Legislative madness

I have tried to find a polite way of saying this but this is what I could come up with: our men and women in the national assembly have gone mad. I can give you only one telling and incontrovertible evidence. The Daily Trust of November 23 greeted the world with this front page headline: N/Assembly to create 80 varsities, polys and COEs.

According to the newspaper, they have even allocated the new institutions among the six geo-political zones. So, expect a federal university or polytechnic or college of education or all three in your village soon. Ah, the good times are here again.

Shocking? Obviously. If this is legislative chest beating, let us not hesitate to tell them that the sound is disagreeable in our ears, the victims of a determined assault by the political class. Only mad men and women would think that the way to solve a problem is to make it even more problematic. This is a mockery of our educational development. The sector as it is, is a crying national shame. Our universities, federal and state, are dilapidated. Some of the private universities are only marginally better than their public counterparts. Overall, Nigeria is educationally backward. If the sheer number of tertiary institutions alone could be accepted as evidence of a nation’s educational development, our country would be number one in Africa; and most probably number one among developing nations outside India and China.

But we are lagging far behind even some of the poor African countries in education because we have the numbers but not the quality. Poor funding has ruined our education at all levels. I think it would be such a shame if the men and women put there to constitutionally make laws for the good governance of our dear, very dear country, appear to be blissfully ignorant of this. ASUU, the body that has been fighting for as long as any one can remember, to force the federal and state governments to pay some serious attention to funding the basics of tertiary education, suspended its strike in pursuit of this same old goal only a few days ago. While the strike lasted, academic activities were grounded and our children returned home. It would be such a shame if our legislators were unaware of this.

Not one of the federal and state universities is well funded and well staffed. Not one of them can boast of a conducive atmosphere for research and learning because the basic materials for research are just not there. And our national law-makers pretend not to know?

Not one of our more than 100 federal, state and private universities is on the list of the ten best universities in Africa. And you tell me that our legislators are so happy about this that they would rather choose to push the country further down the path of education sans education and human resource development?

The quality of our education has been going down hill such that a few years ago, foreign tertiary institutions questioned the quality of the degree certificates issued by our universities. Parents too have been worried sick about this and those who can afford it, send their children abroad. The children of the poor are left here to acquire the inferior education from which there is no escape. I am told that the number of Nigerian undergraduates in the Ghanaian universities is almost half that of the Ghanaian citizens. In almost every African country and other third world countries, there are Nigerian undergraduates who have escaped the suffocation of an inferior education back home that neither trains them to be useful to themselves nor to the country. I am willing to bet that the national assembly members are so busy making laws that this ugly fact staring them in the face is mistaken for a national approval of their legislative performance.

In the 1980s this country became a pathetic victim of brain drain. Some of our best brains in our universities left for countries that appreciated education and were willing to hire the best brains from wherever they could find them. Our universities have not quite recovered from this national loss. If anything, the situation is much worse today, although the haemorrhage is less sensational now. Inferior institutions can only produce inferior products. It is the law of human development. Are our law-makers that happy that this country, once the pride of African university education whose great scholars in all fields of education were courted by the rest of the world, is merely turning out uneducated but certificated young men and women?

Education is too important and too critical for our national development for a body created by the constitution to make laws for the good of our country to cynically toy with its fate. I find it such a crying shame that the reasons the law makers have offered for this madness is that more universities, polytechnics and colleges of education would remedy the inability of our existing institutions to admit all the qualified young men and women seeking higher education every year. I thought they were not aware that lack of facilities impairs the capacity of these institutions to take in more students. None of them is able to fill its quota allotted them by the National Universities Commission, NUC.

The challenges of our educational development are enormous. At least 14 million children of school age are not in school. Many of them have no hope of doing so. Poor funding is at the root of our educational development. Nigeria, a fabled oil rich nation, has never risen to the UNESCO challenge of committing 26 per cent of its national budget to education. Other African countries are doing much, much better than we are. I expect the national assembly to help the executive branch improve on its current eight per cent of the national budget committed to education.

I thought the national assembly would be part of the solution to the problems we face here. Now it has become part of the problem. I did not think it was the business of the national assembly to establish educational institutions. I thought that was the business of the executive branch of government with the support of the national assembly. We have turned many things on their heads in this country. Let us resist the temptation to turn our educational development on its head. The situation is bad enough as it is. Must we make it worse? Haba.

This very vital sector, the engine of modern development anywhere in the world, needs a state of emergency to rescue it from the morass in which our collective neglect has condemned it. Legislative madness, reflecting the madness among the political class, would only make matters worse, much worse.

I think we need prayers.