Reforming Nigeria’s education for global competitiveness
By Nelson Chukwuma
Nigeria’s education sector, like many others, is in a comatose state, and it is only the conscious application of workable reforms to reverse this trend that will guarantee the future generation of educated Nigerians a place in global competitiveness. According to an October 2023 report by Businessday, one of Nigeria’s leading business newspapers, Nigeria is rated the 124th best country in the global education system and 12th in Africa, and this reflects a growing decline in learning at all levels. Other global ratings of Nigeria’s position in education are also not impressive and demand the concerted efforts of leadership at all levels.
Historically, Nigeria’s education curricula have not changed significantly to keep abreast with changes at the global level, especially with disruptions wrought by science and technology, but still largely revolve around the same demands for clerical and administrative officers that manned colonial posts for the interests of the Empire. This accounts for the precipitous fall in standards when measured against global growth, because our education policies did not change when the environment that relies on the products of education for survival changed, as experienced in many parts of the world.
For so long, Nigeria has paid lip service to the training of skilled technical manpower that should serve as a catalyst for industrial development, and now is the time to take the bull by the horn and make far-reaching reforms in the education sector to improve Nigeria’s global competitiveness. The establishment of universities of technology and polytechnics, which was meant to jumpstart the forward movement toward hands-on and functional education, was unfortunately caught in the same web of non-practicality as its products were baked primarily on the theory and not on the practice of the subject areas.
Now is the time to reinvent the education system through revolutionary reforms from the foundation, scale it up to the top through a systemic overhaul of the entire structure, and make Nigerian education a tool for the provision of timeless solutions. The ever-changing education landscape at the global level, with all the applications that render inventions and technological feats obsolete in a matter of months, makes it more imperative that Nigeria’s education planners move at a pace as fast as possible, if not faster than the developed world, to cause reforms that will liberate our school graduates from impending catastrophes occasioned by a lack of dynamism in the sector.
The first conscious step Nigeria’s education planners should take is to develop a new curriculum out of necessity to solve current everyday problems so that students at every level of education will become solution providers, especially in the areas of science and technology. While I do not discourage the study of arts and liberal studies, what needs to be done immediately to improve Nigeria’s global competitiveness is to bolster the acquisition of technical and vocational skills.
Emphasis should be placed on the layered development of hands-on skills from the primary to the tertiary levels to create a synergy between research, invention, and maintenance. Particular attention should be paid to skills that provide solutions to everyday problems. Skills in the agro-allied sector must be taught in schools as part of our curriculum so that Nigeria can achieve self-sufficiency in food production and position itself for export. The growing demand for automobile skills in the industry makes it imperative that it become a part of our curriculum as the development of electric vehicles and its complexities have become unstoppable. In the construction industry, it is utterly shameful that Nigeria still depends on neighbouring countries to supply our demands for mid-level manpower.
The current teaching and learning of ICT, telephony, green energy, satellite security technology, web development, data analytics, and ancillary studies that remain exclusive to the tertiary level and private tutors should be incorporated to our regular curriculum and domesticated to the secondary and primary levels as subject areas that must be mastered by students. Other skills like content and copywriting, beauty and makeup, digital marketing, shoe making, plumbing, tiling, roofing, food, and confectionery—skills that support the massive growth of independent sectors that not only grow the economy but also reduce the growing population of the unemployed—must be incorporated into the curriculum and made available to students from the basic level.
Another way Nigeria’s global competitiveness can be improved is to ensure that there is collaboration between universities, research centres, and industries, and such collaboration should make universities production centres where students work and learn at the same time and acquire skills that not only make them employable, entrepreneurs but also global citizens who can flaunt their skills proudly in different parts of the world. We need to get it right at this juncture so that Nigeria can export talents without the usual brain drain associated with it. This can be achieved by taking advantage of globalisation which has dismantled work borders and technology that allows expertise even from the comfort of one’s bedroom.
In all of these, there must be a definite and purposeful plan by concerned authorities to make policies that have the input of public and private sector operators in order to harmonise operations and have unified outcomes. In fairness to the private sector, they have in recent times scaled Nigeria’s education standard to the point that any little credit of excellence Nigeria has, goes to their painstaking efforts to groom their products to international standards. It is therefore highly imperative that policymakers consider the inputs of private operators in the policy-making process.
We must borrow a leaf from countries like India, Singapore, and China that used technical education to grow their industrial bases by offering education that emphasised practicality against theories. The father of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, built an education system that picked talents at the primary school level, distributed those talents into areas of need, and ensured that no one was left out of the system. Today, Singapore boasts one of the best education systems in Southeast Asia and compares favourably with Europe and America.
It is not surprising that toda, India rules the world of ICT, offering manpower at the highest level on the global stage. It was not the ingenuity of Indians that made that feat possible, but the conscious planning of the Indian education system that picked ICT and prioritised it for the future that was created at the planning stage. The story of China in just 30 years is as inspiring as those of India and Singapore, and they continue to make tremendous progress in other areas of life, many thanks to their education. Nigeria’s education should be the highest contributor to its GDP, given the enormous talents, ingenuity, and resilience of its people.
• Dr. Chukwuma, the Rector of Learn to Live Business School (LLBS), writes from Enugu
