To the minister of education

To the minister of education

DEAR Professor Babalola Aborisade, let me begin with concrete examples. In a friendly chat at a conference in England last year, a lecturer at a prestigious British university tapped me on the shoulder and asked (not his exact words): Niyi, we see very few Nigerians postgraduate students in my department these days. Even the few are absolutely ill-prepared for advanced studies. What's happening? As the chat progressed, I discovered that my friend had spoken in a characteristic British understatement: his encounter with Nigeria's escalating illiteracy was much more profound, more drastic. A sensitive, conscientious academic who knew Nigeria in her better days, he listened with aching attention as I launched into a passionate narrative of Nigeria's (recent?) slide into illiteracy. Tea break over, we returned to the conference hall, my narrative still uncompleted...

A couple of weeks later, and now back in the United States, another colleague bared his mind about the poor quality of his recent crop of Nigerian graduate students. I am having to cope with graduate students in political science, he lamented, who have hardly about Plato, who think Kwameh Nkrumah lives somewhere in Bangladesh, whose knowledge of Karl Marx does not go beyond sketchy bits from newspapers. We have to ask them to take foundation courses with undergraduates, and so they end up spending the first year of a supposed graduate programme struggling with remedial courses. Many of these students are quick on the update, and swiftly take advantage of their new facilities, but for some, the damage done in the Nigerian classroom can hardly be repaired in an American University.

My British colleague is a teacher of English and literary studies who has read Soyinka, Achebe, Clark, and others, and interacted with the best of Nigerian letters. Now he wonders why recent graduates from the country that produced these accomplished writers cannot distinguish between simile and metaphor, why they know so little of literary theory and even less of literary criticism and other fundamental practices of literary discourse. My other colleague is a professor of political science. So, when these complaints emerge from the Humanities and the Social Sciences, you can imagine what the situation must be in medicine, engineering, technology and the basic sciences.

But Honourable Minister, I must confess that I found nothing new in the observations of my two foreign colleagues. As a Nigerian academic and former head of Nigeria's oldest department of English, I am frightfully aware of the downward curve in our educational graph. I know where the nose dive began. I am scared of the tragedy of the landing. For in the past 10 years education in Nigeria has become an expensive charade, an empty, stultifying ritual for raw or half-baked graduates inflicted on Nigerian society for the dissemination of ignorance and the perpetuation of darkness...

Yet another example: about four years ago, at the Senate confirmation of examination results in one of our universities, the department of computer science provoked an uproar. Of the 40 odd candidates presented by the department, about seven came up in First Class, while numerous others were in upper second. The cause of the senate uproar was not just the inflation in the figures, the hall was rent with shouts of "Haba! How did they make it?" For we all knew where the department of computer science was on campus; what we never saw were the computers which the students got their "science" from, and the teachers who taught them. So the conscientious ones in Senate shouted "Fraud!" A protracted debate ensued, every syllable of which was laced with anger and frustration. In the end the results were approved in the interest of the hapless candidates since they were not in any way responsible for the plight of their department. But the case left reverberations far beyond the Senate chambers.

This, Honourable Minister, is the situation in many of our universities and colleges today: mandated to make bricks without straw, compelled to watch helplessly as cherished academic standards run utterly to seed, and the country takes its "quantum leap" into illiteracy and darkness. The "finished products" of our educational system cannot serve the country well; they cannot justify the country's investment in their education. Their teachers, disabled by poverty, low morale, and inadequate teaching tools, find no joy and satisfaction in the job they do. For them, therefore, it cannot be business as usual. Anyone who feels satisfied with Nigeria's educational system today has no business being in the education profession in the first place. This is why the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is out at the barricades again. Having committed their entire career to the fight against ignorance and illiteracy, they know when these monsters are up on a counter attack. What they seek are the weapons to destroy these preyers on Nigeria's progress.

Honourable Minister, I must point out that your attitude and approach to the present crisis have been so disturbingly predictable, so shocking, unimaginative, very much in the tradition of your predecessors in the dark days of Nigeria's military dictatorship. Instead of bold, visionary measures capable of addressing the present crisis (yes, Minister, that is what it is a deep-seated, tremendous crisis!), what we have are infuriating cliches which only serve to deepen the gulf between your ministry and ASUU. For instance, when about three weeks ago you accused ASUU of searching for "the tunnel at the end of the light" The Guardian Online, Wednesday, March 14, 2001), barely one month after your assumption of office, the tone you set is that of a new minister rearing for a fight and very eager to get one. And when you talked about the need to "moderate radicalism with rationalism," you were just a trope away from the rhetorical whiplash of the military dictators of the past who saw "undue radicalism" as the mighty foe on Nigerian campuses, and used that as an excuse for clamping down on voices of positive dissent.

You talk so glibly, so self-righteously about patriotism as though the other party, ASUU, has no access to that supreme virtue. And I ask: what kind of "patriotism" are you talking about? The type which sees the utter rot and decay in the educational system, but shuts its eye and keeps on pretending for the love of country that all is well? The type which condones the production of medical doctors who hardly know what side of the chest the human heart is, or civil engineers who cannot design a culvert? Dear Minister, the government you serve talks so bravely about technology transfer and foreign investment; now I ask you: have you ever considered the kind of educational system that produced the foreign messiahs whose technological expertise Nigeria so slavishly desires its commitment in terms of policy and material resources, its sustained tradition of research and innovation? As a former university professor yourself, do you need anyone to tell you the inevitable interdependence between the educational standard of a country and its level of socio-economic development?

Honourable Minister, take time off your "busy schedule" today and pay a visit to any of our universities. Enter any of the classrooms. Take a seat among 1,000 students in a space meant for 200. Don't block that bedlam of human traffic. Look at the windows; count how many louvres are left. From there move on to the student hostels. Move near the toilets, (make sure you have your doctor around). Proceed to the laboratories, but please with your helmet on, because of falling objects from caved-in roofs. Look at the dry rusty water faucets, empty stores, cracked test tubes, leaking beakers "science labs" without experiments. Then nominate one of the researchers in these labs for the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Don't leave the campus without a visit to the library. Take a look at the shelves; ask how many of the books and journals are more recent than 1980. If your official car has managed so far to survive the potholes on campus roads, move on to the university bookstore. Witness the ubiquitous cobweb and the dust, those dog-eared, exfoliated primary school pamphlets sitting pretty where university textbooks used to stand. Breathe in the splendid aroma of illiteracy. Take a look at the faculty list; ask why some of Nigeria's best brains have been forced into exile abroad. Pay the vice-chancellor a courtesy call. Then summon a joint meeting of university council, senate, and the student body. Preach to them your sermon of "rationalism" and "patriotism". Listen to their responses.

Honourable Minister, Nigeria has a serious problem on its hands. Its children are being raised to be "patriotic" illiterates. In case you need to be told, you oversee the most important but grossly neglected ministry in the country today. The military clobbered the universities and pulverized the entire educational system because the enlightenment that comes there from runs counter to military's ideology of despotism and darkness. Now is the democratic aftermath. But how can you run a genuine democracy without a sound educational system? How can a country mired in darkness and illiteracy take control of its destiny? Look beyond the Nigerian shores, Honourable Minister. For the world outside the future has already begun a future of super-fast micro chips and the cyber super highway, space exploration, high commerce, mapping of the human genome, etc, while Nigerian keeps squirming in Stone Age stupor, unable, even in the 21st century, to generate electricity for its own needs or put a bridge over a river. The solution to the country's problems must begin from your ministry, and you need to realise the enormity of the burden on your shoulders.

This, surely, is no time for ego tripping. No poster war or leafleting will solve the country's educational problems. Honourable Minister, the denizens of motor parks and public squares who are inundated by your leaflets simply cannot read! We must make sure that this stand-off between you and ASUU does not degenerate into a showdown. In many ways, both of you operate within the same constituency and should therefore pursue the same goals: the rehabilitation of Nigeria's educational system, the dissemination of enlightenment, and the renewal of the Nigerian spirit battered in many years of tyranny by military dictators and their civilian collaborators. An agreement presently stands on your desk, reached after four grueling months of mediation and negotiation. In it is the recipe for the resuscitation of the Nigerian university system. Two months in office is enough for you to contact your "principals" so that the formal signing of that agreement can take place. Time is not on our side! Nigerian education is in a state of emergency. Please act now. Our country has known many education ministers in its recent history. Some of them we remember with a curse on our lips. Honourable Minister, on what side of History would you want to be remembered?

YOU talk so glibly, so self-righteously about patriotism as though the other party, ASUU, has no access to that supreme virtue. And I ask: what kind of "patriotism" are you talking about? The type which sees the utter rot and decay in the educational system, but shuts its eye and keeps on pretending for the love of country that all is well? The type which condones the production of medical doctors who hardly know what side of the chest the human heart is, or civil engineers who cannot design a culvert? Dear Minister, the government you serve talks so bravely about technology transfer and foreign investment; now I ask you: have you ever considered the kind of educational system that produced the foreign messiahs whose technological expertise Nigeria so slavishly desires its commitment in terms of policy and material resources, its sustained tradition of research and innovation? As a former university professor yourself, do you need anyone to tell you the inevitable interdependence between the educational standard of a country and its level of socio-economic development?

October, 2001