The aftermath of the cancelled immigration recruitment exercise is no
doubt a national embarrassment which did not only went a long way in
describing the rate and severity of unemployment in the country, but
has also shown the vulnerability of educated Nigerian youths and
uselessness of education when it is only used as a tool to search for
employment. Sometimes events like this happen for us to derive some
lessons because when they occur, they raise important questions.
Now back to our question: what is the purpose of education in Nigeria?
A direct answer to this question is that, as much as arguably 96% of
Nigerians get educated in order to earn a living. If that is the case
then, is education a way to earn a living or is it a means to gain
knowledge and become civilized so as to decide how best to live?
U.S Publisher and politician, Malcolm Forbes
once said: “Education’s
purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” Tijjani
Shu’aibu Adamu, an experienced Nigerian educationist described
education as an agent of social mobility which is capable of moving an
individual from the lower class to the upper class. Therefore, it is
an instrument for developing an individual socially, mentally,
physically, emotionally, morally and psychologically. Tijjani went
further to concur with Taiwo’s view on education as a process which
enables a person to distinguish between good and bad attitudes, right
and wrong behaviours, just and unjust tendencies, social and
anti-social habits in the society so as to prepare an individual for
the future. I would personally define education as a combination of
tools and techniques used to gain empirical knowledge about the useful
components of life and how best to make use of them, recognize the
useless ones and how best to avoid them and to establish a clear cut
boundaries between them.
What do we have now? Education in Nigeria has been relegated to the
means of livelihood. If not for the expectation of monetary
employment, most Nigerians would not go to school. Is this the kind of
education we want? Have we ever asked ourselves why the high number
of graduates we produce every year signifies education growth but does
not reflect in our national development? This is because most people
are not willing to become professionals, develop careers, gain and
apply knowledge, understand life from an intellectual point of view
and offer solutions to life problems. Rather, we are all seeking for
jobs which do not exist.
Now we are faced with two major problems. One is completely turning
education into a means of survival and two is completely relying on
government to provide direct jobs. As long as we don’t take care of
these problems, we are bound to witness more and more scenarios of the
immigration recruitment exercise. In fact, we can only expect things
to get worse and nastier. As long as we continue to produce graduates
whose only objective is to get direct employment, which no government
can provide, then we shall witness not only accidental deaths but
deliberate killings of each other in order to gain employment. God
forbid.
For many years, the Nigerian education system has been suffering
immensely simply because it has been completely relegated into a
process of providing employment. This is the reason why students
graduate empty headed because they were never after the knowledge in
the first place but the grades and certificates. Students are being
made to believe by their parents, teachers and society consciously and
subconsciously that the major objective of school is to work and earn
a living.
The best way to get out of this quagmire is to develop reliable means
of livelihood as we go to school so that after graduating, any job
gotten could be just a supplementary means and a path to career
development. This will enable us to avoid bizarre scenarios where an
engineer works in a bank or a historian working in a construction
company just because they need something to support their lives. Do
you want me to believe that a reasonable number of the about 7 million
immigration applicants who were made to part with a collective
application fees of about 7 billion naira were willing to become
immigration officers? The truth is that most of them applied not
because they were interested but because they have been prepared from
the beginning to have no choice. We must raise ourselves and our
children to become farmers, entrepreneurs, traders, and artisans so
that we can seek education for the purpose of knowledge and
improvement of life quality only. If we fail not only to do this but
to do it effectively, we may well regret in the future as
I have come to understand that regret is not only about bad deeds,
sometimes you regret about good deeds which you should have done
better.
The second problem is of solely relying on governments to provide
direct jobs which have succeeded in adding salt to our already severe
injury. Federal, states and local governments in the country have
continued to fool themselves and the people with the illusion that
they can provide employment. Some politicians, out of ignorance make
promises during electioneering campaigns that they will provide direct
jobs for everybody. Other politicians do so deliberately under deceit
just to secure votes. But the truth is that no government in Nigeria
can provide direct employment to a satisfactory level. At the moment,
out of the 36 states of the federation, only Lagos state can fully pay
the salaries of its workers without waiting for federal allocations.
Few other states like Kano, Rivers and Oyo can pay a reasonable
fraction of their salaries without federal allocations. Some states
cannot even pay salaries at all without federal allocations. The
Federal Government itself is suffering from huge recurrent expenditure
mostly accrued due to salary payment of its large work force.
Gradually, it is becoming apparent that the burden of salary payments
is hugely taking its toll on the Federal Government. How then in the
long run do we expect governments to continue employing directly?
What governments should do is to face reality and stop deceiving
people with direct employment. They should rather encourage people to
be creative and shift their thinking away from ordinary and
conventional means of getting employment and try new initiatives. We
must understand that when everybody follows established paths, there
will be no creativity; we have to think beyond the normal way of doing
things.
Secondly, the government should strengthen sectors like power,
transportation, infrastructure, security and justice because such
sectors have the potential of automatically creating and consolidating
direct and indirect jobs. For example, if there is adequate security
and power supply, businesses would run for 24 hours. When some people
who conduct businesses during the day are asleep, some others who were
resting during the day will conduct businesses during the night.
Nigerian businesses will work for 24 hours with no valuable time to
waste thereby hugely increasing productivity. When power is available,
thousands of jobs would be created both directly and indirectly.
Therefore, advisably, rather than invest in providing direct jobs
which cannot satisfy all, let the government strengthen security and
power. We have seen what the telecommunication and entertainment
industries have done to our economy through direct and indirect jobs
creation with ripple effects and I think that success can be
replicated in many other sectors. When this is done, governments will
rely on its happy and self-employed citizens for taxes rather than the
other way round..
RELIABLE INTERNET SERVICE |