EDUCATION GAP IN NIGERIA

It is now a common observation that the education gap in Nigeria is widening by the day. This has led to calls by many academics including legislators, state governors and other stakeholders for declaration of state of emergency in the education industry in Nigeria. Many have advance reasons for this increasing gap in the sector, but have not looked at the “emptiness” of the education politics in Nigeria.

We seem to pursue education politics rather than policy. Education policy, the world over, is the principle as well as the set of laws and rules that govern the operations of the education industry. It means government’s policy-making in the education sphere. It is in recognition of this that education occurs in many purposes and through many institutions, formal and informal.

Yes, for those who call for declaration of state of emergency in the education industry in Nigeria might mean well for the country, considering the level of the decay in the sector. It is a patriotic call, a call for sanity, transparency and accountability. A call to bridge the yearning gap at all level of the education strata and a call for the institutionalization of excellence in the industry; that will bring the much-needed sustainable development in our country.

These people should know that state of emergency in the sector means, a situation that requires immediate action to deal with; setting aside other things and giving priority to education. It means that they are in other words saying that the laws and rules guiding the education industry be suspended for the period of the emergency. It also means more budgetary allocation to the sector; hence more funds would be expended during the emergency period.

In other words, the education industry will witness unprecedented mass construction of structures in the institutions. These construction will include classroom, roads in the school, recruitment of qualified teachers, school supervisors and administrators, procurement of instructional materials, laboratory equipment, building of libraries and library materials, adequate and proper motivation of teachers through payment of allowances and in-service training and overall increase of salary for teachers at all levels of education.

In today’s Nigeria education, experienced teachers who imbibed and got accustomed to the ethics of the teaching profession are fast-leaving the system through retirement without conscious efforts to transmit and sustain those qualities in the young teachers. For instance, the Nigeria Academy of Education (NAE), Nigeria Academy of Science (NAS) and other professions are not helping matters in the area of recruiting younger colleagues into their fold.

The present generation of teachers are fast losing the art of teaching and writing. This is where curriculum planners have not taken steps to redress. There should be a clinical review of teachers’ education curriculum.

The Nigeria education gap has to be fixed by the introduction of pragmatic policies that will attract the best brains into the teaching profession. We seem to work against ourselves; admission policies of Nigeria universities as well as JAMB has over the years allowed candidates with low entry scores to gain admission into education programmes to become teachers.

• How can “dondy united” teach our future leaders? 
• Why have we abandoned the old long practice, whereby the best brains were retained to teach in our school?
• First class graduates were usually recruited and appointed as graduate assistance to teach in the University, why the sudden revers?
• Why have we lost them to the bank and other sectors of the economy?

However, the situation is not entirely hopeless. The foundation of education in Nigeria patterned after the British type of education we have today has lost the value everybody is yearning for. Can the present governments in Nigeria work assiduously to reverse the trend?