Nailing the Coffin On Nigerian Education

When the COVID-19 Pandemic started, it was clear that it was a crisis, and for some of us, crisis also translates to a ‘dangerous opportunity”. Perhaps a lock-down that forced everything including our schools to shut down could be just what we needed to re-set our ailing educational sector amongst others and place our country back on the path to greatness.

COVID-19 was meant to be a leveler, reminding the privileged about their mortality and vulnerability and reminding us all to be our brothers’ keepers. Unfortunately, rather than harvesting the “dangerous opportunity”, it seems like our rulers have used it knowingly or unknowingly to widen the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” and set us back a couple of decades - Let me explain.

Our schools were shut down in late March this year, and everyone applauded this decision at the time - it was certainly the right thing to do. The schools were almost completing the second term and many students were just starting or completing the second-term examinations.

After Easter, which usually is the end of the second term holidays, forward-thinking schools began to engage parents and formally open their “Virtual School Programs” for the 3rd Term. At this time, the lock-down was still in force - parents who were lucky to still have their jobs were working from home, while a good number had either lost their jobs or suffered significant setbacks in their businesses that were not pandemic-resilient.

The mere mention of paying school fees got many parents agitated and it seems that their complaints got the ears of our educational authorities who quickly issued statements banning the Virtual School Programs and insisting that Schools remain closed - physical and virtual, and that 3rd Term will commence when the Government announced it. Schools were allowed if they wanted to, to offer “Virtual Lessons” to their pupils, and parents who were interested and could afford same. I remember seeing lots of parents celebrating this pronouncement from the Government, accusing the schools of being “shylock”.

Some lone voices like mine smelled a rat and saw the dangerous opportunity that was available. The smelly rat was the fact that our Federal, State and Local Government Schools could NOT set up virtual learning or distance learning programs for their pupils and students and therefore could not allow Private Schools to start running the 3rd term while public schools remained shut. The same educational authorities unfortunately play the dual role of regulator and operator of education in Nigeria. If private schools continued with the 3rd term via Virtual or Distance Learning, while public schools could not - then we will have two different school calendars. That chaos was UNACCEPTABLE.

The dangerous opportunity that I and a few others saw was this - doing everything within the shortest possible time to capacitate our public schools to run Virtual or Distance Learning Programs, so that all schools could resume formally for the 3rd Term. I imagine that if State Governments reached out to donor agencies like the Gates Foundation and others, they could raise enough money to procure $50 tablets and even get access to the billions of naira locked up in UBEB Funds with the Federal Government to fund this Virtual Education Program. If we reached out to the Telecommunication Giants like MTN, 9Mobile, Airtel, Glo and NTEL, whose data revenues had nearly tripled by the first month of the lockdown to offer subsidized or free internet for pupils and students we could pull it off.

Imagine tablets and the internet in the hands of millions of young people and their families all over the country. Talk about the dangerous opportunity of bridging the knowledge and exposure gap in our country, empowering the poor and under-privileged, closing the poverty gap and accelerating economic development in our country.

Unfortunately, many Nigerians remained cynical - pointing out that what our under-privileged pupils and students needed more than ever now was food in their bellies - our proclivity for “stomach infrastructure” is unbelievable. In fact, many were very impressed that the Federal Government’s school feeding program was still taking place during the lock-down, while my friends and I argued that some of the huge sums being spent on such a program could be channeled to Virtual Learning - after all “man shall not leave by bread alone”

Somewhere in between all of these, we saw circulars from the Central Bank of Nigeria and adverts from our local banks informing us that we could now purchase foreign currency (that was getting scarce and expensive due to dwindling revenues) at a preferential rate to pay the school fees of students in foreign schools who had commenced school via Virtual Education. Yet another smelly rat and another major blow to the nail on the coffin of Nigerian education. So, while Formal Virtual education was outlawed here in Nigeria, we could allocate precious foreign exchange for the children of the privileged who schooled abroad to attend their own Virtual Schools.

By this time, our lock down had eased a bit, parents had started going back to work and had now started asking more questions like - when will schools open? But the schools remained shut - physically and virtually, only running virtual “lessons” in line with the directives from the Government till this moment.

Then the final nail on the coffin - the bombshell announcement at the COVID-19 PTF briefing by the Minister of State for Education which went viral on social media. He clarified that schools in Nigeria that run British, American or any other International Curriculum were not covered by the earlier directive and should go ahead with their formal Virtual Programs un-interrupted. He even mentioned the names of such schools - and left us wondering if it was a subliminal message to suggest that we all needed to move from our Nigerian curriculum schools to join the super-elite in those ‘International Schools”.

With that move it was certain - the coffin of Nigerian education had been nailed and closed, and we have just set ourselves decades behind. The proliferation of private schools in Nigeria is an aberration caused by the decay of public schools. With this current disposition, it seems like even private education (with the exception of schools on a foreign curriculum) is heading for a similar decay.