Thursday, August 15, 2013

ASUU: What is wrong with the FG?


By Msonter Anzaa

“My good woman, perhaps you will see many a day when all the food in the house is a loaf of bread. Even so, give every child a piece and send your children to school.”
   The 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was a man greatly committed to education. When he made this statement to the wife of a soldier, who came to the president to complain that she no longer received the allowances due to her husband, America was at war against the states of the South. Mr. Lincoln himself received no more than a one-year worth of formal education. Yet because of his intense desire to learn, he grew from a crude farm boy in the countryside – being a fighter, trader, boatman, postal worker, lawyer – to become the President of his country. It is remarkable that even in the 18th Century the American government knew that its country could not develop without education. Today however, about three centuries later, its Nigerian counterpart is still struggling with itself to decide whether education is important at all.


Nothing new can e said about the place of education in national development. The education sector in Nigeria is not just dying – it has died! We see the evidence every day in graduates who cannot help themselves, let alone the society; who themselves have become a burden to the nation. We lament each day the lack of jobs in the labour market because it is starved of innovative ideas. Complicit in this death are a number of players, chief of whom is the Nigerian government and the lip service it pays to educational development. Sometimes one is tempted to conclude that themselves possessing an education of doubtful quality, men and women in the government must have decided that one does not really need a better education to succeed in the country. 

 How else do you explain this scenario? At the seat of power when the ASUU/FGN agreement was reached in 2009 was a certain citizen of the country, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan with his master Umaru Yar’Adua. Note that before his journey into the goldmine of politics, Dr. Jonathan himself had been a lecturer in the university, a member of ASUU. He wore the shoe and knew where it pinched. Even before then, as an undergraduate back then, Student Jonathan must have attended a lecture during which he neither saw nor heard the lecturer because of the crowd and the insufficient lecture halls. Those days, he must have joined his colleagues in lamenting the government’s neglect of the system and wished he had power. Today, the story has changed, and the man has changed sides.

 It is not his fault anyway. The government of Nigeria has an outstanding history of neglecting the educational system. Poor Ebele is only consolidating on the “reforms” of his predecessors. Dr. Jonathan hurriedly ordered the establishment of six more certificate-printing centers alias federal universities, across the country. He did not think the system needs a total overhaul and massive funding. The UNESCO recommends 26% of the annual budget to education, but Nigeria does not comply. Here is the extract of budgetary allocation to education in other African countries as written by Steve Okecha in Newswatch of October 1, 2008: “Botswana spends 19.0 percent; Swaziland, 24.6; Lesotho, 17.0; South Africa, 25.8; Cote d’Ivoire, 30.0; Uganda, 27.0; Tunisia, 17.0, and Morocco, 17.7 percent.” I admit that what we should do in the educational sector will take courage, commitment and long-term vision. It is not a quick, cash-and-carry or build-and-commission affair. Unfortunately, the Nigerian politician is a creature with remarkable myopia whose farthest vision of the future is the next general elections.

 Madam Okonjo-Iweala told the nation on Tuesday that government does not have resources to meet the demands of the striking ASUU. We must get to a point in this country when students will learn only in history books that strikes often occurred in the educational system; that schools often were shut for many months; that government always claimed it had no funds to salvage the system, and that many graduates often did not learn anything while in school. That will be a time when we will not import from China, electrical products which our graduates should be producing here at home and creating jobs; a period when innovation will drive our economy and graduates could turn down job offers because the employer does not pay health or housing insurance. This feat is possible, but we cannot achieve it until we address whatever is wrong with the Federal Government of Nigeria.

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