Sir: With today’s poor funding in our educational system, corruption, lack of infrastructure, lack of good teacher welfare, lack of good teaching aid, and lots more, will there be a future for the next generation?
The educational sector in Nigeria has been repeatedly lampooned for failing to contribute to the development of the nation. In return, educators and various stakeholders in this sector have continued to list several reasons for the failings in the educational sector, saying that unless all hands are on deck, such challenges can only be surmounted.
Our educational sector today faces prominent problems, such as funding. Not mentioning funding in this context as our top priority will be a grave mistake, as many vice chancellors at the federal universities are going through hell. My reasons for writing this are that when the Vice Chancellor of the University of Maiduguri, Professor Aliyu Shugaba, finally broke the camel’s back and decried today’s educational system, he described how eager he was to leave his seat as the situation was so pathetic.
“I am keenly waiting for time to exit my office because it’s no longer interesting to me, said Professor Aliyu Shugaba. Neither is it interesting to the students, as the fact here is that education is not adequately funded in Nigeria. An instance was Nigeria’s 2020 education budget, which was far away from the 26 per cent of the national budget recommended by the United Nations.
Corruption today is still our major concern in the educational system, as it seems to be the one killing our sector. Little wonder, the late Chinua Achebe, the popular author of Things Fall Apart and Africa novels, said, “If Nigeria doesn’t kill corruption, corruption will definitely kill Nigeria.” I think it has started killing the educational sector, if not that it has already killed it, as today lecturers do collect bribes from students to pass them, students do pay senior colleagues to write examinations for them, and lots more other nonchalant acts at the institution need to be considered.
Again, our infrastructure in public universities today is pitiful and requires everybody’s contribution to sympathise with Nigerian public university students in these disastrous situations. This is because many public universities today have collapsed due to a lack of infrastructure for learning, the environment is not conducive for both teaching and learning, there is no equipment like projectors to facilitate the teaching or learning processes, mosquitoes today at our universities can compete with the number of students because of a lack of spreading insecticides and bush burning, the light on campuses is no longer stable, and students at Nigerian public universities are going through a lot of hardship that seems too much for them to handle.
Who is that capable person to rescue Nigerian students? This is because the welfare of lecturers today is not encouraging at all, as the meager salary has nothing to write home about. This poor welfare must have greatly contributed to the problems the educational sector is going through. The workers in the sector are all demoralised as they are in high need of motivation, incentives, and encouragement from the government to keep the system going.
I therefore appeal to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to come to our rescue as Nigerian public universities, which are on the verge of collapsing, need to be revitalised to bring back the good old days memories like the privileges, favours, and conducive learning environment that public university students enjoy.
Source: The Guardian
