THE deteriorating situation and condition of education in Nigeria was starkly on display recently when the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) announced the results of its 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME). The results show that only 378,639 out of 1,761,338 who sat for the examinations scored 200, which would be the traditional pass mark of 50 percent and above, representing a mere 22 percent pass rate. And JAMB has since come out after that to announce 140 marks, 35 percent score in the examinations, as the minimum mark that it would accept for any admission into the universities for the year. Even if Nigeria were to be the only country in the world, these results and their implications would still have to be a cause for concern, not to talk about the fact that the whole world is witness and alive to what has become of the Nigerian education system. For, pray, which worthwhile education system, that is properly structured and functional, would have only 22 percent of its students passing a promotional examination. And yet it has to be conceded that only those who considered themselves capable of proceeding to tertiary education from the school certificate level would have taken the pains to buy the form for the UTME in order to sit for the examinations.
Which would suggest that perhaps we would have less than 10 percent pass rate were we to ask all those finishing Senior Secondary 3 level to sit for the UTME! And that is in spite of the pretension of having some private secondary schools in Nigeria where tuition is paid in millions of naira! Now we know the truth. The education system in Nigeria has collapsed. What is left is the pretension to education, to give the impression that kids and children are still going to different schools and receiving knowledge from some sort of teachers, even as Nigeria has the dubious honour of having the highest number of children – more than ten million of them and always growing and increasing in number everyday – out of school. Yet, it ought to be clear that quality education is not imparted by some sort of teachers, but by motivated teachers determined and interested in imparting knowledge. Which would not be the case where teachers have not been paid for months and where some state governments are yet to even adopt the new minimum wage as basis for government workers salaries. And the end result of such a setting is glaring as we now have seen the standard of the students that could be produced by the set of unmotivated teachers we have across the country. Those students who could not even pass tertiary institutions qualifying examinations at 50 percent are not worthy of being assessed as having passed through secondary education. They have shown us that what is not worthwhile would not have quality and it would end in disaster as the woeful results are more a reflection of the rot in the entire system of education rather than a blight on just the students.
And instead of recognising what has happened as a dire call for pause in order to take stock of the situation and make fundamental adjustments, we are poised to continue with the pretension by going on with university admissions at 35 percent score. Which kind and standard of university are we envisaging with unqualified students? How do we tell the rest of the world that we are getting students into the universities at the level of 35 percent score? And what score and performance at the university do we expect from students who are not even able to pass qualifying examinations? Ordinarily, not all who pass qualifying examinations are considered good enough for university as the university is for the top students who could benefit from university education and be in a position to help the society later through higher thinking solutions to societal problems. Now we are turning the logic of university education upside down in Nigeria by opening universities to failures from the secondary schools. And we expect the world to take us serious or reckon with whatever we call universities here!
Maybe those in charge know what they are doing anyway. They know that the students they want to admit do not have any real or quality university to go into or attend. The universities in Nigeria are already stunted by the combination of government irresponsibility and incessant strike action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the union of university lecturers. We know that ASUU has been on strike for more than 20 times since its emergence in 1978 in spite of many research results from ASUU members themselves to show that the university system would have problems recovering from incessant strikes as the negative impact and effect are damaging and long-lasting. Indeed, it is almost impossible to get students back to normal level after experiencing strike action for more than six months according to the results of some researches, given that education, and especially university education, is structured for effectiveness and is not expected to be haphazard. According to Lawrence Eckson, ‘incessant strikes dwindle the academic performances of students. As learning is suspended for a long period, the students reading abilities fall. Incessant strikes, however, turn the system into an unpredictable one, endangering the students interest and the functioning of the entire structure. Even the knowledge acquired during the learning period is … forgotten by some students. This mostly turns … students into certificate seekers than knowledge seekers.’
Invariably, the Nigerian university system has been producing certificate seekers rather than knowledge seekers for such a long time, which the teachers themselves know, hence their lack of concern again about what their strike would do to the system.
ASUU members know that the system in which they teach is rotten and has collapsed, such that they would not allow their own wards to get into the system again. Ask around: ASUU members have joined government officials in seeking universities for their wards outside of Nigeria having realised the depth of the rot and the total collapse of the system in which they teach. And what future awaits a system in which the operators themselves do not have confidence? Those in charge of the Nigerian university system do not mind again whether those admitted and to be admitted have qualifications or not, or whether or not they could pass the qualifying examinations. They know that the future of the system is bleak and they do not want to be bothered about how to fix what is wrong with it – as that would require a fundamental tackling of the problems of Nigeria in all ramifications. Nigeria is in deep problems as its university education system is in a quandary. There are no quality students to admit from the collapsed secondary schools even as the universities themselves are stunted. And we know that quality development would only come through quality human resources to be sourced mainly from quality universities. The reality is therefore a bleak future for the country itself on account of the bleak future of and for its university system.
- Yakubu is with the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan, Ibadan.
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