By Amaka Abayomi

WORRIED about the worsening crisis rocking the Nigerian education sector, an independent scholar and former Dean, Faculty of Administration, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Professor Ladipo Adamolekun, has proffered some solutions to help reposition the sector for global recognition.

Giving reasons why saving the education sector should be top priority, Adamolekun said; “Because of the great value attached to education globally, crisis in the sector must be considered a serious cause for concern as education is almost everywhere considered as the key to economic prosperity and a vital instrument for combating disease, tackling poverty, and supporting sustainable development.”

Citing the many successes recorded with the Universal Primary Education, UPE, of the then Western Nigeria and the lessons that can be learnt from it, Adamolekun said after a decade, by 1965, primary education completion rate was between 80 and 100 per cent throughout Western Nigeria and the launch of the UPE was accompanied by rapid expansion of post-primary education: five-year secondary/grammar schools and three-year modern schools.

The latter were introduced to provide post-primary education for the hugely increased primary school leavers who could not gain admission to Secondary or Grammar Schools. Simultaneously with the launch of UPE, teacher training was significantly scaled up through the expansion of colleges responsible for training teachers for primary and post-primary education.

Evidence of crisis

Reminded of the lost era of educational excellence when in late 2000s, a taxi driver who drove him and who only completed Modern School education in the ‘old’ Western Nigeria, was more articulate in spoken English than some current first degree holders, the Professor of Public Administration listed some evidence of the decline and decay in sector to include low enrollment and low quality of teachers in basic education as Nigeria has over 10.5 million children of school-going age who are not attending school – one of the highest in the world while enrolment of children into schools is as low as 12.0% in some states.

Poor performance of secondary school students as evidenced by the percentage of students’ results who obtained five credits, including English and Mathematics in the May/June WAEC over the last five years: 23 percent (2008), 26 percent (2009), 24 percent (2010), 31 percent (2011) and 39 percent (2012).

NECO wasn’t any better as the failure rate was 98 percent (2008), 88 per cent (2009), 89 percent (2010), 92 percent (2011), and 68 percent (2012), while the percentage of students who scored 200 and above (out of 400 total) in JAMB in the last four years ranged between 36 percent (2010) and 46 percent (2009) – overall average of 42 percent. In 2012, only 3 of 1,503,93 candidates scored above 300 and only 5 percent scored 250 and above.

Universities are not left out as instead of having no less than 80 percent of the academics with PhDs, only 43 percent are PhD holders, and instead of 75 percent of the academics to be between Senior Lecturers and Professors, only about 44 percent are within the bracket. The staff mix in some varsities is alarming as almost all the varsities are over-staffed with non-teaching staff.

There is an average of four abandoned projects per varsity, with negative consequences for classrooms, laboratories, students’ hostels, and staff accommodation. Poor infrastructure adversely affects teaching, research, learning and students’ health and safety. Adamolekun listed three major causes of the crisis in the education sector as over-centralisation, implementation failure and de-emphasising the value of education and decline of the teaching profession.

Possible remedies

On how to reposition the sector to compete with its global counterparts, the former Lead Public Sector Management Specialist at the World Bank proposed five possible remedies: devolving educational development, increasing funding for education, ensuring reliability of education statistics, leapfroging the use of Information and Communication Technology, ICT, in education, and enhancing university autonomy.

Devolving educational development: After years of implementing the Universal Basic Education Act, enrolment in primary education falls far below MDG target. It is advised that the UBE Act be repealed and the share of national revenues hi-jacked for the purpose by the FG should be shared among the states and local governments.

Also, in the absence of empirical evidence to support the facile assertion regarding the usefulness of the so-called unity schools for promoting national integration, federal government should either transfer the schools to state governments together with the annual budgetary allocation (pending the adoption of a new revenue allocation formula) or embrace the public private partnership for running the schools that was adopted during president Obasanjo’s final year but abruptly abandoned under president Yar’Adua.

Increasing funding for education: It is important to point out that Nigeria has sufficient financial resources for ensuring adequate financing of education at all levels as according to reports, between 2006 and 2009, Federal government Ministries, Departments and Agencies failed to remit about N4 trillion to the Federation Account. To this end, government’s education expenditure is grossly inadequate and needs to be significantly increased. According to the Report of the Committee on Needs Assessment of Nigerian Public Universities (2012), state governments also underfund education.

Ensuring availability of reliable education statistics: An important dimension to the crisis in the education sector is the weakness of the statistical underpinnings of the national education system, as according to the report of the Presidential Task Team on Education “that data (both hard figures and soft explanations) are virtually non-existent and un-useable in the education system is an undisputed truism.”

Appropriate incentives

State governments need to provide appropriate incentives to local governments to ensure that they keep comprehensive data on childhood and primary education as government needs to acknowledge that it can’t achieve quality education without robust education statistics.

Leapfroging the use of ICT in education: Despite the low ICT penetration, its role in helping to enhance teaching and learning has been embraced in several states as some states have provided laptops for students and teachers in secondary schools.

The progress towards digital education in the US and South Korea are: around 30% of all college students are learning online – up from less than 10% in 2002 new online Western Governors University [founded in 1997 by 19 Governors] costs less than $6,000 a year, compared to $54,000 at Harvard and students can study and take their exams when they want, not when the sabbaticals, holidays and scheduling of teaching staff allow.