By Alex Abutu
At a time that Nigeria is doing so badly in keeping up with the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) recommendation that at least 15-20 per cent of the total budget of a country should go to the education sector, scarce resources from Nigeria have continued to fund education across the globe.
Nigeria allocated 6.48 per cent of the 2020 budget was allocated to education; 7.11 per cent in 2019; 7.14 per cent in 2018; 7.27 per cent in 2017; and 9.20 per cent in 2016.
As President Buhari submits the 2023 appropriation to the National Assembly, a 2020 article by the Guardian, United Kingdom has found ways to trend on Twitter. The article, although 2 years old, has shown that nothing has changed rather things are headed for the worst.
The writer concluded that “should 11,000 Nigerian students in the UK pay the tuition of £10,000 each (at £1/N478.5179), about N52 billion would have been spent on tertiary education overseas, excluding other expenses like accommodation”.
After reading the article, I went back to see what the budget for education for the 2022 fiscal year is for Nigeria and tried to do some mental calculations for 2023. When I added the plus and minus, I realized why our education system is suffering from one crisis or the other. The above calculation is only for UK, we have not included Ghana, Malaysia, China, India, USA, Canada and other nations where Nigerians are struggling to acquire higher education.
No nation will want to lose the huge educational revenue Nigerian students are turning in annually, hence every attempt will be made to, not only blacklist our educational programmes but to ensure it is not stable.
They started with the World Bank, tagging Nigerian graduates as untrainable and as a result, those who could afford to, started moving their children and themselves abroad, where their graduates are trainable.
While some reports are busy discrediting our educational system, some nations are poaching our best brains with attractive packages and incentives, leaving lecturing at the mercy of fresh graduates who are also struggling to find their bearings.
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Just on Monday, The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) says Nigeria is now battling with its worst situation of brain drain in history, as no fewer than 10, 296 Nigerian-trained doctors are currently practicing in United Kingdom.
According to them, Nigerian graduates are untrainable, but our doctors are hot cakes and the most sought after in all of Europe and the Americas.
The eight months that ASUU was on strike should be enough for the government to constitute a Presidential Panel on Higher Education in Nigeria. The Panel should be vested with the responsibilities of taking a wholistic look at the educational system and come up with evidence-based solutions on how the frequent crisis will be handled once and for all.
The mandate of the panel should also include taking a serious look at the rapid emergence of private universities vis-à-vis the rising cost of higher education in the country and the falling standard of university education. Otherwise, how does one explain a situation where some university graduates do not know what the NYSC acronym stands for.
Recently, I was part of a training programme to give an orientation programme for fresh Nigerian graduates who were recruited based on having attained First class and Second-Class upper division. It was after the first day, that I realized the mess the nation educational system is in.
We cannot continue to pretend that all is well with our educational system in its entirety, yet we are producing some graduates who are jokers and a surprising disgrace to what education represents.
Is it that the National Council on Education that meets every other year is not aware of what is happening or is it because their children are in foreign universities, so whatever happens here does not bother them.
In all sincerity, can we say our current educational programme is good enough to take us to the promise land? The answer is not far fetched, while we are producing medical professionals of global standards, we are also producing Mass Communication or Journalism graduates who cannot write comprehensible news, even English graduates who cannot construct simple essays.
Enough is enough. In those days; it was not fashionable to go abroad for higher education. How then did we get here?
