers produced to handle the development deflated the quality of primary education in the country to a base status from which it has not been retrieved till today. Since July 2013, the portals of over seventy Governments owned universities in the country have been sealed as a result of a strike action embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities. The rationale for the industrial action is the failure of the Federal Government to uplift the quality of university facilities as agreed upon since 2009. If tertiary education in the country were efficiently planned, our undergraduates would have been spared the agony of loafing for over one hundred and fifty days, during which a
substantial portion of their academic attainments may have expired. There are several other programmes in the Nigerian educational arena which have failed due to planning trammels. If education in Nigeria is to be resuscitated, educational planning and meticulous execution of such plans must be treated as a pressing priority.
The scourge of corruption has had a field day in degenerating the standard of public education in Nigeria. The Ministries of Education, the campuses of tertiary institutions, as well as the Education Boards and Commissions are mostly virile cubicles of corruption. This explain why it is possible for pupils to gain admission to government secondary schools with proxies taking the common entrance examinations for them, candidates who are fast asleep in their homes score excellent grades in JAMB examinations without setting foot on the examination centres, and semi-illiterate are able to procure genuine university degree certificates without attending any lectures, let alone writing any examinations. Recently the Nigerian media exposed a female teacher in Edo state who could not read the text of the affidavit to \Nh\ch she was appending her signature. She was by no means alone. Corrupt school Board Officials in many parts of the country accept bribes, wink at fake certificates, employ school dropouts as teachers; and foist them on innocent public school pupils.
The impact of this genre of teachers on the system is monumental disaster in public primary education in the country. A significant percentage of public secondary school candidates who score high marks in the West African School Certificate Examinations have the examinations taken for them by university graduates, with the collaboration of their teachers and supervisors. Although public education is perceived as inadequately funded by the Federal Government, billions of naira set aside by Government Funding Agencies are begging for collection by various State School Boards and University Vice-Chancellors, arguably because they have not accounted for the previous grants mode available to them. The instances are myriad. Indeed, public education managers in Nigeria are not less corrupt than the other arms of government personnel. This bleak integrity scenario in the nation’s public education system has culminated in feeble foundation at the primary school level, poor quality secondary school products not suitable for university education, and universities churning out annually thousands of empty graduates who cannot be useful to themselves or the country.
In virtually every sector of the nation’s economy, Nigeria is already harvesting the sour fruits of her defective public education system. The country can boast of eminent professors of engineering and hundreds of graduate engineers, yet all the major civil engineering projects and most of the minor ones are executed by expatriate engineers and technicians. The splendid Abuja metropolis is a cynosure of German civil engineering excellence. Nigerian medical specialists abroad are among the most respected globally, but here at home, our people spend billions of naira in hard currency monthly on out-bound medical tourism to India. In recent times, I have not read through a page of a Nigerian national newspaper without detecting grammatical errors and wrong spellings. The local tabloids are totally unreadable. The electronic media, in terms of presenters and respondents, are not better. The tally is endless. What baffles me in the entire setting is that Nigerians appear to have resigned themselves to academic mediocrity as a national norm. The only profession in which Nigerians appear to be living up to expectation in law. Unfortunately, the academic benefit of our lawyers’ brilliance at the bar has turned out to be a moral burden on the Nigerian polity, since our billionaire kleptomaniacs cannot be convicted in Nigerian law courts.
I cannot conclude this presentation without commenting briefly on public education in the South East Zone in general and Imo State in particular.
The Igbo Language Conundrum
It is painful to observe that recently, the future disappearance of Igbo from the lexicon of global living languages has been of concern to many Igbo patriots. The matter would have been a non-issue if the Ministries of Education in Igbo land had performed their functions with efficiency and professionalism. In fact the Ministries of Education in Enugu, Abakaliki, Umuahia, Owerri and Awka jointly hold the key to the life and death of the Igbo language in the current century.
Section 4.19(e) of the National Policy on Education (4ln edition) states that “the medium of instruction in the primary school shall be the language of the environment for the first three years. During this period, English shall be taught as a subject.” This provision lucidly compels the operators of education in Igbo land to ensure that all pupils in primaries 1 -3 in all primary schools are taught ALL SUBJETCS IN IGBO LANGUAGE. Section 5.22(d) states that secondary education in Nigeria shall “develop and promote Nigerian languages, art and culture in the context of world’s cultural heritage.” In the South Eastern States, the first language to be developed and promoted in compliance with this provision is obviously Igbo, Section 5.24(a) states that all junior secondary school students shall offer eight core subjects including (iv) “language of the environment”. In Igbo land, the language of the environment is indisputably Igbo. Section 5.25(b) states that every senior secondary school student shall take all the six core subjects in group A, which includes (iii) “A major Nigerian language.” There is no other major Nigerian language spoken in the South East zone except Igbo. The National Policy on Education therefore succinctly mandates the operators of education in Igbo land to ensure that all subjects are taught in Igbo in the first three years in primary schools, that Igbo language must be taught and offered in all examinations at the junior secondary school level, and that all senior secondary school students must study the Igbo language and offer it as one of the mandatory subjects in the West African School Certificate Examination. The import of the foregoing is that the Igbo language will continue to flourish in Igbo land as long as functional teaching and learning are going on in primary and secondary schools in the tertian and the operators of the education system perform their functions as vividly stipulated in the National Policy in Education.
I therefore charge the leadership and officers of Ministries of Education in all the South Eastern States not to continue letting the Igbo nation down. They should take advantage of the ongoing 2014
budget presentations to make ample financial provisions for the meticulous implementation of the curriculum stipulated in the National Policy on Education, with effect from the 2014 – 2015 academic year.
Igbos should henceforth stop bemoaning the impending extinction of their mother tongue, and insist that their sons and
Home Trumpetapodium Government And Educational Values Being A Paper Presented By Chief Charles Okorafor,...
