Nigeria Content Online

Last
week, the Ondo State governor and arguably one of the more dynamic
state executives in the country, Olusegun Mimiko fired a number of
broadsides against the enduring yearning of Nigerians for foreign
education. Basically, the state governor was scandalised by the huge
transfer of naira to mostly western countries by Nigerian parents,
government and private organisations seeking to educate Nigerian
youngsters in foreign climes. More specifically, Mr. Mimiko said this
huge sum of money is enough to turn around the parlous state of
tertiary education in the country. He may well be right. It is not for
nothing that one of the booming areas of foreign interest in Nigeria
these days is in education: possibly at least three foreign -sponsored
education fairs probably take place in the country every other month to
expose

Nigerian students to admission processes for western universities and
others on different continents. It is also a particular bogey of
education activists that government officials remain wedded to the
ambition of training their children abroad. Every little official in
the local, state or federal establishment wants his or her children
educated in fancy – and not so fancy schools abroad. It is often
muttered about that this fondness for foreign education is one reason
why government officials do not really care about providing public
schools with the required resources to make them attain their past
standards, not to mention meeting up with modern demands. An extension
of this is the suspicion that a large part of the funds that should
have been invested in the schools is actually stolen.

There are no statistics on the number of Nigerians enjoying the benefit
of foreign education. But the figures should be in the hundreds of
thousands. A large number of them are in the west, but there are
substantial numbers in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and,
increasingly west and south Africa. The reason why Nigerians travel
abroad to get educated can be found in the wide variety of courses they
pursue. The genuine pain of Nigerian education activists and now Mr.
Mimiko notwithstanding, it is hardly possible or desirable to seek to
stop Nigerians from educating their children anyway they can – and to
the best of their ability.

There is one
reason why many parents also increasingly prefer to send their children
to private elementary and secondary schools namely the quality of
education on offer in Nigeria right now leaves much to be desired.
Under funded and mismanaged, public schools in Nigeria are overwhelmed
by the large number of students they have to train. As for tertiary
institutions, the problem is capacity.

According to
Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), over
300,000 students who passed in the recent Universities Matriculation
Examination (UME) will not be able to gain admission to a university
due to lack of space for them in any of the nation’s private and public
universities.

This is a yearly
ritual and is not likely change until more universities are built to
accommodate this growing number of youngsters. Then there is the
uncertainty over the school calendar. A recent NEXT report stated that
the business of foreign education recruiters boomed during the last
strike action by university lecturers. Students only know when they are
admitted. Frequent strikes make it almost impossible for them to
calculate when they will leave the university as a five-year course may
well take six or more years.

Then there is the
very real fear that Nigerian companies have a soft spot for applicants
bearing foreign-awarded degrees. There has been a lot of talk about the
fact that Nigerian graduates are virtually unemployable – and there may
well be reasons to back this up. But the likelihood of getting better
reception from prospective employers is a mighty spur to a young
person’s desire to study abroad.

The upshot of all this is that the rush for foreign degrees is a
symptom of a much larger social malaise and cannot be treated in
isolation. Putting more money in public schools and retraining our
educators would be a good way to start the process of rebuilding trust
in our education system.