Professor Donald Abidemi Odeleye is the Dean of the Faculty of Education, Lead City University, Ibadan. The counselling psychologist speaks with SAHEED SALAWU on some issues affecting Nigeria’s education sector.
What do you make of the Federal Government’s plan to enforce 18-year age limit for entry into tertiary institutions in the country?
It is important that a child should go through specific developmental stages. When a child misses out on these developmental stages, it becomes a problem, and we have seen this, I can tell you that. I have been teaching for a while and that is why I have the moral and professional right to be able to advise. I have done more than four decades as a professional teacher and I have seen different generations of students. I have seen that it is an advantage to go through the rungs properly.
In Finland and most of the Scandinavian countries, children don’t get into school until age seven, sometimes eight. And we have seen in research that whether you start at three or you start at six or seven, there is a synchronisation that happens when you are 11, 12, 13. You come to the same level. It has also been established in research that when kids are exposed too early – always writing, always doing maths from age two, age three, age four – it gets to a point where most children are frustrated. They are not happy; they want to do something different, and it is just normal.
From personal experience, I can tell you that when young adults get into the university at 14, at 15, even at 16, most of them are oblivious of what is going on. They may be good in terms of scholastic excellence, but in terms of emotional intelligence, in terms of social development, they are typically grossly deficient. This has been the position forever; it is not something that was just brought up today. But over time, elite parents have always found a way to circumvent these things.
You find parents who think that their child is gifted, whereas a lot of these children are not gifted. Maybe they are above average, but they are not gifted. They are not necessarily gifted when it comes to intelligence quotient. So, there is that confusion and it has been there for a long time. Those coming in as parents need to be trained; they need to be taught how to parent their children. How do you do that? You do it from the cradle. The confusion we are having is because parents have left their primary calling. That is why they want to rush through, and the result is the kind of national confusion we are having today. Parents no more do due diligence concerning their primary business of taking care of the children. The traditional family has been rubbished. We need to go back to the basics.
The reason this proclamation may not work is because we are seeking to resolve the matter from the top. Yoruba elders would say amunkun eru e wo, o ni oke le n wo, e e wo’sale. The problem is fundamental. If this government’s plan works on the side of the proletariat, the common people, it will not work with other people, whereas this pegging is instructive; it makes a lot of sense. It is just that government needs to know how to organise it. It has to be systematic. So, you need to start somewhere. Maybe from now, you want to begin to tell the people that what we want done to have our educational system to be streamlined. But it will take a lot of commitment on the part of all stakeholders. Government and all the people will definitely have one thing or the other to do. Government must be willing to invest more in the training of elementary teachers. We need to go back to the drawing board. We need to begin to put round pegs in round holes. We need to begin to deliberately invest in elementary education. I think that’s the place to start. So, the matter of education at the university level, 18 years is a matured time; it’s a time that the individual is ready for the flight because he can take a lot of independent decisions. But then there should be space for gifted students. There has been a systemic decay and it has to be addressed fundamentally. The repair has to be systematic.
Nigeria is presently challenged on so many social and economic fronts. Do you think the timing is right for the government to introduce this kind of concept?
There is no time that is not right. It depends on the perception. Nigeria has a myriad of problems. Any government that wants to do something has a big opportunity in Africa, now in Nigeria, because we have too many issues. So, if you face one issue and you face it correctly, you have done a big job. Given Nigeria’s present situation, the onus lies on the government. Life is tough for everybody at this point, but this issue has to be addressed. People should know that it is not how quick but how well; that there is no reason to push a child into something the child is not ready for.
The whole idea is not meant to strangulate the people; it is just to make parents to begin to be aware of their duties. So, the honourable minister has done well. He just needs to gather together people, a think-tank, that would help to look at this thing holistically and then come up with a robust perspective on it. It is going to be added value for all of us at the end of the day.
Nigeria seems to have failed to resolve issues in virtually all sectors of its national life, including education and power sectors where most other countries of the world have recorded remarkable achievements. Do you see anything happening differently with this educational concept?
We are virtually in the Fifth Industrial Revolution now, with all these driverless cars and automated things all over the place. But the truth of it is that in Nigeria, we are stuck at the Second Industrial Revolution which took off in the early 1900s. That is where Nigeria is today. That was when electricity came. As a people, we seem to be just hovering around the same point without knowing that we are destroying ourselves. It is here that you hear people talking about better yesteryears. Elsewhere, people are looking forward. We seem to be a confused people, and that may be right because we actually have different types of people in the same system. For instance, somebody has argued that in the North, a 13-year-old girl, even younger, is marriageable. This is an abomination in my own part of the country. This does not even come into a man’s brain. We have had Boko Haram say Western education is haram; that it is not something good. You have people saying we want to go to school and you have people saying something else. We have that confusion and that is why it goes back to the issue of restructuring the entire fabric of the system. It may be able to help a great deal because that way, everybody can take a decision. Presently, we are a confused people and this is the reason why some people have adduced the colonial experience that we had. We were colonised and our language was taken away from us. It was in the midst of that confusion that you found people coming together, people with cultures that are diametrically opposed. This one is saying this. That one is saying that. So, there is a lot of confusion in the body polity. This probably explains the reason why we are not moving. And that is why some of us, as historians, say let’s go back to where it worked at first. It worked between 1955 and 1964. There is no society where you don’t have issues. But this project worked at that time because there was healthy competition, healthy rivalry between the regions. We may need to look in that direction if we want to have an amicable and sustainable resolution of these issues.
What is your take on the administration of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) in the country?
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund was established basically in response to the plight of the university system in Nigeria. At that time, we didn’t have too many private universities. But TETFUND is supposed to help the tertiary education system build capacity, not just universities but polytechnics, monotechnics, colleges of education. It supposed to help the system build capacity, provide funding, grants for all kinds of research that will help the country.
I am happy that the honourable minister is doing something along that line now. The universities, polytechnics, colleges of education, whether public or private, all have resources. For instance, I schooled in Ife. Some of my colleagues in the University of Ibadan schooled in Ife. We are all trained. We all have the capacity and we are all going to the same market. We are all doing the same thing.
I think that there was something not quite tidy about the law that brought forth TETFUND, especially talking about this issue of only public universities. The duty of any government is to provide a level playing field, is to provide education for its citizens. And in the private university system, they are also doing their bit. So, the issue of funding, of grants for research, should actually be for everybody. It shouldn’t be for public universities, polytechnics, monotechnics, colleges of education lecturers alone. It should be for everybody who is part of the system. We are all seeking to build this country. I think this is an aspect that this administration must look into. They should correct it. It will be one of the pluses for the Bola Tinubu administration. It’s going to be a plus for them if they are able to just remove that clause that it is for public universities. I mean, it doesn’t make sense. We all belong to the same country. We are all citizens of the same country. We are not expatriates. We are all praying taxes. We are all going to the same market. So, we are all seeking to do the same thing. In the university, all we are seeking is to find the truth and deploy it.
The student loan scheme, a brainchild of the present administration, is under way in the country. What do you make of the idea?
Student loan is not new in Nigeria. Student loan has been with us in the Western Region for years. The whole concept is fantastic. The implementation is what a lot of people are wondering whether is still going to go the usual way: I know you; you know me; that’s how I get it. Or you have to pay somebody, a public official who will be able to put your name there or something.
Leaving out the private universities is still an issue here. I don’t know how they got that. This is the only country in the world where you have so many public universities that are being funded by government and the private universities are not supported by government. Most of the big universities you find in the world are not public, they are private. They generate funds and governments support them.
The Asian Tigers, particularly South Korea, up to the early 2000s, were spending over 6,000 Us dollars on every university undergraduate. Whether it was public or private university, it didn’t matter. They were investing just to make sure that things run very well. And what do we see today? They are global powers; they are doing so well. So, government needs to have the political will to be able to make it happen. That is the only way.
The student loan scheme is a wonderful idea. And I am glad that they have made some payments. They have paid into many public universities. It’s good, but they need to involve the private universities. It is not everybody that is rich that is sending their child to a private university. In the private university system, there are some common people who believe that they have to give their children education, and they are just struggling and taking all kinds of loans. We are even discovering that the difference between public and private universities is very slim now. The public universities now collect tuition and so many unwritten payments. That is why we say that they should liberalise it but have a system in place that will be able to authenticate that this person has this challenge and probably this is the collateral. All over the world, people take loans to go to school. It is not wrong. It is a good idea. It is part of the responsibilities of government to support students and help them to make meaning. The challenge, again, is that sometimes some students may think that this is their own share of the national cake because of what they see. That is why we say that anything we have to do has to be systematic; it has to be fundamental. It may cause some people not to be very happy but that is how it is done.
How do you think the scheme will not get derailed like everything else in Nigeria?
If the helmsmen, the president, for instance, wants to do something here, they would do it. At 70, going to 80, the president is able to do a lot of things if he wants to do them. I am sure he is not afraid of death at this point in time in his life. Whether you do it or not do it, you will die. The same thing applies to the governors. They should do whatever they need to do because it is what you do that you are remembered for. Chief Obafemi Awolowo is being remembered today for what he did and his memory is likely to still outlive a lot of people even in this generation. If the leaders have the political will to do something, they will do it. One of the things that made the president appealing to me during his campaign was that he was talking about our children and grandchildren. He said he wanted to be able to leave something, a legacy. We are still crossing our fingers as to what exactly he would want to leave for his children and grandchildren.
What do you make of the state of affairs in the country at the moment?
I am not an economist but I know that if you spend more than you earn, you are probably going to get into trouble. And I think for the past two successive administrations, maybe including this one, people are taking so much that they don’t earn. If you work for money like we are labouring now – you see grey hair on my head – you will know that working to earn money is different from taking money.
The situation we are having now, as somebody described it, is that the rich will keep getting richer. That is what inflation does. The naira slide against the dollar, it is only the rich that will enjoy it, because the poor and the middle class are at their mercy. That is the situation we have found ourselves in. So, it is still the issue of not having a clear-cut identity. A typical person will be thinking of the future of his children, of his grandchildren, of his community, how it is going to be after he leaves. But we are thinking of immediate gratification. Well, I call it a combination of insecurity of leadership and a lack of identity as a people. We don’t know who we are. We don’t know where we are going. Added to that is lack of knowledge. We don’t know. We have people who are not knowledgeable, who have been so pulverised by greedy leaders who are not also visionary. It has been happening over time and probably will keep happening until we have people who are truly knowledgeable. A knowledge-based economy may be the only way out for us. We should have a knowledge-based economy where we take the issue of knowledge very seriously. Years ago, a professor in the university was earning more than a minister. But everything has been bastardised and it is all political now.
READ ALSO: EFCC returns 53 stolen vehicles, $180,300 to Canadian authorities
and then