PROFESSOR Noah Yusuf of the University of Ilorin has urged Nigerians to imbibe the spirit of positive work ethics, whjich he listed among them as industrious, committed , dedicated and transparent, as the only way to guarantee Nigeria’s development.

Experience, they say, is the best teacher. If this statement is true, then the best teaching practices do not tally with the well known, widely accepted style of copying, cramming and pasting that is practiced in Nigerian universities, and indeed, all over the world. It isn’t only this popular saying that contradicts the popular mode of education; proprietors of Minerva University in United States of America, which was founded in 2012, say they are out to redefine what a university education should be in the 21st century.

IN 2009, when Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State obtained a whooping $90 million (N13.5 billion) World Bank Education Loan, to fund teaching and learning infrastructure under the State‘s Eko Secondary Education Project, many a Lagosians thought the era where pupils and students across the public schools in the state sit on bare floor, tyres, broken furniture or even windows is now a thing of the past.

NIGERIA is said to have the highest number of out-of-school children in the world according to the United Nations International Children Education Fund (UNICEF) which has been put at 10.5 million children. This number is threatening to increase if nothing is done urgently to arrest the insurgency in the North-East of the country and assist internally displaced school children in various camps across the region to continue their education despite the situation they have found themselves in.

If government fails to recruit and retain the best in the labour market, then how can it achieve the objective of building a Human Resources Management structure that will backstop its vision of a world class public service institution?