Permit me to start with a caveat. My background and orientation means I’ll always be “biased” in favour of quality education. I am a firm believer in the revolutionary power of education. My father was a teacher, all my Uncles were teachers at some point, and I would love to retire as a teacher someday. I believe that our lecturers deserve better pay/incentives. I also believe that quality education is not cheap, especially at the tertiary level. Therefore, I believe it is right for the lecturers to demand better remuneration and working condition.
That said, I would like to state that the problem with university education does not start and end with improved funding. No, Naira and Kobo are not the only coefficients. It is common knowledge that the salaries of lecturers today is a great improvement from what it was ten years ago; yet there is no solid proof that the quality of education has improved by same measure. We are aware that our universities generate millions internally on yearly basis, but none have ever published their financial records or balance sheet. They are not run transparently and as coded as the information in an aircraft’s black box. Improved funding without transparency will give the university administrators more leverage for fiscal rascality. Improved funding must come with accountability and certain responsibilities. Universities should be subjected to proper auditing process, and reports should be published annually. Lecturers must also be good role models; not the ones harassing students sexually or collecting bribes in exchange for marks. This goes beyond more funding for university education.
Beyond Naira and Kobo, our universities must be restructured. Pedagogical strategies must be reviewed in line with global trends/best practices. The curriculum must be reviewed and reworked to reflect the solutions to our unique national challenges; and this is very crucial to our success as a nation. Educational curricula at the tertiary level must be designed to answer specific national questions and address our unique challenges; it must be directed at solving peculiar national/economic issues. For example, we are aware of our rampaging joblessness, therefore our curriculum should be designed to breed more entrepreneurs if we want to address the job question. The university should be breeding ground for industrialists and entrepreneurs. We want to become an industrialized nation? It must start at the university.
We are currently held down by huge energy and infrastructural challenges, which will even worsen with increasing population. Our roads are terrible, our energy generation and distribution capacity is abysmal, our health infrastructure is pathetic, our schools are still using teaching methods worse than the medieval whilst the developed world are exposed to multimedia learning aids, e-library, internet, etc. We can only overcome this challenge if a deliberate effort is made to bolster our technological base; and one way we can do this is to revamp science and engineering education. The economic age we are in is such that we must prioritize technical education. The curriculum of schientific/engineering programmes in Nigerian institutions must be reworked to equip the graduates with the skills needed to fit in to the real world. The Nigerian engineer must be trained to realize that his practice is expected to bring solutions to the challenges in his immediate environment. What is theory without practical; what is theory if it cannot be applied? Graduates must be trained to deploy solutions that will benefit our immediate society. Graduates should be equipped to solve our unique Nigerian challenge. We hear of petroleum pipeline vandalization; our graduates can’t seem to find a solution to this probably because our antiquated curriculum did not anticipate this and so did not equip them to create solutions for it. We were taught in Chemistry, the simplistic process of fractional distillation used for refining Petroleum and other derivatives from crude oil, yet we cannot build our own refineries because the students are merely taught to cram this process just to pass their exams and not to create a real world solution. Why can’t we tinker with our curriculum to ensure that our graduates are fully equipped to tackle our immediate challenges, rather than copy a template from countries with different backgrounds? There is a wide gulf between what is taught in class and what obtains out there. The challenge before ASUU, the University Community, NUC and FGN is to bridge this gap by reworking our curriculum to be reflective of our national goal. This is beyond improved funding.
With the way our economy is configured, it is difficult to see experienced and practical oriented lecturers in the classroom. It is a surprising statistic that more than 70% of the lecturers in our universities are people with no “field” or “real-world” experience, so how do you expect them to give what they don’t have? It is therefore imperative for our universities to work out schemes that will open up the university community to real practitioners, professionals, industrialists, etc. These schemes can be designed to allow these professionals share their practical knowledge even on part time bases. It doesn’t matter if this is the standard practice elsewhere, but if we can solve our own problems in the process, then why not?
Beyond Naira and Kobo, we must also revamp our methods of teaching. Lecturers are still walking about in this age, with powdered face involuntarily applied by coarse chalk grains that dropped off the board. They don’t have access to multimedia learning aids or other modern pedagogical strategies. The lecturers don’t even have access to the internet, yet he is expected to be abreast of modern trends in his field. The department does not even provide computers for the lecturer let alone the student. I remember back then in school we wrote computer programmes, compiled and executed it in our head. We had no computers, yet we were studying to be computer Engineers. An exercise that should be 100% practical was taught as 100% theory. The practical suddenly became the abstract. How then do you expect such a graduate to walk straight into employment? Do you now see why we should be as much concerned with unemployable graduates as we are with unemployment?
Recently, I read an article in the Economist about Estonia. That little (no disrespect meant) country got her independence in 1991, and with a population of about 1.3 million is now a leading nation in technology. The original code behind Skype, Hotmail and Kazaa were developed by Estonians. In 1991, only half the population had access to analogue telephones, today they have one of the best tele-densities in the world and the internet has been declared a fundamental human right. Estonia was able to make sweeping reforms (including the educational content) that facilitated their quantum leap to where they are today. They found a way to grow their technology and nurture it to their advantage, to solve their unique challenge. We can achieve this as well, and one way this can be done is by revamping our educational system, including overhauling the curriculum.
It seems our lecturers on the negotiating table have equated all the problems bedeviling our education to Naira and Kobo. They seem to be only interested in their “accruable getting” and not these other issues. If we want to revamp and revolutionize the educational sector, we must address the issues across board and not from the stereotypical posture of “Labour is always right”. Improved funding should come with improved responsibility. That said, both parties must learn to shift grounds in the interest of the millions of youths wasting away at home. Government must do more, labour must be more responsible. However, truth remains that our current educational system is not sustainable. We must find a way; our way!
Written By Engr. Robinson Tombari Sibe
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