Education and security as vehicles for Nigeria’s progress

Unfortunately, the increase in knowledge and concomitant increase in the wealth and comfort of man has occasioned corresponding increase in the nature, volume and spread of crimes which humanity must confront and deal with today! Can man decide to forego knowledge to avoid the rise in crime?

The answer seems to be no. But can man afford to pile up knowledge and risk the increasing crime rate, the type that today threaten the very foundations of humanity?

The answer again remains no. How then can we all happen on a happy medium in which increase in knowledge will always produce desirable increase in safety, security and collective joy of man?

This is a challenge as much for national and world leaders as for education administrators the world over.

A cursory look at the country today will show that education and security could be said to be critically and drastically sick as a result of which they both deserve equal measures of treatment to be panel beaten and re-sprayed back to acceptable and comfortable shapes.

Deriving from the above, it is therefore no small wonder then that just as the Police High Command is organizing a two-day “Security Summit On How To Stop Pastoral/ Farmers/Herdsmen Clashes in Nigeria” in Abuja on May 8 and 9 just as the frontline legal icon and Founder of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), Aare Afe Babalola, CON, SAN, has called on the National Universities Commission (NUC), the Regulatory Authority for University Education in Nigeria, to convene an Education Summit where the various ills plaguing the nation’s educational system will be addressed in the overall interest of education in Nigeria.

The Security Summit is most assuredly a welcome development in the face of the threatening menace of different shades and shapes of violence, including kidnapping and the maddening orgy of Boko Haram and its attendant loss of lives, limbs and means of livelihood amounting to several billions of Naira in both ambulatory and non-ambulatory property.

Babalola who spoke recently at the Farewell Reception for the Immediate Past Executive Secretary of the NUC, Prof. Julius Okojie, and the Welcome Reception for his successor, Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, in Ado-Ekiti posited that the Education Summit has become more imperative now than ever before in order for Nigeria to tackle the hydra-headed problems bedevelling its education and thereafter take its rightful place in the comity of providers of quality and functional education world-wide.

The Reception was organized to appreciate Okojie for the support he has consistently given to the university and to welcome Rasheed for his manifested love for ABUAD and more importantly to impress it on Okojie to use his wealth of experience to continue to support Rasheed in order to ensure continuity and to be able to identify problems afflicting education in Nigeria with the overall aim of offering constructive advice on how to overcome such problems.

His words: “I want to seize this opportunity to appeal to the two NUC giants, Prof. Okojie and Prof. Rasheed, to continue to work together. Prof. Okojie should continue to use his wealth of experience to advise his successor. The umbilical cord of their working relationship must remain unbreakable as this is one of the veritable ways the much desired change in the country’s education landscape can be consummated and actualized”.

“Leaning heavily on his seven-year experience as Pro Chancellor and Chairman of Council of the University of Lagos and as the Founder of ABUAD since 2009, Babalola, a man who will not stand idly on the sidelines comfortable in complacency when his voice must of necessity be heard, identified the major problems afflicting the Nigerian educational landscape as funding, attitude of Nigerians to giving, University Autonomy in relation to the power of the University Council and Pro Chancellors, the quality of students being admitted into Nigerian Universities in the face of JAMB lowering Admission cut off mark to 160, the place of good quality teachers and Curriculum development as well as the emerging technologies which are redefining virtually all professions in this “knowledge age”.

Other equally debilitating afflictions are the need for more Private Universities which he described as the future of education in Nigeria, the contentious and discriminatory administration of TETFUND resources, strike actions and regulation of the number of children by each family to two children as well as the place of Technology in contemporary education where everyone has to be conscious of his/her talent and potentials in particular and the world at large.

“All over the world, every university has the right to screen the candidates it wants to admit. It also has the right to embark on other exercises, whether written or unwritten, to make it and its products stand out. It is for this reason that any student applying to study Law in the University of Oxford is mandatory required to take the Law National Aptitude Test (LNAT), any student applying for Biomedical Sciences must take Biomedical Admissions Test (BMAT), any student applying for Chemistry must take Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA) while any one applying for Classics must take Classics Admission Test (CAT)”, he submitted

He added: “It must be emphasized that many of the students being recommended for admission in the universities by JAMB are certainly not university materials. Universities need to be populated by students who have received proper and quality Primary and Secondary School education. And that was why I was shocked and amazed when JAMB reduced the cut-off for admission in universities to 160 last year. This is rather bad. The minimum cut-off mark should not be below 200 for universities while a cut-off mark of between 160-180 should be for Polytechnics and Colleges of Education”.

Babalola who has always maintained that education is too important and expensive business to be left to governments alone to fund in the face of innumerable and competing other needs to be met, decried a situation whereby the 2012 budget of North Carolina State University in the United States of America is far in excess of the pitiable and unpalatable N392,263,784,684 which Nigeria budgeted for over 150 universities, Polytechnics and Colleges of Education and the UBEC within the same time frame.

With this scenario, the protagonist of quality education postulated that it would be impossible for Nigerian Universities to compete favourably with any of the top universities in the world let alone drive innovation and maintain qualitative levels of delivery without donations, endowments or gifts from sources other than government, adding that the lesson from the Stanford University is that Nigerians and corporate bodies must contribute generously to education in accordance with international best practices.

Babalola, who denounced the attitude of Nigerian to giving, lamented that “an average Nigerian does not believe in giving and that is what makes a lot of difference in Europe and America where people willfully will their estates in support of university education.
Today, it remains incontrovertible that the best universities abroad thrive on grants and donations. And so, funding of universities in Nigeria can be improved upon if Nigerians change their attitude about giving. The funding of education cannot and should not be left to government alone”.

He added: “The time to act is now, that we can through donations, gifts and endowments change the face of education in Nigeria. If universities have to rely on grants, endowments and other kinds of gifts, then the societies in which they exist must imbibe the culture of Philanthropy. This culture of philanthropy is unfortunately insufficiently practiced in Nigeria. This failure to imbibe a culture of philanthropy is a threat and challenge to funding of educational institutions.

“Government should let Nigerians know that they cannot be bearing children and donate them to government to educate. Besides, government itself should change its attitude towards the funding of education. It must make deliberate efforts to comply with UNESCO’s recommendation of devoting 26% of the country’s yearly budget allocation to education. In addition, governments at all levels should stop deceiving the people about offering them free education which no government has been able to do after the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, SAN, who devoted as much as 52% of the resources of the then Western Region to successfully prosecute Free Education in that Region.

“…the change we need is not about corruption only. We need change about giving, about endowment, about institution of Professorial Chairs in our universities. Our case should not be different from what obtains in other parts of the world. My plea to you is that you should use your good offices to impress it on the government to increase the annual budgetary allocation to education while there should be more financial commitment on the part of the generality of the people, particularly the well-to-do in the society”.

He advised the new NUC helmsman to look into the issue of quality of teachers and their training and make it compulsory for university teachers to have the requisite training and be certified as teachers before they are allowed to teach, stressing that mere possession of a Ph. D is certainly not enough qualification for teaching in Nigeria’s universities.

“You should also address the issue of teachers who parade fake certificates. They should not be allowed to cheat the society by eloping to another university after they have been detected in another”.

On TETFUND facilities from which private universities which been curiously and undeservedly excluded, he said the time has come for NUC to make it transparently and unambiguously clear that Private Universities are non-profit entities limited by guarantee and clearly distinct from Limited Liability Companies where shareholders share money at the end of every business year and therefore should be made to benefit from TETFUND.

According to him, any Private University which operates on its permanent site with a minimum of 20 of its academic programmes accredited by the NUC and has also commenced its Postgraduate studies should have an unfettered access to TETFUND facilities.

There must be more, and several more of these Summits to jaw-jaw on the way forward in different areas of our national life for there lies the much desired change, peace and harmony in the land. We cannot and we must not shy away from that stark reality.