in this concluding part of a 2-part article, Daniel explains the problem faced by young Nigerians in search of a foreign education and he offers some options for Nigerian policy makers
In spite of high rate of illiteracy in the country and in our part of the world, it is no longer news that there are more Nigerians seeking education than the country’s educational institutions stretched beyond capacity, could accommodate. In many Nigerian universities it is typical to find 6 students sharing a hostel or a privately rented room, lecture rooms designed for 300 students (with half its chairs missing) now accommodate close to 500 students; the teachers available would find it very difficult to thoroughly teach, examine and supervise these students. And we say nothing about the millions who could not get into the universities.
If you look into the education system at secondary schools which serve as feeders to the universities, the picture is worse. A total of 6 years secondary school education has now been reduced to the possession of 5 credit passes in the SSCE exams, which not many can boast of on the first attempt. Thus on arrival at university, the question is not what one has already knows from secondary school, but what is written on the certificates. At the stage of JAMB’s UTME, the university entrance examination, I think the story gets worse: of every 15 applicants only 1 will be accepted in the university (regardless of how many actually pass the examination).
It is no longer news that Nigerian students are everywhere in the world. In Nigeria, one hears of graduates arriving from far flung places like Kyrgyzstan and Australia. Many Nigerians have been studying in Ghana for decades, but now some are branching out to Benin and Niger Republics and new universities and polytechnics are popping up daily in Nigeria. Yet only recently, students of the University of Abuja protested and insisted that they rather study in programmes that are not accredited than allow these programmes to be suspended by the Ministry of Education.
So Nigerians have over the years become experts of world educational systems; we know which countries force us to write IELTS and which ones respect our NECO; we know where we can study in English and where we have to learn a foreign language before beginning our studies. Of course we know where we can find jobs while we study and where cost of living is best. Perhaps it is this expertise that has drawn thousands of Nigerian youths to study in Scandinavia over the years. In the past, education was tuition-free for scholars from developing countries and all one worried about was food, clothing, shelter and school books.
The ‘free-movers’ of Scandinavia soon discovered a brute fact, cost of living is exceedingly high and jobs are scarce even to those who speak the national languages. Consequently, many of them dropped out of the free education and sought places in the workforce. Now the free education policies have been replaced with expensive tuition fees for everybody; but Nigerians have not stopped coming. They pay their way through school and attempt to work or take periodic breaks from studying to work and save for the next lap. From students there are reports of Nigerian (and other African students) sharing accommodations meant for one person; taking and sharing odd jobs to pay their way and increasingly being supported from home.
What these point to is that the option of seeking foreign education is not as easy as it sound. We need to urgently look at the capacity of the Nigerian nation to educate itself and arm citizens with skills needed to compete in the modern world. In this regard, there is need to revisit the trends of opening up new universities by the Government (at all levels) and the private sector to focus more on expanding the capacities and competences of existing institutions. If at all there must be specialized universities for agriculture, they should teach agriculture and not nuclear physics.
On the other hand, foreign education should not be pursued as an alternative to home training. Instead, government could assist Nigerian institutions to forge partnerships with foreign institutions such that foreign education could be pursued as an addition to, or indeed component of degrees awarded in Nigeria. But there is need to educate the youths – there is no way a decade spent mopping floors in Europe to finance a Masters degree could be thought to be better than studying in a Nigerian university. Yet regardless of the state of institutions in Nigeria, some people would opt to study abroad. This is a fair ambition, but it is not fair when people head to Kyrgyzstan because they are one of the 14 – those for whom the Nigerian educational system cannot give a place to study regardless of their grades.
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Daniel Nengak
Until he took a break to study International Migration and Ethnic Relations at Malmö Högskola in Sweden, Nengak Daniel Gondyi was a Senior Programme Officer at the Centre for Democracy and Development, CDD in Abuja. He holds a Bachelors in International Studies from the Ahmadu Bello University. At CDD, he worked on a number of projects including the West Africa Insight (http://westafricainsight.org ) which seeks to collect and analyse futures information in West Africa. He reads and writes about human rights and democracy in West Africa. He loves cycling, asking questions and reading. He is presently reading Kahlil Gibran’s The Prohphet for a second time. Nengak can be reached via email on nengak.daniel@gmail.com
