Professor Idowu Sobowale, former Commissioner for Education in Lagos State has said that Nigeria does not have the infrastructure for the kind of education that can make it compete globally.
In an interview with Daily Sun recently, Professor Sobowale who was a former lecturer in the Department of Mass Communications, University of Lagos lamented that education at all levels in the country is not properly funded.
N.B Visit www.campusflava.com for updates and information related to other schools.
He said: “When you have a class of a thousand plus, people are sitting on widows to receive lectures, many people are outside, they don’t even hear what is going on in the class, yet at the end of the semester, are expected to pass...”
He also spoke on the ongoing ASUU strike and why government should adequately fund education.
State of education
The present state of education in Nigeria is a very sad one. God has given us every thing on a platter but we have not utilized those resources to the benefit of our people, rather, our leaders have interest in amassing wealth far in excess of what they and their generation even to the fourth level can use.
Those that are stealing billions and billions, how much of it can they spend, how many people can sleep in two houses at the same time, even in two rooms in one house at the same time, even in two bed in one room at the same time, even the bed you can only occupy a section of it at a given point in time. What is that for?
Most of us who even trained abroad, we see how things are. We see efficiency at its best but the moment we get back here, it is a different thing all together. If it is a curse, I am optimistic that some day the situation will change, God will bring those who will change the situation because I really do not know how to describe our plight.
Poor rating of education
I would say education has not been properly funded at any level, we do not even have the infrastructure: When you have a class of a thousand plus, people are sitting on windows to receive lectures, many people are outside, they do not even hear what is going on in the class and yet at the of the semester they are expected to pass and you are telling me that such product will be the type that will be able to face the challenges of development, no sir, no sir.
Time was in this country when if you went to any university in Nigeria if you get abroad, your certificate will be highly respected.When I went to the US, my certificate was highly respected and many of the things that I did at my undergraduate level were just an advance when I got to the U S. Now, you own a certificate from Nigeria and you want to use it any where, they will have to re-examine you. I do not know if Nigeria is among the first one hundred with our resources, with our exposure, with the number of years of being independent ah ah, that is not good enough.
ASUU’s strike
I am a teacher, I am a parent, the strike like any other one before has put me in a dilemma but I think the time has come for every body to do what is needful in order to get this country moving. Tell me what you can do without education in the twenty first century, virtually nothing. And do we have the infrastructure for the kind of education that can make Nigerian compete favorably with their counterparts else where in the world? My answer is as good as yours. So we need to pay serious attention to education at the primary level, we need to pay attention to education at the secondary level; we need to pay serious attention to education at the tertiary level. Let us resolve the issue once and for all so that when schools resume in the next ten, twenty years, nobody will be thinking of closing or what ever. I do not know any Nigeria university other than the private ones that can boast of a steady calendar, I mean no Nigerian Student can boast of when he/she will pass out. That is not good, that’s not reasonable, that is not desirable, that’s does not make sense that it does not make for growth and development.
How did we get to this bad state
Honestly I wish I knew, I will probably be in a better position to proffer solutions but I think basically greed, ethnicity or tribalism, lack of patriotism, and principally indiscipline are the problems we have and they have militated against our growth and development. In the energy sector for instance, any little money one has will be spent on diesel or petrol to power your generator. As generally known, generators are meant to be stand by but the reverse is case.
It is the PHCN that is the stand by in this area we will be lucky that you have light for two, three hours consecutively usually an hour, one and the half may be two hours and that is it in a whole day. Whereas for about six going to seven years now, Ghana celebrated ten years of uninterrupted power supply. Ghana does not have one tenth of the resources that Nigeria is blessed with. What is our problem? And we are talking about education, we are talking about the Millennium Development Goals or vision 2020, well it will be a mirage until we have people in government who are really dedicated and committed to the improvement of the situation of Nigeria.
For as long as we have people who will not be honest, who will not be committed, who are not disciplined to know that they should not do certain things that they indulge in, people who will only think of themselves and their immediate relations, then we are going know where. For instance, it is not as if our leaders do not know what to do to give us uninterrupted power supply but who will do it? Are they not the same people who will import generators? It amounts to cutting one’s nose to spite his face. We know our problems and if we are sincere, we know how to tackle them.
The way forward
By the time our problems will be turned around for the better, it will be like a miracle. For instance, we know what we should do, but why is it so difficult to do? Simple election we cannot conduct, census we cannot conduct, education we cannot fund. Look at our roads, so bad. If you go from here to Ibadan, Ijebu, Abeokuta anywhere then you will really be sorry for your vehicle. What are we talking about?
There are countries that are far less endowed than we are that are proud of solid roads. Take Swaziland in southern Africa, for instance, it is a very tiny country of 1.7 million, sugarcane is the only thing they have and maybe corn but they have good network of roads, their electricity does not fail, water flows regularly. Last year, when we were there, they had a pipe burst and it was going to take a few days to fix the thing for one week they were advertising apologies in their two newspapers for people that were affected assuring that they were working. They gave a time but before that deadline, they have to inform the people.
I mean we can do the same thing here, we can even do far better. We have people who have the competence, who have knowledge, who have every thing but when comes to doing the right thing here it become a different story. It is the same Nigerians that are making waves in developed countries in their critical sector, you find Nigerians there contributing to the growth of development of those nations but when they come here, even for those who are genuinely motivated, the resources are not there.
Well I have stated this several times, government must rededicate itself to education funding, aside that, government will have to scale down activities in other sectors in order to give education a serious boost unless that happens, we can not achieve vision 2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment