The Decline in Nigeria’s Education Fortune; Sylvester Onoja X-rays factors

The issue of education is a recurring decimal in public discourse in Nigeria any day. With the worrisome trend of dismal performance in the sector in recent times, many continue to wonder where the Nigerian state got it wrong.

While some complain about the authorities in charge of education in the country, others blame it on lack of professionalism on the part of teachers and yet some others put the blame on the unserious nature of students.

In this exclusive no holds-barred interview with Chief Sylvester Onoja (O.O.N) monitored on 95.1 Nigeria info. Fm radio in Abuja recently, fundamental issues of multifaceted nature were adduced by the Chief as the unmistakable factors militating against education in Nigeria.

Chief Sylvester Onoja (O.O.N) is an ex-principal, Kings College, Lagos, ex- commissioner for education Kogi state and currently, the Technical Adviser to the Governor on Education and the Executive Chairman, Teaching Service Commission, Kogi State.

When were you principal of King’s College, Lagos?

I started in 2004 and I was there till 2006. However, I was principal for a period of 30 years in my life.

So much has been said about the education sector in Nigeria and not too good news. Not too pleasant news. What do you have to say?

Well, it is unfortunate. Education is on a stretcher in an emergency ward in the hospital. The least any government can do is it to take education from the stretcher to the wheelchair so that the nurse can take over from there. It is very sad to talk about education. Everyday we seem to be going down. Not many people think that experience actually is the best teacher.

The Nigerian education sector has had a lot of knowledgeable men, but not much of experienced people. I am not saying that those people who are knowledgeable are not experienced, I think that if we inject those who saw it when it was good and those who saw it now that it is going bad, they should be asked to make a contribution, but unfortunately, that is not being done.

Who is to blame?

Everybody. We all have a part to play in all this. But let us go to government first: Two plus two is four anywhere in the world. There is no controversy about that. Education is about the best man, but unfortunately in recent times education is about the most acceptable man. And when the most acceptable man presides over the best man, there is the likelihood that the best man does not always agree with the most acceptable man. So at all sectors of education, I think that we started getting it wrong from 1976 and we have not looked back since then.

Can we say we are getting it wrong from the nursery/primary level i.e from the foundation or is it only being pronounced in the secondary and tertiary levels?

We are getting it wrong right from the foundation. Those who know about education at its lower level, from 1976 when the UPE came will agree that we’ve compromised everything about education. The quality of teachers, the quality of delivery, and the quality of infrastructure in education had been compromised since 1976 when the UPE came. It was a crash programme and you know all crash programmes produce crash results. So we have crashed and people are looking everywhere. They have brought in all the knowledgeable people and they cannot find a solution to it. I think that the parents also have abdicated their responsibility, ditto for the community that has turned its back on rearing the child. The primary school teachers also have been compromised and that is the beginning of corruption. Let me give you an example; when I went to school, there used to be a subject called handcraft. That was your initiation into creativity, using your hands on what you know. But today, in most of the schools in this country, the handcraft which is actually the first introduction of a child to the discovery of who he is or what he can do has been monetized. If you go to any primary school, and you give N200, you will score a hundred percent in handcraft. That is corruption at the beginning. And then the parents also from the Gowon days when money was not the problem, everybody started looking for money and they forget about the home. The parents became strangers even in their own homes. Their children don’t know them, they don’t know their children and the children don’t know what their parents stand for. Nobody cares, only the mother goes for PTA meetings and school visiting days. Sometimes, only the driver goes. So the child is not in touch with the parents and the parents will go to any length to ensure that their children don’t fail examination. They make sure that they get admission into prestigious secondary schools and the principals know who the parents are. In any case, some of the principals are people who are not supposed to be there in the first place. They are the most acceptable men. They are not the best men. There is so much to say about education that I think that we should now look towards, what we can do to get out of this mess because we are on our way to the stone age if I may use that word.

You said something about the UPE in 1976, what was it all about?

In 1976, Olusegun Obasanjo was the head of state and he thought we should increase access to education. So the federal government for the first time intervened in primary education and we started the universal primary education. I must commend Obasanjo because he had always had progressive ideas, but it failed at the level of implementation. There were teacher training colleges established everywhere. Those who had no business being teachers came into it. Everything was free. And then, the quality of training dropped and those who left the UPE institutions and became teachers were far less qualified than those who went to the normal teacher training institutions like grade 3, grade 2 and all that. That’s how we got it wrong. And then the policy came that the qualifications for entering into teacher training institutions were lowered than those going to do other courses. I think it is only those who know that can teach those who do not know. When I went into teaching, it was the most brilliant that went into teaching because you have to know so that the person you teach must also know. But now we’ve got it wrong. Then they brought in professors to be in charge of education. I have the greatest respect for all professors who merit it in this country. But if you are a professor of agronomy for example, and have not read the federal government policy on education, you can in no way know what the syllabus says in the primary school. So there were people who are not in touch. The teachers too felt inferior.  They could not go and meet those who are in charge.  There are too many things time will not allow me to go into, but I witnessed the downfall.  I was there when it was good.  I was there when it was going down helplessly.

Could you have done something about it?

In all the schools I had been teacher, head teacher or principal, I had tried on my own to do what is right. But unfortunately, education has not received the priority it deserved in this country. We are not paying attention to education especially if you take into consideration the United Nations’ recommendation of 26% of national budget on it. Education is treated with levity because it does not produce immediate results. It is not tarring a road, it is not like supplying water. It has a long time effect. We are impatient; our politicians are only interested in what will produce instant results. So they go for those ones and they neglect education. So that is where we are particularly about the teacher’s recruitment, retention, motivation and all which have been ignored. The teachers are being seen as the hewers of woods and drawers of water in the community. Nobody cares about their welfare. They are not recognized in what they do. Teachers taught the head of state, the minister e.t.c but nobody ever looks back at the condition of the teachers. They are in the villages. The teachers serve in the remotest parts of this country. In every nook and cranny there is a teacher impacting knowledge, guiding everybody’s future, but what does he get? Not even recognition in the community where he serves, not even the respect of the parents of the children he teaches. That is what we get. Funny enough in this country everybody wants to eat, yet nobody wants to be a farmer and everybody wants his child to be taught and nobody wants to a teacher. That is the situation.

What do you have to say about people who just woke up and open a school today without the required tools to impact knowledge? And why did you close down so many schools in Kogi state during your tenure as commissioner for education?

Thank you. All the traders in the market that use to sell tomatoes and have not got market for tomatoes anymore have gone to open schools. Any failed mechanic has gone to open a school somewhere. It has become an all comer’s game because to a large extent government has failed in its responsibility to provide education. And the worst part of it is that senior secondary education has remained an orphan and nobody cares. All institutions have regulatory bodies; the primary schools have UBEC i.e. the Universal Basic Education Commission as the regulatory body. The universities have NUC as the regulatory body, the NBTE is a regulatory body for polytechnics and monotechnics and the NCCE is a regulatory body for teacher training institutions e.t.c . The secondary education has no regulatory body. If you want to open a polytechnic anywhere, you must go and obtain the permission and follow all the regulation that is laid down by NBTE. If you want to open a university, you have to go and ask the NUC to do so. But there is no regulatory body for secondary education. It is an all comers business. So, the senior secondary education is an orphan, everybody goes there to try his luck to open one. However, on May 26, 1999, General Abdusalam Abubakar signed into law establishing National Secondary Education Commission. As I speak, it has not seen the light of day. I also want to believe that the present minister of education tried her best to push it, but the powers that be believe there are too many parastatals and therefore they have no room for National Secondary Education Commission and there is a move as I speak to merge that with UBEC which you all know has not been living up to expectation. So as long as we don’t get right senior secondary school and primary school, we are wasting our time in this country as far as education is concerned. The federal government can go ahead and establish a university in every town; it will fail as long as we do not have credible secondary education and primary education.

How do we then begin to get things right?

A regulatory body for senior secondary education will go a long way. If you want to establish a secondary school in this country, there should be a body that would assess and see if you are qualified or the facilities are available to be recognized by NECO or WAEC e.t.c. Things need to be got right. If we don’t get the secondary school right, we are wasting our time. You are talking about establishing a university in every state, who are those to go to such schools? Who are those to teach them? We talk about numbers. The University of Cambridge was established in 1205. As of 2011, the University of Cambridge had 14,500 students spread all over the world. The University of Calabar was established in 1978, by the same period, they had 30,178 students. What is the quality of the students? When the University of Ibadan came into being in 1948 as a college of the University of London, up to the time the Ahmadu Bello University, University of Nigeria, University of Ife and University of Lagos were established education was at par with what obtained in the developed world. If you go from U.I, ABU or Ife, you go straight for your master’s degree.  Today, you don’t have a university in Nigeria that is among the first 100, among the first 200, not among the first 500, not among the first 1000, not among the first 2000, not among the first 3000 and not among the first 5000 in the world and we are talking about education. I think there is a conspiracy to kill education and we are all involved in that. That is exactly what is happening.

Are the private universities living up to expectation in Nigeria?

I attended Ahmadu Bello University Zaria and one of my teachers was Professor James O’Connell in the 70s. He came out with a theory in 1975 about inevitability of instability in Nigeria and summarized it and said Nigerians are like a people in a bus that do not know where they are going, but are happy they are on the move. If you apply that to our Nigerian education, you will realize that we are poor students of history. Once upon a time they said the Aviation industry in Nigeria was not well developed and they opened it up for the public and all sorts of airlines sprang up. That was the beginning of Okada Air and others. Just immediately after that, we started having crashes. People who were first officers in Nigeria Airways became captains in the private Airlines and there were accidents. Today, there are not many private airlines anymore. Then at a point, we were told that Nigeria was under banked and all sorts of banks came in. It was the era of so many wonder banks, and then it was what it was until a man called Soludo came on board and then some of the banks disappeared. Now it is the turn of education and all sorts of people are coming into education because it is said that government cannot do it alone and it is true that government cannot do it alone. We agree on that fact. But how it is done, I don’t believe in it. I read the statistics that it is only 43% of lecturers in Nigerian universities that hold PhDs. That is the statistics available to us from the public universities that we know. The NUC regulation says they should be about 80%. If we have only 43% of PhD holders teaching in our universities and I want to believe that the first choice universities for them will be public universities, so who are those in the private universities? They are likely to be people who are retired and probably tired professors, probably expired professors or young men who have more to learn who have gone to these universities. So that is my worry. We have a faulty senior secondary system, who are those going to these universities to teach. And those who teach in these universities, who are they teaching? I want to believe that in most of the universities, they are only doing remedial secondary school works because what we do in the secondary schools is also remedial primary works.  So by the time they are ready to go out of primary schools, they are ready for the school certificate examination and that is why you hear examination malpractices and all that. I am not saying there are no good private schools, but most private schools in this country promote examination malpractices and the evidence is there for everyone to see. I am afraid for the future of education in this country. We must have the courage to speak and act and follow what is true. The truth is that some people somewhere are not telling us the truth. I have been in the system; I have been a secondary school principal for 30 years, I have been in the National Council on Education for 25 years. I knew all about quality education. But if you are a teacher standing there in the classroom, what can you do? We are not serious. From 1960 to 2013, we had had 46 ministers of education including ministers of state. So continuity is the name of the game and education is about continuity. There is no continuity. Nobody is interested in starting from where the last person stopped. I want to commend the present minister of education; we have seen continuity under her reign. She has tried to follow some degree of continuity. But I have always said that the experienced people are not involved in education, the people who are involved in education are those who only know about tertiary education and have no knowledge about primary education. They pontificate.  They have never taught in primary schools, they have never taught in secondary schools.  Of course they have been students in primary and secondary schools, but they have never taught in those schools. Today, appointment of principals in secondary schools have been compromised, the best people are not in charge.  You now have to be an indigene of a place to be principal of a secondary school. Quality is being taken out. We are looking at other things. We are not looking at knowledge. We are not even looking at the child-centered education system, we are looking at other things and we cannot make progress this way. However, the first thing we should do is that, let the federal government bring back the secondary school commission that was approved by General Abdusalam Abubakar. It is a good thing.  Let us revive primary and secondary education.  A lot of people that are in charge of those things should take a second look that the future of Nigeria is mortgaged. Today, we have 10.5 million children out of school, and we have universal basic education commission. If we have a body like that, why should 10.5 million children be out of school?

Do the state governments have anything to do in this regard?

Both the states and federal have a lot to do. The federal government is to show the way and to a large extent the federal government is showing the way, but the states are not following. The federal government is clapping with only one hand. There must be some sanctions for states that are not following. Because if you refuse to educate the people in your own state, you are not doing damage to people in your state alone, you are doing damage to Nigeria

Then what do you have to say about states where people are not encouraged to go to school?

It is unfortunate. I don’t know of any state that has a policy that children should not go to school. What is happening today like the boko haram issue is a symptom of much more to do; failure to educate, failure to do our work, failure to empower the teacher to do his work and failure of the parents to do what they are supposed to do. That is why we have all these things that are happening today. It is now fashionable to be ignorant.

What is the way forward?

The way forward is for the good people who know to be in charge of education and to ask the states to take education much more seriously than they are doing. And as an interim measure, the federal government intervention on education at the state level is urgently needed. The secondary schools are virtually dead. The teachers are not there because the states do not have money to pay. The basic infrastructures in schools are not there. Next year, there is going to be a new syllabus for WAEC.  2014 is around the corner and there are states where they have not even seen the copy of the new syllabus. They are still teaching the old thing. The teachers that we have on the field are not being retrained regularly and so we have a situation where we have analogue teachers teaching digitally mined students. So they double the tragedy of the Nigerian child; his father is analogue, his teacher is analogue and he is digitally minded because he has access to internet and all that. So we must train teachers. At the moment, through the intervention of the federal government, teacher training is regular at the level of UBEC. This should be extended to senior secondary education where the teachers have not been updated and it has reached the level where those who do not know are teaching those who do not know. I don’t want to put it bluntly by saying the blind leading the blind.  There should be further federal government intervention. And the federal government should bring back the senior secondary school commission to regulate secondary education in this country.  If we do not get that right we will not get it right even if federal government tries to build a university in every town.