What is wrong with our education system? Who is to blame?

It is arguable that Nigerian postgraduate students are one of the most sort after breed in the world due to their hard work, talent and perseverance; but the big question is what makes them excel elsewhere but underachieve at home? One major problem is that of the system; student-lecturer relationship is an integral part of […]

It is arguable that Nigerian postgraduate students are one of the most sort after breed in the world due to their hard work, talent and perseverance; but the big question is what makes them excel elsewhere but underachieve at home?
One major problem is that of the system; student-lecturer relationship is an integral part of the learning process. In Nigeria, it is mostly a Master-Servant relationship, while elsewhere it is considered a symbiosis relation where the student provides the services of his talent and the lecturer uses his experience to guide the student. Another problem is that of mentorship; back home, lecturers keep students at arm’s length to the extent that the student is even afraid to ask basic questions relating to his work. Outside the shores of Nigeria, I have seen a third year undergraduate student that co-authored a publication with a mentor in an academic journal. The same cannot be said of our Nigerian undergraduate students. So where is the source of the problem?
Most of the time, lecturers that are supposed to mentor students who are brilliant, talented, and hardworking and with good grades, see the students as competition. I attended an international conference last year and our paper was selected for an award, my supervisor was so happy that he kept on mailing the notification email to people including to the vice chancellor. This is because promotion and appointment is based on anonymous performance evaluation by the lecturer’s students.
In my school, to be due for promotion, you have to graduate at least a master’s student (especially by research) in the last three years under review or a PhD candidate in four years; otherwise the university would not continue to pay your salary without reasonable output.
Elsewhere, people are obtaining Ph.Ds at the age of 23 – 25 years; while it takes a decade for one to obtain a master’s in Nigeria.
When you flip the coin, our universities are suffering from inadequate funding. Universities all over the world today are using digital machines especially in the sciences in conducting experiments while we are still stuck in the analog age; the world has forged ahead in technological advancement in the education sector, while we are still in the 60’s. In our libraries, textbooks that you would find are the ones with brown leaves; We are still using books written between 40s and 70s, books that have undergone many revisions, but unfortunately they are what we have.
In serious nations, they don’t even talk of paper libraries today; the norm is digital library where from the comfort of your home you can access current textbooks addressing issues in the present day. Postgraduate research is not possible nowadays in our country because our universities cannot afford journal subscriptions and laboratory equipments. Most of our universities do not have a functional website, making university ratings of academic performance based on research publications very difficult. If by chance you see one at first glance one might be tempted to disagree with the ratings. Unfortunately, rather than comparing ourselves with universities in the first one hundred in the world for improvement, we always end up comparing ‘ourselves’ with ‘ourselves’.
The big question is where do we go from here? Also there is no level playing ground in the labour market, Nigerian employers are also ‘racist’ in their recruitment strategy, they prefer to employ a person with a foreign certificate even if the person is empty ‘upstairs’ especially those with first degrees, which is unfortunate. A Nigerian graduate spends a minimum of five to six years to obtain a bachelor degree in an ‘ideal’ situation (i.e. no strikes, communal or religious war, etc.).
It is time our lecturers who have laboured in pain saw that we attain a certain level of academic excellence and rise to the occasion and start seeing their products as their possible replacements in the future and not competition; otherwise they would have laboured in vain. The Federal Government on its part, should ensure that funding of the education sector is given priority not like the current 8% of national budget allocated to the sector. The president has talked of sending the first Nigerian to space; however, if we continue at this current level of neglect, we will not be able to effectively send anyone to even Lokoja, Kogi State not to talk of space. God Bless Nigeria.
Abubakar, Abdulhameed Umar is a Graduate Student in Civil Engineering at Kuala Lumpur Infrastructure Universitya