There are two Nigerian parents should not be at the mercy of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU): one is our tendency to glamorise university certificates, the other is failure to properly implement the 6-3-3-4 education system, which Nigeria launched almost 40 years ago.
The glamorisation of tertiary certificates elevated university degrees to some kind of elite turbanning or chieftaincy titles for our children. Failure to implement the basic education programme opened the floodgates for every child to go to university. Our exploding population of young people weighed down government’s capacity to adequately fund public tertiary institutions. This, in turn, has created a union of overworked and underpaid teachers who lash out in frustration every now and then.
The World Bank summarized the consequence of what our universities have become in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Bank concluded that our students “do not graduate with locally relevant skills for a successful integration into the labour market.”
Locally relevant skills
So, there we have it. Parents assume wrongly that children graduate from our universities with locally relevant skills, and that tertiary education delivers locally relevant skills. Because of these assumptions, every child must, therefore, go to a university. And because government also promotes tertiary education as a social service, every child must see university as continuation of the failed basis education programme.
I confess that, as a parent, I lived with this mindset. But you can excuse the likes of me who can scratch out moderately priced education for our children. One of my daughters, a final-year university student, brought the issue home in an article she wrote. What she wrote was, however, already playing in my mind since June 2021 when I found the current West African School Certificate Examination (WASCE) timetable.
Nigerian students write about 30 vocational and technical subjects in that examination. Allow me to list the subjects. They are: Air-conditioning & Refrigeration, Auto Body Repairs & Spray Painting, Auto Electrical Works, and Auto & Mechanical Work. There is also Animal Husbandry, Block Laying, Bricklaying & Concrete Works, Bookkeeping, Carpentry & Joinery, Catering Craft, and Cosmetology.
It does not end there. There is Data Processing, Dyeing & Bleaching, Electrical Installation & Maintenance Work, Fisheries, Furniture Making, and Garment Making. There is also GSM Phone Maintenance & Repair, Leather Goods Manufacturing & Repairs, Machine Woodworking, Mining, and Painting & Decorating. The rest are Plumbing & Pipe Fitting, Photography, Printing Craft, Radio, Television & Electronic Works, Salesmanship, Store Keeping, Store Management, Upholstery, and Welding & Fabrication Engineering.
The fact that our children learn these skills in school gives them a good opportunity to become specialists who can trade their skills internationally. And they are to learn these skills at the foundational education level, not at the university.
But do they? My wife, a teacher, says students learn less than 40 per cent of these subjects. They haven’t been able to learn because the 6-3-3-4 scheme, as usual, failed at implementation stage.
President Olusegun Obasanjo rejuvenated the scheme in 2006. He merged six years of primary to three years of junior high to form Basic Education, aka 9-3-4 system. His was a grand vision and plan designed to achieve 100 percent literacy rate in the country, among other benefits. The first nine years of basic education was free and compulsory. It still is. Nigerian parents, no matter how poor or indigent, have no excuse for not enrolling their children and wards in school. To ensure that states and local government councils do not complain of funds to implement the scheme, the Federal Government decided to pay 66 per cent of the cost of infrastructure, facilities and training of teachers for the scheme.
Again, we failed at the point of implementation.
There’s something to say about the Basic Education Programme, an excellent scheme. School teachers use it to identify innate skills and career interests of children before they get to the ninth grade. Students with high aptitudes progress to senior high schools, including technical schools, to prepare for tertiary education. Those with other non-academic skills choose vocational schools and apprentice schemes. There, they will specialize in some of the lower level skills that we listed above.
If faithfully implemented, made-in-Nigeria products and services will cross our borders and become export earners. Ghana showed this during her years of the locust. Highly educated Ghanaians earned reasonable and sustaining income through “mundane” tasks that they expertly performed. We see it today with skilled labour from our neighbouring countries that we increasingly prefer to our own.
Root of the problem
There are three impediments to the implementation of the Basic Education Programme. One is socio-cultural practices, such as street children (almajiri) and itinerant pastoralism. Ignorance/peer-group pressure is the other. A third is the will to use the massive funding available for this scheme to implement the programme, rather than massive pilfering of the funds by our officials.
Many poor parents do not know that education in Nigeria is free up until the ninth grade. Many of those who know are also unaware of their rights and responsibilities under the scheme. Which is why we groan without protest when unscrupulous administrators force children to pay levies that make nonsense of the free education programme.
By far the bigger challenge is that parents ignorantly look down on the lower level skills we listed above. They think that this translates to lower level earnings or possession of lower social capital. This is stupid thinking. It’s silly because all around us is evidence that tertiary education is not the only or even the best entry to high-paying careers.
We see young people who developed their innate vocational or athletic skills travel abroad to work or admitted to good schools with fully funded scholarships. Those who work abroad as sportspersons or skilled labour earn monthly incomes the equivalent of millions of naira. Their counterparts in Nigeria live on a basic monthly wage of $60. Again, those of us who live in cities prefer to engage skilled labour from Benin Republic and Togo rather than our unlettered cousins who failed to go to school. The key is getting basic education, followed by vocational and internship opportunities that create the difference in skillsets.
Finally, a skilled worker who earns N3,500 per day (standard wage) will out-earn a graduate in monthly wages.