| GOVERNANCE AND NIGERIANS' QUEST FOR GHANIAN DEGREES Ayo Olukotun For those who may be too young to know 'happy survival' was the predominant form of cordiality and felicitous exchange among the Ibos and other inhabitants of South-East Nigeria who survived the traumas and murderous incivility of the Nigerian civil war. Thank God Nigeria today is not at war if you discount, that is, various manifestations of what experts refer to as low intensity warfare. But then, everyday life around the country, harsh and harrowing, often reminds one of the horrors of war. As this write-up is being finalized, the queues to buy the increasingly high priced petroleum have returned to Ibadan and Lagos with the commodity selling for between 100 and 120 naira per liter in a country where 80 percent of the population live on less than one dollar a day. Commuting within and between cities remains uphill considering the state of the roads and the ever lurking marauders. Power generation in spite of a recent modest mark-up trails behind what obtains in several African countries while educational and health infrastructure remain in tatters. Against this depressing backdrop, the revelation published in the Punch on Sunday, the 9th of April that Nigerians spend 160 billion naira annually on university education in Ghana hardly came as a surprise even if it qualifies and puts in context recent triumphalist claims that Nigeria's fast growing economy suggests that the transformation agenda of the administration is on course and that the country is on the high road to achieving its oft stated goal of ranking among the twenty largest economies by 2020. The information about how much Nigerians spend to educate their wards in Ghanaian universities was put out by Dr. Wale Babalakin, chairman committee of pro-chancellors of Nigerian Universities. Babalakin went on to say that Nigeria's budget for education in 2011 was less than the amount which parents commit to educating their sons and daughters in Ghana yearly. Talking about spending on education, Nigeria's budget remains scandalously low in comparison with other African countries not to talk about the new centers of industrial prominence in Asia. For example, in the 2012 budget Nigeria voted less than 9 percent of its total expenditure on education; a far cry from UNESCO's stipulated target of 26 percent. In contrast, Ghana's educational budget in the last decade hovered between 26 and 35 percent of its annual budgets; South Africa's roughly 26 percent and Kenya's 24 percent. In other words, Nigerian leaders for whatever reason have consistently underfunded the educational sector even at the level of budget proclamations which, as everybody knows, does not tell the full story about how much was actually spent. Is it any wonder then that Ghana's better funded educational sector has become a haven for Nigerian students seeking a modicum of quality and order? For countries eager to move rapidly up the development ladder, investment in human capital formation which refers to resources committed to making the human agent healthy, productive and knowledgeable is absolutely crucial. It is surprising therefore if not outrageous that an administration that recently proclaimed a Korean style transformation as cardinal objective continues to treat education and health as backwaters in its spending priorities. Obviously universities run on shoestring budgets and located in an inhospitable governance clime with its harvest of infrastructural woes can hardly avoid a hand to mouth existence. The logic of Nigerians sending their wards to Ghanaian universities flows from the structural deficiencies of a perpetually underfunded educational sector. There are other problems with our universities apart from funding. It is no secret for example that many public universities are still struggling to complete the 2011 /2012 session at a time when they ought to have commenced the 2012/ 2013 academic year. The calendar has become a casualty of the prevalent anomie. Several years ago, I wrote about absent classes in our universities by which I lamented that graduation classes had to be shifted forward because of protracted strikes. For instance, in the mid 1990s, the 1994/1995 academic session had to be cancelled in view of pervasive strikes which wiped out the session. It is to be deeply regretted that the syndrome of truncated calendars continues to be a marked feature of our universities in the same way as our hospitals are often deserted because of elongated strikes by health workers. Indeed, a culture of dysfunction replete with mushrooming gangs of student cults, 'sorting' which is a code word for back handed deals among lecturers and students trading money or sex for marks, overcrowded classrooms, dry taps, and non-functioning public toilets is in evidence and militates against a conducive learning environment. Nigeria, despite the abundance of natural and human resources, is fast becoming a graveyard of abandoned projects and aborted visions. Between the Scylla of visionless military autocrats and the Charybdis of an incoherent and predatory civilian class, the country has had a raw deal. In the 1990s, education and health for all by the year 2000 was the overwhelming political slogan; the year 2000 came and passed and the slogan became a mutilated, almost comical, dream. Then we had vision 2010 which summoned to its drawing up the energies of the cream of the technocratic and business class. The year arrived and the country moved farther away from its eloquently advertised goal. Apparently undaunted the political class proclaimed the National Economic Empowerment and development Strategy (NEEDS) but we are still waiting for its dividends. These programmatic wreckages were followed up by the current administration's transformation agenda within the context we are told of vision 20:2020 but it will take the most incurable optimist to accept that the country is moving in those directions. Is this an exaggeration? Not if you consider the evidence closely. Life expectancy in Nigeria by UNDP figures is one of the lowest in Africa while the country's maternal and infant mortality is one of the highest on the continent exceeding what obtains in countries whose states formerly collapsed such as Angola, Liberia and Serria Leone. When you add to this the virtual state of siege created by insurgents, a dismal and desolate scenario emerges. The exodus of Nigerian students to Ghanaian universities, as well as the country becoming a bazaar for universities all over the world in search of students because of our dilapidated educational sector is a metaphor for the increasing cost of governance failure symptomised by a harvest of promises and slogans which come to naught or to very little. As the 2015 election approaches, we will be bombarded with yet more attractive slogans but many Nigerians in search of respite and if they have the wherewithal may be sourcing for countries even on the African continent where the disparity between official proclamations and existential conditions is not so wide. The human condition in Nigeria often appears to be a chapter taken straight out of the fable written by a famous Yoruba novelist concerning memorable vicissitudes in a forest of ghosts. Interestingly, the way forward may be to travel backwards to the 1950s where visionary statesmen such as Obafemi Awolowo postulated that because the human agent is both the target and the catalyst of transformation, his welfare and wellbeing should be the centre piece of economic and social development. Awolowo not only theorized this ideal but went ahead to inaugurate a democratic developmental regime which devoted as much as 50 percent of annual budget in the Western region to health and education. If the hemorrhage of capital to Ghana and other countries must be stopped or even reduced then we must initiate the kind of social re-engineering that prioritizes human capital development as well as build those institutions which can carry through that sort of visionary intervention. But is any such agenda on the political cards today? Olukotun is Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences at Lead City University Ibadan. |
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