When I went to school as a young man, it was commonplace for teachers to admonish pupils by telling them of the falling standards in education. “It wasn’t like this in our own time” was the usual peroration of most teachers when they were confronted by students’ misdemeanour, ranging from lack of commitment down to outright malpractices in examinations and other issues. But the situation has spiralled, and I wonder what yesterday’s teachers would say about the general situation of education today, when education has become part and parcel of the decadent bread-and-butter fantasy land that we now call society.

There is no doubt that much of Nigeria’s social malaise today stems from her rather lopsided system of education where bribery and corruption are as cheap as they have been in the arena of politics, law enforcement, and business. Normally, a sound system of education would be the cornerstone of any developing nation. But education in Nigeria became dangerously perverted when the standards became pitifully privatised alongside other values in Nigeria, namely religion, morality, and the concepts of good and evil. Even recently, democracy in Nigeria is brutally privatised and often confused with the decentralisation of violence and corruption.

Since the closing years of the 20th century, Nigeria has redefined and misinterpreted the meaning and essence of things, concepts, and situations which, in other places where sanity reigns, would have one rational meaning and significance. The bastardisation of education is, of course, a by-product of this scenario, which only questions Nigeria’s claim to being a developing nation. If anything, Nigeria is an under-developing nation. Beyond the caricature educational system, so many other factors can be counted among the evidence. But I shall focus only on education.

The fact that education in Nigeria is cheap is, perhaps, the bane of Nigeria’s development. Beyond cost, Nigerian education, especially in the public schools, is also very cheap in content. This is so much for the primary and secondary schools as for the universities and polytechnics. In the words of Jonathan Sacks, “Education is the transmission of a tradition …Traditions are never lost. They can be renewed or re-invented. Cultures survive … when they attach the highest priority to schools and teachers, and when they see at least part of the role of education as developing individuals articulate in the language of their heritage.”

But I am wondering whether Nigerian education has been conceived and pursued along the above principles. In recent times, Nigerian education has become an easy means to nescience and ignorance, rather than a means to individual and social freedom, which are the germs of great societies. Anybody who has been to Hiroshima can attest to what education and social commitment can do in the transformation of communities and societies. The magic of post-war Japan has, indeed, been a function of a sound educational system and an inspiring commitment to the collective heritage and common aspirations of the people. In no sane community can affordable and quality education be divorced from a holistic and sustainable concept of development. Not only that. Education is one of the major arbiters of socialisation. When it is reduced to mere ability to obtain a certificate by fair or foul means, it becomes a tool for underdevelopment and retrogradation.

For qualitative education to be achieved and sustained, critical value must be placed on it so that those who receive it can see beyond its food-bringing ability and refocus on the imperative to apply the gains of education to the needs of society. In other words, education, especially at the university level needs to be properly valued, if international standards can be attained. What the supporters of the “no-school fees” campaign do not realise is that the almost free nature of university education (especially in the federal universities) is part of the bane of education in Nigeria.

One may say that state universities where higher fees are paid have not fared better. But I think that the fundamental index for determining the justifiability or otherwise of fees is the average income of those from whose pockets the payment is to be made. If Nigerian workers earned adequate income, the argument for fees increase would be much better justified. But all the same, it remains laughable that in today’s Nigeria children in day-care, kindergarten and primary schools pay several times higher than most university students in terms of school fees. This, coupled with lack of adequate funding, has left the university system in a very sorry state.

The fact that education is cheap remains the major problem in the sector. By the word cheap, I am looking beyond cost, at the course contents. As the world widens and seeks for new challenges, curricula in the Nigerian education system seem to be stale and shrinking. I have argued elsewhere that much of the curricula for some major courses in Nigerian institutions of learning have not been reviewed since the end of the civil war. Before now, only the best brains and outstanding scholars were employed in the schools, especially the universities. But today teaching, scholarship, and academics are all-comers things. Similarly, entrance exams to schools, such as J.M.E., have become vicious circus shows where candidates, parents, and invigilators are the fire-eating actors.

A few years ago, a parent ran into me and, not minding that I was a teacher, lamented about her children who had sat for the J.M.E. exams that day. “I heard that English and Mathematics leaked,” she told me excitedly. “I wonder whether these kids were lucky to see copies of the papers before the exams.” She was a feeble-minded parent, perhaps. In recent times, more courageous parents would bribe policemen and invigilators to look the other way while their wards cheated in G.C.E. and J.M.E., or, they simply went to the examination hall to join the army of mercenaries and exam touts who stand by the doors and windows waiting for the opportunity to throw in fraudulent materials to their wards or “clients” in the hall. If parents can help destroy their children by encouraging them to cheat, what does anybody expect from such children when they go into higher institutions where part of the germ of successful scholarship is independent research? And unfortunately, schools in Nigeria of today are full of such hooligans. They are to be found among students as well as faculty. The educational system, especially at the university level, groans under their murderous weight.

I must hasten to add that hooliganism here is not necessarily a poor cousin of vandalism. When the purpose of scholarship is miscarried and its essence confounded, the meaning of scholarship itself becomes hopelessly debased. For me, a negation or misapplication of scholarship is a variant of hooliganism. It is criminal and sinful for someone to take up a teaching position just as a meal ticket. Teaching is a divine vocation by virtue of its necessity to the future and development of society. Those who choose, or are chosen, to be teachers (not cheaters) must offer their soul and show utmost commitment to scholarship if they must have some justification to stand before students for the purpose of inculcating learning and (to some extent) character. Sadly, today the real teachers are largely out of the window and “cheaters”, having taken a front seat, have upset the educational system.

Much of the ignorance that encircles contemporary Nigeria certainly stems from the education industry. It is easy to point to government’s lack-lustre attitude as the major problem of the educational sector. But that cannot be the whole truth. The education industry is also an adversary unto itself. Beyond torn-coat Ministers of Education who even as academics helped to under-develop education, teachers and students have not lived up to expectation. In the lower levels (especially in the public schools), there are quack teachers who cannot read or write good English, and yet English remains the language of instruction. At the higher level, I know lecturers who cannot write one correct sentence; yet they are there teaching and supervising students. There have been cases of lecturers copying or plagiarising works and dissertations of their colleagues.

In a state university in Enugu, lecturers are steeped in bribery and corruption; they would not score any student’s work without collecting sums ranging from N2000.00 to N10, 000.00. The situation is so bad in this university that even technologists and typists impose various tolls and levies on students and collect same unchallenged under various ignoble guises. Of course, this is not an isolated case. Such is the character of most universities these days. I have seen professors whose pastime is to buy books from the United States or United Kingdom for the mere purpose of re-publishing them here with their own names as authors. In an ideal situation, a university is made up of senior and junior scholars (lecturers and students). If we relate Peter Ezeh’s “mould analogy” to the university system, we are bound to get mainly bad blocks (students) from the largely inadequate moulds (lecturers) that populate the universities today.

Given the role of education in human societies, Nigeria’s future remains very bleak indeed. I say so because the educational system is merely a pastiche of the society. This is especially true of the universities which should be centres of excellence, but which have become a pitiable extension of the rotten political system in Nigeria. This is perhaps why they are never run with any defined budget and why some vice-chancellors operate like czars and cannot encourage true freedom which is germane to academic excellence. If the universities – indeed the entire educational system – must be the vanguard of excellence and development, they have to operate at a level higher than the ugly realities that define contemporary Nigeria.

The pointers that emerge from the above recitals are that Nigeria is in crisis as is her educational system; apathy is high, and students, teachers, and parents have thrown in the towel. The only rumbling that resonates in the educational system has been about poor funding and non-payment of salaries. But the problems are much more than that. If and whenever the issues of funding and salaries are resolved, we would sooner or later discover where the real dangers are: that morality and education must go hand in hand in the moulding of the complete human person, that the ultimate purpose of education is divinely central to the pursuit of a modern society, and that in this regard, everybody has fallen short of expectation in Nigeria.

In his review of the Documenta Conference in Lagos in 2002, Dr. Hanno Rauterberg of Die Zeit (newspaper) in Germany remarked that most Nigerian Schools looked like “ruined factories.” This statement is not only true of most primary and secondary schools but also of some universities. And I must add that some look like battle fields where only the learning and internalisation of violence can take place. It was Gabriel Okara who once remarked at an art event in Enugu in 2001 that contemporary Nigerian youths are “the children of corruption and violence.” To me that was a very reflective statement about the present and future of Nigeria. Going from military despotism through so-called democracy (where we have only succeeded in privatising the notion and perpetration of violence), the Nigerian youth has been perpetually located on the ugly side of living where the meaning of socialisation is inverted.

Rather than ameliorate the situation, the Nigeria educational system (like the religious industry) has added to it. And this is quite understandable, not only because the teachers are drawn from the larger society, but also because a good number of our students and teachers, especially at the university level, are not supposed to be in the system. Uninformed lecturers apart, about half of the student population does not have the requisite qualifications. While some secure admission by cheating in J.M.E. exams, others simply do so by forging W.A.S.C./ G.C.E. certificates. There are university students in Nigeria who did not pass G.C.E . Yet, they go through university and graduate in the end. A federal university in Enugu State recently discovered an alarming number of “fake” students among its student population; a single department in one of the faculties had as many as over one hundred fake students who were smuggled into the system by a criminal syndicate operating in the university town. Since this scam was uncovered, no logical action has been taken. The situation calls for concern.

The question, perhaps, is, must every G.C.E. holder go to the university? Why can Nigeria not establish reputable technical schools that can award diplomas in selected vocations such as carpentry, auto mechanics, masonry, draughtsmanship, photography, craft, pottery, printing technology, etc? If this were done, it would reduce the unnecessary strain on the university system while affording some young people the opportunity to gain practical proficiency in some chosen fields without having to go to read for degrees in the universities for which they are ill-equipped.

Writing about the educational situation in India , M. V. Kamath (2000) declared:

One of the major tragedies in India is that there is far too much emphasis laid on college education and far too little in meaningful activity… ‘An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water’…Our schools and colleges are cluttered with poor teachers and poorer students whose sole aim, it seems, is to get a degree in the arts or science without any true concept of what it is they want to get from life or give to society. What we are experiencing and practising …is a colossal waste of manpower because we have our priorities all wrong. Not every student who has matriculation (or equivalent) examination is fit for college studies; and not every student who is fit for college studies will necessarily benefit from them…Too often our young are willing to become poor B.A.s than better electricians or welders.

Kamath could have said the same thing about Nigeria, where university education seems to have replaced the traditional initiation to adulthood. Nigerian degrees have become so cheap that very soon even goats and chickens may aspire to acquire them. This postulation encourages me to believe that the problem of criminal gangsterism (christened “cultism” in Nigeria) derives from the faulty system where the wrong people populate the universities. For it is seldom that genuinely committed, brilliant students would find time for gangsterism. The problem of gangsterism has been aided by the flagrant commercialisation of admission by some myopic vice-chancellors, as it has also facilitated the admission of unsuitable students in most instances. In some universities, admission into certain courses, such as Medicine and Law are sold for as high as N300,000.00, while the cheapest would go for about N50,000.00. Only questionable candidates would opt for these kinds of options, and their conduct as students can often be as dirty as their mode of admission.

Until university authorities and academics rid the system of square pegs in round holes, all efforts to refocus the universities and indeed the educational system on the right track will be in vain. A situation where students go to exam halls and class rooms with guns, knives, and axes should be more worrisome than poor funding. Sometime ago in ESUT, Enugu, a Head of Department was shot in his office. The response of the academics was a procession through the city with stops at N.T.A, E.T.V., and the Government House. This was followed by a “suspension of academic activities.” But did that solve the problem? At other times, lecturers have been shot in the same university. One lecturer is reported to have jumped from a storey building to escape students’ bullets during an examination which he invigilated. He broke his leg and was hospitalised for a long period.

At Nsukka, a professor in pharmacy was shot in January 2004 at his residence on campus and he died like a common chicken. Not long after, another lecturer – younger and also in pharmacy – was chased round Nsukka town by gunmen, but they could not hunt him down. When the gang finally ran out of luck and was arrested, the gunmen were allegedly discovered to be policemen and their “driver” was a student of pharmacy. It was a grisly drama, like a tale out of Hollywood.

The most annoying aspect is that at no time has a powerful statement been issued on these incidents. For government and academics after each incident, it is business as usual. Yet the level of violence in our institutions of learning only affirms the degeneration of the education industry and the larger society and the fact that the (educational) system has been taken over by criminals of all kinds, including students and faculty.

The above recitals do not offer enough courage to anyone to look to the future with much enthusiasm. There is need for an urgent clean-up of the educational industry in Nigeria if the country really hopes in its future. Otherwise, in a few years, the situation we are bemoaning today will certainly become child’s play. Perhaps, when the battle against inadequate funding and poor work condition has been won by university faculty, the very next agendum would be that of internal cleansing so that the Nigerian educational system can be positioned as the vanguard of new values and standards as it should be in any truly developing (not under-developing) nation.