EDUCATION, PRODUCTIVITY AND YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT IN NIGERIA.
Chief BISI AKANDE at Ila Orangun.
Nigeria began as a country of strong communities with crude technologies. Those technologies were totally devoid of writing and record keeping. The British came to give Nigerians an educational curricula that would continue to make the people subservient to them and to enable them effectively use our able-bodied youths to perpetually exploit our land and natural resources.
Since our political independence, because of Nigeria’s military-based history, it has not been easy for our communities to change our educational policy from long years of crude technology to a science-based technology. From the primary level to the secondary and tertiary stages, the literacy and numeracy contents of our children’s education have not been intensive enough to compete with those of the other global communities among who had earlier enslaved and colonized our ancestors. Also, the time being allotted for the training (theoretically and practically) of our professionals are comparatively much shorter. Therefore, Nigerian’s active agent to productions is inferior to global standards.
Crude technology can never engender and stimulate abundant productivity. The more intensive the sciences at the base of our technology, the more abundant our productivity and the greater the quantum of the products that would be available for processing, for storage, for transportation, for distribution, for marketing and for consumption. And the more the hands and services that would be required for employment to carry out all these functions effectively. The lack of science-based technological education of our youths has been the basis for our huge youth unemployment and our grinding mass poverty – a situation which our leaders, in recent times, are exploiting in misappropriating our commonwealth.
We must stop our government ministries/agencies and our rich trading Shylocks from establishing garbage-in garbage-out educational institutions without due research in and consideration for the economic and societal needs. Our Universities and higher educational institutions too must be encouraged to structure research opportunities (if they still do any) towards increased science- based school curricula that would enable their teachings to produce trainers of grassroots science- based technologists. While universal basic education should be the norm, universal tertiary education would be an aberration in any society. Nature did not create everybody as university materials. Man’s success in life does not flow mainly from the portals of the Universities.
The emphasis of University academic independence was not to be on the admission of as many as possible students merely to rake in revenues for the recruitment and promotion of lecturers to professors and for the creating of more and more departments for our educational institutional staff members. The emphasis must be to produce employable and self employable science-driven technological minds.
Year in year out, since the past ten years, Nigeria’s about 160 universities, 114 polytechnics and 93 colleges of education turn out hundreds of graduates averaging some 100,000 annually. Ironically, most of the products of these institutions, who are expected to be creators of abundant goods and productive services, have been forced to become parasites, ignorant bullies, tricksters and, largely, objects of sorrow by falling into the hands of exploiters, sex-agents, militants and, sometimes, into outright crimes.
In a country like Nigeria which is so blessed with abundant resources and opportunities, the question now is “why do our tertiary institutions mainly produce mere application writers and perpetual job seekers? For the discerning minds, this calls for a deep reflection especially about the purpose and state of our education. I don’t know if the leaders of the nation’s educational institutions, using the inherited exploitative educational curricula and teaching methods, are still proud of these graduated mismatches being produced by them.
Unless and until education is driven by highly intensive science-based technology, no matter how much unity may be achieved among political differences and ethnic nationalities, the unity among the trained professionals and unemployable ignorant bullies will continuously pose intractable problems with the result that our Nigeria shall become huge communities of slums and theatres of self destruction, where fraudsters and vagabonds shall continue to takeover as leaders and where chaos shall permanently prevail.
The ‘next level’ for our governments must now lead to a disproportionate reward in favour of science and technology for institutions and individual beneficiaries.
Being text of a speech delivered on the occasion of the conferment of doctorate degree of doctor of Letters.
