The madness of foreign education

Last week, chairperson of the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) Senator Binta Masi Garba said this country spends over $2 billion annually to finance students’ education abroad. Some might see this as testimony to Nigerian parents’ love for education but it is more accurately a testimony to national waste, […]

Last week, chairperson of the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) Senator Binta Masi Garba said this country spends over $2 billion annually to finance students’ education abroad. Some might see this as testimony to Nigerian parents’ love for education but it is more accurately a testimony to national waste, profligacy and misplacement of priorities.
Such revelations had been made before. Mr. Ike Onyechere, Chairman of Exam Ethics International recently said that Nigeria spends over N1.5 trillion on students studying abroad. According to Onyechere, Ghana gets N160 billion of these funds annually while Nigerians spend over N80 billion on education in the United Kingdom. A report in 2010 recorded that Nigeria fuels the UK education sector to the tune of N246 billion, which was over 60 per cent of the Federal Government’s 2012 education budget. The report further noted that Nigerians studying in British and American universities spent over N137 billion on tuition and living expenses in the last two academic sessions, or 34 per cent of the Federal Government’s allocation to education for the period.
The National Bureau of Statistics says it has no statistics on the population of Nigerians studying overseas but observers think that the sum quoted by the Senator was in fact conservative. At the last meeting of the Bankers’ Committee, bank CEOs expressed concern that 15 per cent of the forex allocated to them by CBN went to pay school fees abroad. Group Managing Director of Access Bank Mr. Herbert Wigwe said there are no specific figures on how much is going to pay school fees abroad but that reports from different banks indicated that it was not less 15 per cent of the total forex allocation. He said, “There are different numbers that are parading around about the number of children that go to schools overseas. Some people say about one million. Now, if we assume these children pay 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 dollars per annum, the figures are staggering. It means that there is potential demand of $20bn or perhaps a bit more.”
The quest of Nigerians to study overseas has been attributable to many factors such of dilapidated and obsolete school equipment, corruption in the university system and lack of carrying capacity for those willing to undertake university education. Of the over one million prospective students that sit for JAMB exams every year, the universities can together accommodate only about 300,000. Sending children to study abroad however increased greatly in the last decade due to incessant strike action by university staff unions which made students to stay for years without graduating. State governments too, especially in the North, contributed to it by sending thousands of students to study in different parts of the world.
The painful aspect of it is that Nigerian students even go to study in countries that Nigeria assists with teachers under the Technical Aid Corps scheme. While Nigerian kids once went essentially to UK, USA and Russia, Nigerian students in thousands can now be found in Benin, Ghana, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, China, Malaysia, Turkey, Cyprus and Singapore. It is no longer news that foreign universities are profiting from Nigeria’s misfortune as Nigerian youths pay huge sums as tuition fees to foreign universities. This ugly phenomenon must stop. If the huge sums are to be invested in this country’s education sector, others will be flocking to our schools to study.
For one, the incessant university staff union strikes should be ended by government ensuring that it abides by agreements that it enters into with the unions. Where such agreements are deemed difficult to implement, government and the unions should review them in the spirit of give and take. A concerted national effort should also be made to replace obsolete equipment in our tertiary institutions. Finally, if the anti-corruption war were to establish firm roots in the universities, a lot of difference will be seen in their utilization of scarce resources.