Nigeria’s foggy educational landscape: The way out

To say that Nigeria’s educational landscape is not in the best of shapes is like stating the obvious. Here is a country where the yearly budgetary allocation for education is abysmally lower than the UNESCO recommendation of 26 per cent of the annual budget of a country where its citizens think they could give birth to children and donate such children to government to train for them. But should this be allowed to continue before our very eyes? Are there no ways out of this unfriendly quagmire? To borrow the language of Nigeria’s pop musician, Olamide: “Se ba se ma waleleyi?” which translates literally to “Is this the way things will continue to be?”

But Nigeria’s frontline legal icon and founder of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), Aare Afe Babalola, SAN, seems to have an answer as he has posited that Nigeria’s crave for accessible, affordable and available education may remain a mirage unless its constitution recognises the basic right of its citizens to education as a justiciable and enforceable right.

A man who should know, the former Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council of University of Lagos (UNILAG) frowned at the situation whereby the 1999 Constitution foisted on Nigerians by the military put the all-important subject of education under Chapter II of the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy which provides that: “The Government shall strive to eradicate illiteracy; and to this end Government shall, as and when practicable, provide(a) free, compulsory and universal primary education; (b) free secondary education; (c) free university education; and (d) free adult literacy programme”.

As good and robust as these provisions are, Section 6(6) (c), of the same constitution however provides that the judiciary shall have no powers to decide on any issue or question as to whether any act of omission by any authority or person is in conformity with the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy.

Wittingly or unwittingly, this provision makes it impossible for citizens to sue the government for failing to provide free or quality education. In essence, like a Greek gift, the constitution in one breadth contains wishful aspirations or dreams about education and in another breadth takes it away from the citizens.

Babalola therefore stressed that there is an urgent need to modify these archaic provisions, including Chapter IV of the Constitution where the right to education is sadly cosmetic, being a chapter that cannot be enforced in any court of law in Nigeria and recognises education as an important and enforceable fundamental human rights in Nigeria.

“While other serious countries have guaranteed the right to education through enforceable legal instruments that empower citizens to hold the political class accountable for failing to finance education, Nigerian citizens are left to depend on the goodwill of the ruling class or to pursue incessant strike actions, due to the failure of the political class to protect, defend and fulfill the fundamental human rights to education. Not only have governments failed to finance and equip our educational systems to be qualitative, competitive and functional, they have also failed to address barriers to educational access such as endemic poverty and conflicts.

“In the light of the gaps in Nigerian laws and the perennial failure of the political class to properly finance and equip our institutions of learning, a complex paradox and dialectic faced by university reformers like myself is the challenge of how to achieve educational security, i.e. the accessibility, affordability and availability of quality in Nigeria,” he said.

But Babalola, who spoke as the Guest Speaker at the 2017 Edition of the Annual Lecture of the Faculty of Education of Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, on Thursday, saw a ray of hope now that Nigeria, for the first time, has a Professor of Law (Professor Yemi Osinbajo, SAN) as the vice president. According to him, expectations are high now about positive reforms to provide more robust protection for educational rights in Nigeria, given Osinbajo’s understanding of the gaps created by this provision.

Speaking on “The Difficult March Toward Educational Security in Nigeria: Law, Policy and Governance Imperatives”, Babalola x-rayed what he described as “Pathways to Education Security”, including enforceable constitutional right to education, sustained budgeting and funding and investment in research and innovation as well as the peculiar Nigerian factors.

In his view, unless factors like population, philanthropy, giving and attitude of Nigerians to giving, as well as the place of the alumni in the running of universities, which are peculiar to Nigeria, are effectively and decisively dealt with, all efforts to actualise educational security would end in vain.

Worried that Nigeria has found it increasingly difficult to relate the growth in its population to the resources available to government in the midst of several needs it has to provide for, he said, perhaps, the time has come for government to peg the number of children per family to two.

His words: “When China woke up to the reality of population explosion starring it in the face, it pegged the number of children per family to one. When the growth in population stabilised, China recently amended the law allowing a family to have a second child. However, any family which chooses to raise a second child will be responsible for the education of the second child, while the government will be responsible for the education of the first child only.

“On the contrary, Nigeria continues to revel in the unwholesome habit of giving birth to a multitude of children.

But it would appear that all hope is not lost if all stakeholders in the education sector appreciate that they have pivotal, sacred and indispensable roles to play in contributing their voices, ideas and opinions to debates on how qualitative education can be more accessible, available and affordable in Nigeria, with Babalola stressing that “government inertia or failure is not the greatest loss, the greatest loss is when educated minds fail to inspire the next generation”.

Olofintila wrote from Ado-Ekiti