This is a blessed country. Wherever you turn, all you see suggests greatness. The main snag though is that, whether in terms of men or materials, the greatness is only latent. Nigerians hear and see the greatness of our country but we neither can touch nor enjoy it.
Look at how great our political system is, and the great men and the great women who people it. However, six decades after, our flamboyant democracy run by great political engineers and great political architects has not begun let alone made any appreciable progress vis-a-vis the journey of nation building. Look also at our health sector and what immediately hit you are a thousand and one ways of how not to build a country. It’s not something I want to admit but the truth is that our great country has become a global laughing stock for Stone Age infrastructure, medical tourism, brain drain, quackery, name it.
Unfortunately, this painful reality is not confined to just the aforementioned two sectors. National unity, economy, agriculture, transportation, and most other aspects of the Nigerian life are a mere shadow of what should be. Make no mistake about it, the blame for the sad situation of things cannot and should not be borne in whole by the current administration. In fact, the blame for the horrendous rot should not be for just government past and present, it should as well be for the citizenry.
By our sickening apathy, disunity, cynicism, hypocrisy and corruption, we as citizens are 65 to 70% responsible for where our country is. We are too insensitive, too laid back, too clannish, too religious and above all too anti-Nigeria. There’s nothing in the way we lampoon Nigeria as well as everything and everybody Nigeria to suggest pride, love, joy, patience and godliness. We waste no time in insulting our leaders at all levels, who in any case generally don’t seem to care a hoot about us or the country.
If you listen to the radio, watch television, read the papers or follow the social media and hear Nigerians talk about their country and leaders, you would puke. Worse, you would choke when you hear or read what leaders say about one another or the very people they were elected or appointed to serve. My point is that the trouble with Nigeria is partly leadership-based and partly citizenry-based. Nigeria needs its leaders and the masses on one page, working together -honestly and assiduously.
Which takes us next to one of the fundamental drivers of nationhood -education. How does Nigeria stand in the sector, in terms of infrastructure and human statistics? Without pointing the finger, are both the leaders and the people proud of our educational quality? Can our teachers and students compete at the global marketplace when it comes to knowledge, employability, technology, pay and morale?
The one answer to the foregoing cannot be gainsaid. Nigeria is in hot soup, educationally speaking as indeed in most other sectors. Our leaders and citizens pay lip service not only to educational budget, personnel and efforts but also to products and results. Nigeria voted a paltry 6.3% of its 2021 budget (that is N742.5 billion out of N11.7 trillion) to education.
Described as the worst in a decade by National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) that provision doesn’t tell the whole story. Here it is: of the 742 and a half billion naira, N615.1 billion is for recurrent expenditure (personnel and overhead costs) while N127.3 billion is devoted to capital expenditure. Meaning: for this year, the change Nigeria wishes to see in its education sector is worth N127,300,000,000. To understand the depth of the mess, please convert that into USD or GBP or Euros.
Alas, that is not all. Someone recently pointed out to me that ours is probably the only country in the world which hurriedly dispatches first-class graduates into other sectors or overseas while retaining their average colleagues to teach or lecture. I hope and pray that is not true. I hope and pray that education is getting commensurate attention and action by government across all tiers.
For instance, going forward, only health, social welfare and agriculture should challenge or come anywhere near education in budgetary provisions. Teachers just like medical and security workers should have a take home pay that not only takes them home but also ensures that their family and they are comfortable thereat. Our children, from primary school all the way to post-graduate, should enjoy incentives to read harder and wider so they come back and add the much-needed value to this beautiful country. Of course, mention must be made of the urgent need to rewire our curriculum at all educational strata and to create employment and a workable system.
Furthermore, as with everything else, education is not merely for government to fix. Parents and the private sector have a huge role to pay. Let us never buy admission or result or job for our wards. Let those who can afford it grant scholarships to our young people.
Let us as a society discontinue -effective today- the illiterate mannerism of putting money, power, position, ethnicity and allied weightless weighing scales of influence ahead of education. And, while we are at that, let us agree conclusively that never again shall paper qualification enjoy such primitive bragging rights in our scheme of importance. Nigerians must stop treating education as criminally as we have done the last three, four decades if we want Nigeria to break into the league of countries that crave a sane future. We should never again humiliate education by allowing it to kowtow to mediocrity -as we tended to do all through our first century.
God bless Nigeria!