In the run-up to the last Ekiti governorship election in June, I wrote a piece about Ayo Fayose, a little reminder of some of the scandals that led to his being kicked out of office the first time round. To my shock, a lot of young responders on Facebook never got it. They thought I was saying that because Fayose was once a cab driver in London, that ought to disqualify him from seeking office as governor. How they arrived at that bizarre conclusion was a feat only known to them. But for me, that episode was a sad reminder that education has hit the buffers in Nigeria.
And when the West African Examination Council released the results of the May/June 2014 Senior Secondary Certificate Examination a few weeks ago, no further proof was required. It was a sight for sore eyes. It was failure on a most disheartening scale.
It’s been a gradual slide. We fell off the cliff, I think, in 2011. That year, only 30.91 per cent of all candidates who sat the WASSCE passed (i.e., got at least five credits). Later that same year, in Edo State, all the secondary school pupils who sat the National Examinations Council failed. All of them! In 2012, the pass rate for WASSCE was 38.81 per cent. In 2013, that rate dropped again, to 36.57 per cent. 2014 records a 31.28 per cent pass rate with 8.61 per cent of the candidates alleged to have engaged in exam malpractices.
Hhmm…this is quite sobering and the whole thing reads like a bad joke. Please, think about what this means in raw numbers. In 2014, of the 1,692,435 youngsters who sat the exams, 1,163,010 of them failed. That is nearly 1.2 million candidates!
In this country, we’ve always had ministers and commissioners of education. These people collect handsome salaries, live in fantastic mansions and have 24-hour police protection. And since 2007, we’ve had educators as presidents. What has been their collective impact on the standard of education here?
In contrast, our kids are excelling in schools abroad – particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. They routinely come top of the class from primary right through to tertiary level. In fact, there is a joke in the UK that if you don’t see a Nigerian and a Chinese in any particular university, do not let your kid go there. So, what has happened to education in Nigeria?
Well, the most obvious thing that stands out is that there is something wrong in the way education is delivered here. I’m not certain that funding is the main issue; after all, a sizable chunk of those pupils would have gone to private schools. And some of the teachers are hopelessly inadequate.
Another reason for these mass failures is this recent phenomenon called “Expo.” A few days to the exams, some websites would claim that they have the genuine WASSCE questions. A lot of candidates rush there. They get access to the questions, for a fee, of course. At this point, they cannot go to their teachers for help as they would have to explain from where they got the questions. So, they approach undergraduates and other people who themselves are products of previous mass failures. Half-baked undergrads provide half-baked and oftentimes, outright wrong answers (for a fee of course) which the candidates share among themselves in their group. Furthermore, this being Nigeria, 419 practitioners have caught on and they too set up their own “genuine” WASSCE questions websites. The result? Mass failure.
Moreover, there are “specialised” exam centres where some parents and invigilators join forces to cheat on behalf on their children and wards. A lot of the candidates have come to put their trust in such centres and in prayers rather than study well. Wrong answers given in such centres permeate the whole group.
The frightening thing for me is that it would not be possible for all 1.2 million candidates that failed this year’s WASSCE to sit the exams again. There is simply no scope for that. So, universities and polytechnics and colleges of education would have to lower their minimum admission requirements in order to get candidates because, quite frankly, those institutions need their money to stay in business.
This means that, by hook and by crook, and via our other miracle-working ways, people who cannot pass secondary school exams will in a few years become “graduates” and flood the job market. Goodness! The implication and the multiplier effect on the nation’s economy (and socio-cultural bearing) are dire.
Some of these young people will become journalists and editors, a few will find their way into the banks, some will become teachers, some might become First Ladies, while the rest will end up in Local Government administration. And if this has been the pattern for the past 20 year or so, it is no wonder we are where we are today!
To redress this situation, I think we really have to look again at the curriculum with a view to revamping it. We need to redesign our teacher training programmes (because what obtains at the moment is clearly failing young people), and perhaps introduce performance-related pay for teachers. We also need to improve infrastructure and reduce class sizes. And government, from the federal to local council levels, has got to enforce minimum standards in school, not just colluding with school authorities and collecting bribes.
But the government cannot do this alone, and education is too important to be left entirely in the hands of government anyway. Parents must play a more active role. It is not enough to pay the school fees – no matter how expensive. Some young people spend entirely too much time on DSTV watching football and Mexican soaps. Parents have got to be more hands on. Conversely, some parents have to resist the urge to overburden school kids with disproportionate economic undertakings.
I know it is a rat-race out there and we have to put food on the table and live comfortable enough lives, but we’ve got to take care of the future too. A look at the WASSCE result table shows quite a few states in the North/North-East at the root of the table. These are the same states now in the worst grip of Boko Haram. That’s the link. That’s the future unless we begin to change things now.
Dr. Egbejumi-David, a policy analyst, wrote in from Whyteleafe Road, London, UK, via demdem@hotmail.co.uk
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