Memos to GMB: No 3 – Education

After the subjects of the first two memos, Corruption and Revenue respectively, I would like to share some thoughts with you on another vital pillar of the new Nigeria we all are looking forward to – Education. For three decades now we have all lamented loudly that our schools, the certificates and scholars they produce are no longer anything to write home about or fit to propel an ambitious country to the desired status of industrialization or membership of the 21st century. This dim view of the Educational sector has been universally held for some time with parents, including a super patriot like you, sending their children to schools abroad while employers openly prefer foreign trained applicants to the products of local schools. Other employers set up very expensive training centers to retrain local graduates, engineers particularly, for as much as 12 months before allowing them anywhere near their plants. I know of a blue chip that awards post graduate diplomas from a foreign university to its recruits after retraining them for nine months. From parents who sold treasured homes to pay foreign tuition to employers who diverted funds meant for expansion and trading to setting up elaborate training institutions, the cost has been crushing and unsustainable.

We all know how we got here: years of austerity in the early 1980s followed by IMF / World Bank mandated Structural Adjustment Programs that essentially defunded Education and other social services. Newly poor civil servants and teachers almost universally turned to corrupt practices to make ends meet and by the 1990s the destruction of Education and every other government dependent social sector was complete. Nature hates a vacuum so, as the public Education system became moribund, the private sector, which had in the 2nd Republic been almost entirely pushed out of the sector by populist government policies, grew by leaps and bounds. At first private primary and secondary schools became the only option for parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t send their kids abroad but, once the floodgate of private universities was opened, our public universities too were abandoned by parents who couldn’t countenance the upward mobility of their wards being stymied by multi semester altercations between college unions and government. Their faith in the private sector has been amply rewarded as a cursory survey of the new recruits coming into Nigerian blue chips shows a preponderance of private university graduates that belies the fact that they still account for a minority of the graduates produced annually. I believe guaranteed program lengths, ease of entry, typically within a year or two of completing high school, and somewhat inflated grades, in addition to those other qualities the schools are rightly proud of, account for this anomaly.

[b]Curiously two of the first dozen private universities established in Nigeria were set up by, at that time, a sitting President and his Vice. [/b]I understand that the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting that granted approval for the Vice’s school was chaired by the President while the Vice returned the favour. That is our naija way of overcoming the blatant conflict of interest that exists in executive office holders, elected to superintend Education and all other sectors, setting themselves up in business to compete with their charges. Obviously their Educational investments can only prosper if their public charges falter so we have one more apparent reason why Nigerian public schools mainly produce unemployable graduates. Also we can better understand why in 2007, when the duo left office, the percentage of Nigeria’s national budget committed to education was less than half the 29.3% that Ghana achieved in that year despite decades of Education sector unions clamoring for implementation of UNESCO’s recommendation of a minimum of 26% being devoted to education. No surprises that Ghana, despite having a per capita GDP that is barely half of Nigeria’s, is host to one of the largest populations of Nigerians schooling abroad. In addition to much more generous government funding of Education going forward, I commend to you the steps below that should result in efficient use of those resources and a public Educational sector we all can be proud of.

Let us start from the beginning. There is universal alarm over the number of Nigerian children who are out of school and roaming the streets either as traders, Al Majiri or given in service as house helps and ‘apprentices’ in defiance of child rights laws. Nigeria’s population of children thus marginalized socioeconomically is second only to India’s and has been highlighted by you and others as one of the reasons Boko Haram and other social menaces like kidnapping, baby factories, bunkering and cultism are on the verge of asphyxiating our nation. We are all agreed that these social monstrosities must be denied the fuel they need to keep growing and the best way to do that is to ensure all Nigerian children compulsorily get sufficient education to make them productive and engaged members of the economy and society. It will take sacrifice from us all but all enlightened societies have learnt that when you marginalize significant portions of your population you manufacture dissent and ultimately the fagots for a destructive revolution.

[b]Nigeria should make the first nine years of Education, up to the JSS 3 level that is, compulsory for all Nigerian children. [/b]Beyond compulsion however, we must make the offer irresistible for parents and students. The first nine years of education should be free with uniforms and all other necessary materials provided by the state. Additionally each child must be guaranteed one good quality meal a day and learning must be turned into something better than a chore with playgrounds and sport arenas an integral part of each school. The school building program executed by Mr Rotimi Amaechi in the last seven years in Rivers state is a good example of what is required nationwide. Each child should long to go to school and each parent should be happy that his child is not only getting a worthwhile education from the state but that the state is contributing to the overall wellbeing of the child. Of such parents are happy Tax payers made.

As currently designed, the three years of JSS Education will be comprehensive in scope with quality workshops and instructors delivering the basics of artisanship and the more theoretical subjects. At the end of this stage students undergo a checkpoint examination intended to signpost those more academically inclined who will continue to the SSS level and others who might be better suited for more focused technical training in state / private sector run training centres that produce young adults ready for the assembly lines and workshops of modern industry. While no teenager should be denied the right to progress on the academic path even if the assessment indicates a different path, strict meritocracy should begin to be applied at this stage. The best 20% of JSS output should continue to be on a full state scholarship (tuition, uniforms, books, meals etc), the next 20% should enjoy only a tuition free scholarship while the bottom 60% should have their SSS education fully funded by their parents. This stratification will be reviewed annually with mobility in both directions expected. Some will argue that this is too early a stage to introduce fees but my argument is that during the JSS years students are still almost entirely clay in their parents hands to be molded as parents deem fit. We must secure the cooperation of the parents in bringing out the best from their children by welding the economic interest of the state and the parents together. Faced with the prospects of significant, market rate, fees from SSS 1, most parents will react rationally by putting in the vital parental supervision that ensures homework gets done and books get read. Beyond that, students, while still under their parents’ supervision, will acquire the work ethic that they will require as they gain more independence in SSS and college and, eventually, when they become part of the workforce.

It would be unrealistic to imagine that any amount of effort by the state can bridge in the short term the massive gap that has been opened up between state education quality and what the top private schools offer. I propose that an incentive be given private schools to accept say 10% of their population as state scholars who will enjoy every benefit these often world class schools offer. These state scholars in private schools would be chosen by the schools on merit within defined catchment areas. The private schools will get in turn a Tax exempt status as charities. Ultimately it is hope that the difference between state schools and even the best private schools will be so minimal that attending private schools would be mainly a matter of social snobbery.

At the tertiary level the 20:20:60 split should continue for full scholars, partial scholars and privately funded students. Tuition and other fees in state colleges should be fully market driven to ensure that at least the cost of providing world class education to non-scholars is recovered while the state and endowments should cover the cost of the scholars. Again private colleges willing to accept say 10% of their population as state scholars should be awarded Tax exemption.

At this top level we need to bring in the 3rd leg of the educational tripod to join the state and parents. The joint efforts of the first two legs are geared towards producing an attractive product for the employer of labour. I know it is fashionable to say that every student should aspire to be an employer of labour but the fact is that for every Bill Gates there are 128,000 Microsoft employees. Gates, Larry Ellison, Richard Branson and many of their ilk never finished college with the last gentleman never finishing high school. Colleges are not exactly entrepreneurial hotbeds even if they are innovation hubs. State energy should be focused on producing the 128,000 potential Microsofties while ensuring the external economic environment will allow business builders to germinate and flourish. If the gaze of the British Education ministry had been cast too long on Branson it is a fair bet he would never have made his first billion.

I propose that the federal government’s involvement in tertiary education should be replaced by private sector led trusts. As the prime customers of the products of our colleges, corporate organizations should be asked to form cross industry trusts that will take over federally owned colleges from the government. Such trusts should cut across industrial sectors to provide a balance of interests and be a mix of large and not so large corporations, listed and unlisted entities. Each trust should be encouraged to set up a trust fund and management team that would turn the school entrusted to it to a globally competitive college able to produce graduates fit for employment in Nigeria and anywhere else in the world. A pilot could be started with the five oldest universities in the land with the support of the World Bank, UNESCO and similar global bodies not forgetting our education sector unions and relevant professional and trade associations. If the pilot works as well as hoped the program should be extended to all federally owned colleges. Of course all participating corporations will receive appropriate Tax incentives to make this a cost neutral proposition for them. Gaining ready for market graduates and being saved the cost of training new hires in the basics or recruiting at high cost expatriates should encourage corporations to participate. At the end of the transition Nigerian colleges would be left in the hands of state governments, private owners and the trusts.

In addition to getting the federal government out of tertiary education we should also get it out of secondary education. It is doubtful if it is good use of the FEC’s time to be debating Unity Schools’ budgets and the like. Secondary education should be left entirely for state governments and the private sector. All Unity Schools should be handed over to host state governments. The federal government’s involvement in education should be limited to setting standards, regulating and possibly handling national examinations. It is expected that the retrenchment of the federal government in this and other areas will be reflected in the restructuring of the federal revenue allocation formula.

All these changes will however come to naught if we ignore the most vital ingredient in the classroom; the tutor. There was a time when it was commonly said that a teacher’s reward was in heaven even though teachers at that time were very much a part of an upwardly mobile middle class. Since SAP decimated civil service pay in the mid 1980s, teachers have learnt to do the unusual to make ends meet and even then it has been a miserable existence. Few teachers exist in Nigeria today who do not hold down one or more other jobs in addition to their primary jobs. The norm is for a teacher to resume duty as an evening classes teacher after leaving his day job and all too often he has reserved his energy for that second job hence shortchanging the students under his tutelage in the morning. A significant portion of teachers go well beyond the legitimate to engage in masterminding cheating during internal and external examinations. This has become so entrenched over the years that uncooperative teachers have sometimes been killed while bright students who refuse to cooperate in the teachers’ scams are victimized. By the way, the last sentence was the status of things more than 20 years ago when I was a teacher in a Lagos state school. We all can imagine how bad things must have gotten by now.

It would appear that the labourer is worthy of his wage except when he works as a civil servant in Nigeria. 23 years after leaving service as a teacher my peers are vice principals and principals of high schools but I earn in two weeks what they earn in a year even though I know I exert myself less than they do and work in a much more salubrious environment. Almost anyone will agree that a school principal shaping thousands of lives for society’s benefit contributes much more to the nation than a mid level accountant (or engineer, banker, whatever) no matter the industry he is in. How have our values become so distorted that we happily live in this anomalous situation yet have the gall to complain about the falling standard of Education and every other service provided by government? Public schools are so bad today that none but the most desperate parents deign to send their children there. Even the lowliest among us, drivers and artisans who could be imagined not to know the value of education, send their children to private schools. Often the physical structures of the private schools they can afford are not as grand as those of public schools but the sacrificing parents expect and get greater dedication from the teachers in such schools. This dysfunction cannot be allowed to continue and the key is to start paying our teachers (and doctors, police etc) a living wage once again. We must recognize the import of a 99.5%+ devaluation in the value of the naira since 1985 (btw currency devaluation can never exceed 100% and to achieve that the paper must cease to be legal tender) and adjust public wages accordingly over the next several years. Wages must rise to a level that public schools will again attract talent comparable to what a manufacturing or trading company would attract. We are all economic creatures and if we want staff as good as Aliko Dangote gets in his various enterprises then we must pay wages that are not too far from what he pays. If we keep paying peanuts, monkeys will keep churning dunces out of our schools. The new government must display the courage necessary to right this decades old wrong if we truly intend a national rebirth.

Abraham Abiodun Idowu
May 3rd 2015