21st September, 2010
Everyone knows that education is in shambles all over Nigeria. However, the state of university education in the South-East region is so appalling that members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, had to call out lecturers to protest on the streets. The lecturers in the state-owned universities took to the streets recently when the five state governments in the zone ignored the lecturers who have been on strike since 22 July this year.
At the forefront of the protest was ASUU President, Professor Ukachukwu Awuzie who condemned the rot in the state-owned universities in the geopolitical zone. According to him, the governments have been paying lip service to university education and have failed to take concrete steps to improve facilities in the universities which are in abysmal shape. To make matters worse, non-academic staff have also joined the strike, thus paralysing academic activities completely.
The rot in the state-owned universities in the South-East is also replicated in federal-owned universities where even basic facilities and equipment needed for learning are not available. The absence of facilities needed for conducive learning has turned most universities into glorified secondary schools. In fact, some private secondary schools boast of laboratories where science students carry out experiments whereas universities don’t have such facilities.
We support Awuzie who has blamed Igbo leaders for not speaking out against the eastern state governments for neglecting tertiary education. Awuzie is seeking a minimum benchmark for standard of university education in the east in accordance with the requirement of the National Universities Commission, NUC, on accreditation for universities. Some of the affected state universities are Enugu State University of Science and Technology, ESUT, Imo State Univerity, IMSU and Abia State University, ABSU. The crisis must be resolved now so that the students can resume.
In some of the universities, students do not sit down while receiving lectures because of lack of chairs and tables in the classrooms. Should such institutions be called ivory towers or centres of academic excellence? It is this state of affairs that has given rise to the sprouting of private universities across the country. But how many parents can afford the huge tuition fees demanded by the private universities? Some demand as much as N450,000 per student per session. Only the rich and thieving public office holders can send their children to such universities.
The rot in the nation’s education has persisted because virtually all public office holders and the rich send their children abroad to learn. To these people, it does not matter if the education system collapses completely. The progressive decline in our education system began in the late 80s after the military took over power and bastardized everything while pillaging the nation. Since then there has been no concerted effort to rebuild the decaying infrastructure; even successive civilian administrations that took over power eleven years ago have continued to turn a blind eye to the urgent need to reverse the sad trend.
The future of our youths will continued to be mortgaged if the state and federal governments fail to enact policies that could prevent things from getting worse. The future of the nation’s education so bleak that, even at the moment Nigeria, according the Global Campaign for Education, GCE, has world’s worst education enrolment, with 8.2 million children out of school. With this huge number of children out of school, what is the fate of tertiary education in the next few years? The issue of kidnapping didn’t manifest suddenly. It is a product of the criminal neglect of the youths whose energy could have been properly harnessed to serve the nation in better capacities if they had gone to school and were properly trained and employed after their graduation. Insecurity will persist in our country as long as our idle youths cannot go to school and learn how to improve themselves and contribute their quota to the development of the society.