Ahmad
It was Issa Aremu who told me the story in Ilorin, early this week. When WAEC results were released in 2008, the Registrar of the examination body noted that the failure rate was worse thatn the previous year. However, it did not set alarm bells ringing in the country and the ruling elite carried on its irresponsible habit of looting the country blind. But when the stock market lost about ten percent of it value, It was as if the world was about to come to an end! A lot of looted fund had been invested therein and Nigeria’s ruling elite was inconsolable in its sadness! Well, a similar scenario is now on our hands, because last Friday the West African Examination Council released the results of the May/June 2009 Senior School Certificate Examination.
Announcing the results in Lagos, WACE’s Head of National Office, Dr. Iyi Uwaidae said out of a total of 1,373, 009 candidates, representing 25, 99 percent obtained credits and above in English Language and Mathematics and at least three other subjects. What the statistics released underlined was that there was a failure rate of seventy-five percent during this year’s examinations! Incredible as these figures are, they do not seem to have concerned all who matter in our country. Nobody, at least within the ruling circles: neither of our teacher president and vice-president or their birthday partying minister of education. Sam Egwu, has made any statement about the unacceptable and worrisome trend in the results of the basic requirement for admission into university. The truth is that they cannot be bothered.
But the Nigerian people must be bothered. This is because the results are a fair reflection of the deep crisis in the nation;s educational system which has built up over the years. If the foundation of education is as crisis-ridden as has been so graphically expressed by the WAEC figures, then it is blear that there really is no hope Nigeria’s future, whatsoever. It is like digging ourselves into a hole, and choosing to bontinue to dig. There can be no salvation with such a hare-brained decision! The Nigerian ruling class is a past master in delusions and bombast, regularly setting empty targets of development which deep down it knows will never be met; the latest in the Vision 20-20-20. Whatever it means! How does a nation set itself visioning targets when it is not even getting the fundamentals right beats the imagination!
The truth is that over the past quarter of a century or thereabouts, we have seen a gradual slide at the primary and post-primary levels of our educational system. These have been largely due to the sharp rise in enrolment which the UPE of the 1970s encouraged and then the subsequent per capita drop in investment in the sectors, remunerations for teachers suffered; the inspectorate systems declined and as the number of students outstripped the capacity of schools, the new philosophy of the market, which valorized money above all other values, made traching an unattractive profession; while the incentive to study hard was lost among the students. Our schools are no longer the redoubts of hope for a better future earned from honesty and hard work but are today warrens of earning the fast, not-worked for, butk; cultism; rape; clandestine and open prostitution; violence and of teaching and administrative staff extorting money from students and parents colluding to help their children cheat through schools, from primary, through secondary and up to the tertiary level!
This is the foundation upon which Nigeria’s future is being constructed by its unconscionable ruling class. Again the reason is not farfetched: they have stolen enough money to send their children abroad or to very exclusive schools here. There have been half-hearted reforms that do not go far enough or really miss the point about this very fundamental basis for national progress. Some of these alleged reforms have included open humiliation of teachers while monies thrown at the problems at hand, end up in the pockets of bureaucrats and politicians. But in most cases, even the problems are ignored as if they do not matter. Os while the public primary and post-primary school system is allowed to go to the dogs, they build private schools that their children attend before being famed out into exclusive schools abroad, with money stolen from our public purse.
Patriots must fight to reclaim the public school system and ensure they work efficiently because that is the only bais upon which a national project of education for the liberation of Nigeria from its bandit ruling class can be constructed. Even the most advanced capitalist country, the USA, invests heavily in its public school system! The WAEC results have come against the backdrop of the killings of Boko Haram disciples, condemned for preaching against Western education. Yet our univerisites have been closed for about four months under the presidency of a teacher; isn’t that worse than Boko Haram? That same president is said to be away in Saudi Arabia to attend the opening of a university have been closed for about four months under the presidency of a teacher; isn’t that worse than Boko Haram? That same president is said to be away in Saudi Arabia to attend the opening of a university! It is a joke carried too far, but these jokers are toying with the future of Nigeria!
