Under normal circumstances, the unimpressive results achieved by private candidates who participated in the 2020 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) would have attracted shrill headlines in newspapers and on television. But, in abnormal times like this, many aspects of our lives are shoved aside. We live in a season of fear, hysteria, panic shopping, confusion about the difference between the seasonal flu and coronavirus that has grabbed the world by the jugular. There are extraordinary stories about the impacts of the virus in different countries, including general misinterpretations of how and why some countries are hardest hit while others have experienced low fatality rates. The times are not normal anymore. 
In the first week of March 2020, there was news that a total of 3,892 candidates representing 32.23 per cent of those who took the senior school certificate examination successfully obtained credit in a minimum of five subjects, including English Language and General Mathematics. Olu Adenipekun, head of the Nigeria national office of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), who announced the results, confirmed the figures. While we must keep in mind that this result represents an improvement on last year’s examination, it is a marginal enhancement. Last year, 26.08 per cent of candidates obtained credit in a minimum of five subjects compared to the number of candidates who met that mark this year.
While we should also note that the examination was meant for private candidates, that should not be taken as an acceptable excuse for the second-rate achievement. The overall performance is unquestionably poor. It is inexcusable. It is unimpressive. The result cannot inspire other students and their parents. A large majority of the students who did not achieve credit in five subjects or more cannot serve as role models for their peers.
Mass failure in examinations conducted by WAEC has become a yearly scandal that has sullied the image of secondary school education in Nigeria, even though some students take the examinations as private candidates. Mass failure in examinations conducted by WAEC is taken as a measure of the quality of secondary school education.
When secondary school students fall short of public expectations, parents and students become distressed. It is public knowledge that education standards in Nigeria have since deteriorated. In panic, an apathetic government would race to introduce ill-advised, dubious, unsound, and incomprehensible measures aimed at treating the symptoms rather than the causes.
The key causes of mass failure in secondary school examinations are too numerous to list here. Many of them have been around for decades. They include diminished quality of teaching, hiring of unqualified teachers, lack of enthusiasm by students who no longer see value in education, underfunding of secondary schools by federal and state governments, lack of basic facilities, and growing perception among students that quick acquisition of wealth is the most preferred pathway to fame and attainment of higher status in society. At the centre of all these are extravagant lifestyles and unreasonable aspirations implanted in students by politicians, religious leaders, business entrepreneurs and parents.
Secondary education in Nigeria has many fault lines. Here are a few. There are many secondary school students who cannot construct sentences that are grammatically correct. There are students who grapple with the fundamentals of arithmetic. Some students cry pathetically when they are given assignments in statistics. In this era of digital technology, you would be surprised to see far too many students who are not exposed to the fundamentals of computing.
Primary and secondary school students must be exposed to computers and computer skills training. This training should be funded through public (that is, government) and private sector support to schools, as well as through re-training of teachers. Teachers should be provided with necessary support in order to acquire computer knowledge and skills, including access to computer technology. Computers are efficient and effective devices for doing things better, faster and more constructively. Students should be introduced to computers to help them to meet the challenges of a 21st century knowledge economy. This will help them to enhance their education, to undertake assignments, to advance reading, writing and arithmetic skills, and to communicate with their colleagues, friends, and families.
There are, of course, challenges involved in computer training. As Guillermo Delgado-P. argued in 2002, we live in a world of inequalities, a world “still divided between the cybernetically informed and the non-informed. There are those that would like to plug in PCs but can’t; there are those who have computers but are getting a headache from them.”
The Federal Government is administering a sub-standard secondary school education programme that produces half-baked and intellectually undernourished graduates. As I said previously, a flawed education system will always produce unsound outcomes. We need a rounded educational curriculum that will produce rounded graduates. Government must invest in quality secondary education. It must aim to improve secondary school pedagogy. Government must provide necessary infrastructure to make school environment fit for human habitation. While all these will not solve all the problems, they will surely make a difference.
Nine years ago, precisely, in March 2011, the Federal Government, led by President Goodluck Jonathan, announced that it would launch a new senior secondary school curriculum to commence in September of the same year. The new curriculum was meant to serve as the government’s answer to declining quality of secondary education. One of the aims of the curriculum was to produce secondary school graduates who would be ready for university and polytechnic education.
The director-general of the National Teachers Institute (NTI) in 2011, Dr. Aminu Ladan Sharehu, said one way to lift the quality of teaching in secondary schools was to verify the background and academic qualifications of secondary school teachers. He said this background check was necessary because, if a teacher’s academic background was defective, it would affect the quality of knowledge the teacher would convey to students. That was good rhetoric that was never implemented during the term of Jonathan’s presidency.
The dilapidated state of public secondary schools in Nigeria must be deemed a national catastrophe. To transform public schools would require massive funding, improvement in human resources, equipping libraries and science laboratories, providing suitable sporting facilities and playgrounds, and an atmosphere that is favourable to teaching and learning.
I visited my former secondary school in December 2009 and it felt like someone had stabbed me. I was saddened by the way the school had been run down. The physical structures were broken. The buildings were standing, as it were, on their last legs. The images that stood in front of me were confronting. I was profoundly disappointed because the school had lost its honour and prestige. The impeccable academic record that once served as the school’s unique selling point had been shattered by poor student performance. For many decades, the school maintained an impressive record of 100 per cent in the West African School Certificate Examination, as it was known in those days. All these are now history.
Public secondary school students have for too long put up with a wretched education system that holds no future for them. They have had to improvise and cope with a hopeless situation that has no end. If Nigeria has a responsible government that claims that it caters for the education of all citizens, it is time officials of that government stood up to their obligations to citizens. There is no point in politicians campaigning for the 2023 elections three years ahead of the elections, while the government that was elected in 2019 has achieved little or nothing on the ground.