IRIN Focus on troubled education system

Thirty years ago Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria was among areas in the country that provided leadership in education. Its schools maintained the highest standards and its students came out tops even in international examinations. However, in the past eight months, public primary and secondary schools in the state have been shut down by a teachers’ strike. Teachers are owed more than a year's back pay and many don’t see the point in going on teaching. Students have been left to their own devices. Many are drifting into low skill trades or, in the worst cases, into crime and prostitution. The situation in Anambra State may be an extreme case, but is symbolic of the parlous state of the education system in Nigeria. After many decades of producing a succession of highly educated people, Nigeria’s education system is today in decline and its institutions in decay. The schools that produced some of Africa’s leading intellectuals - including writers such as Chinua Achebe and Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka - are now pale shadows of their former glorious selves. The early modern educational institutions in Nigeria were mostly set up by Christian missionaries in the first decades of the 20th century. Though largely a part of the evangelisation process, they were encouraged by the British colonial government as they produced much of the manpower needed to run the administration. In the mainly Muslim north where the colonial authorities discouraged missionary activities, the few schools set up were owned by the government. These schools provided training primarily for those to be recruited into the colonial administration, who were mainly from the families of the local caliphs and emirs. "During this period, only a very small percentage of those who received primary and secondary education made the transition to higher education," Ijeoma Nwankpa, an educationalist, told IRIN. But as the anti-colonial effort gathered momentum in the 1940s and 1950s, she said, education became an instrument of struggle for the nationalists. The regions into which Nigeria was then divided attained self-government by 1954, and the regional governments of the west and east immediately introduced free education. Following independence in 1960, there was a strong desire to develop an indigenous education policy, shorn of aspects of the colonial policy considered to be in conflict with national aspirations. A curriculum conference in 1969 laid the groundwork for the declaration of a universal primary education scheme in 1976, the production of a draft policy on education three years later and its approval in 1981. It established the 6-3-3-4 system, comprising six years of primary school, three years of junior secondary, another three years of senior secondary or technical education, and four years of higher education. "While the oil boom years - between 1974 and 1981 - lasted, the objectives of the national policy appeared within reach," said Nwankpa. "But with the downturn in government revenue that followed, wide gaps began to emerge between the objectives and their implementation." A study conducted by Nigeria’s National Planning Commission and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), blamed frequent changes of government through military coups for creating great difficulty in pursuing educational goals. "Lack of continuity has been one of the main stumbling blocks," the study said. A closely related and perhaps more fundamental factor has been the absence of the political will to follow through the policy commitments. "To a large extent, lip-service has been paid to the established goals and policy prescriptions by successive governments," the document concluded. Figures released by the central bank show that between 1980 and 1998, federal government expenditure on education (based on 1985 prices) fell by more than 270 percent. During the worst years - the last 15 years of military rule - annual expenditure was at times as low as 500 million naira (some US $4 million) as against 3.5 billion naira ($31 million) spent at the peak of the oil boom in 1980. The period between 1986 and 1992 experienced the lowest expenditure, averaging 600 million naira a year. At the time, military ruler General Ibrahim Babangida was implementing a structural adjustment programme (SAP) backed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and characterised by cuts in social spending. Consequences that followed include the non-provision of adequate financial resources to create a conducive environment for learning, leading to the demoralisation of teachers and other professionals involved in the delivery of education services. The situation was further compounded by the intensification of poverty during this period. By 1996, more than two-thirds of the population - then about 110 million - were living on less than US $1.4 a day - below the poverty line. Many parents could neither send their children to school nor provide them an environment conducive to learning. Very rapidly the gains made in education in the first two decades of independence were lost. Official figures show gross enrolment of children of primary school age fell from 82 percent in 1985 to 68 percent in 1990. The quality of education also dropped sharply. According to a 1996 study conducted by the federal ministry of education with UN agencies, primary four pupils achieved a mean score of 33 percent for numeracy, 25 percent for literacy and 32 percent for life skills - well below the 40-percent pass mark. With a massive brain-drain from the universities to more lucrative positions abroad or in the private sector following the SAP years, the quality of higher education inevitably dropped as well. According to the study by UNICEF and the National Planning Commission, accreditation reports by the various education regulatory bodies in the past decade "have all alluded to falling standards, while employers have consistently decried the quality of graduates being turned out by the tertiary education system". Latest available figures show that 58 percent of Nigerian men and 41 percent of women are literate. Wide disparities exist between the north (where 40 percent of men and 21 percent of women are literate) and the south (where the figures are 74 percent for men and 57 percent for women). It is estimated that 80 percent of children need to complete primary education in order to cut adult illiteracy to half the 1990 levels. Since his election in 1999, President Olusegun Obasanjo has initiated moves to reverse the decline in education. Under a Universal Basic Education (UBE) scheme launched in August that year, children are supposed to receive free and compulsory education up to the first three years of secondary school. The plan is to introduce UBE over a nine-year period starting with those in primary one in the 2000/2001 academic year. But whatever plans the federal government has articulated will have to contend with the fact that it shares decision-making on education with state governments. The states have exclusive responsibility over primary education, while both federal and state governments have legislative powers over the secondary and tertiary tiers of education. A number of states, such as Lagos, Anambra and Kaduna have abolished the payment of tuition fees in primary and secondary schools. But in practice, not all have the capacity to carry through the policy. Anambra, which, due to a combination of alleged mismanagement and a shortfall in revenue, has not been able to pay its teachers is one example. Recently the governor declared that he plans to reintroduce school fees in order to cope.