Education
The dwindling quality of education in Nigeria is a cause for great concern and also calls for a prompt action by all stakeholders to salvage the trend.
The current situation is, to say the least, disheartening. A lot of computer science graduates of Nigeria’s tertiary institutions, for instance, fail recruitment tests for their inability to switch on a PC. Some of them are obviously getting to touch such machines for the first time. Mass Communication graduates struggle to make simple and correct sentences. Engineering graduates who ought to have conducted researches in the course of their studies, culminating in inventions, get to touch most of the elementary engineering tools for the first time, after their graduation. This is a near hopeless situation for a country that targets to be one of the world’s leading economies by 2020. The implication of the existing trend is that even though there is a high graduate unemployment rate, most of the university and polytechnic graduates in Nigeria are not employable.
The loss of confidence in Nigeria’s education system is evident in the amount of money that Nigerians who can afford it, spend on their education in other countries. According to Exam Ethics International, a non-governmental organisation, Nigeria loses N1.5 trillion annually to education tourism. N160 billion of this amount is allegedly spent by Nigerian parents on their children and wards’ education in Ghana alone while N80 billion is spent on the same purpose in the United Kingdom.
President Goodluck Jonathan should be commended for allocating the highest budget to the education sector in the 2013 budget. However, there are other issues that require urgent attention. The emphasis on paper qualification and theoretical knowledge at the expense of competence or practical knowledge and entrepreneurial skills is a big challenge to the sector. The result is that most products of Nigeria’s tertiary institutions are mere certificate carriers and are not
The current situation is, to say the least, disheartening. A lot of computer science graduates of Nigeria’s tertiary institutions, for instance, fail recruitment tests for their inability to switch on a PC. Some of them are obviously getting to touch such machines for the first time. Mass Communication graduates struggle to make simple and correct sentences. Engineering graduates who ought to have conducted researches in the course of their studies, culminating in inventions, get to touch most of the elementary engineering tools for the first time, after their graduation. This is a near hopeless situation for a country that targets to be one of the world’s leading economies by 2020. The implication of the existing trend is that even though there is a high graduate unemployment rate, most of the university and polytechnic graduates in Nigeria are not employable.
The loss of confidence in Nigeria’s education system is evident in the amount of money that Nigerians who can afford it, spend on their education in other countries. According to Exam Ethics International, a non-governmental organisation, Nigeria loses N1.5 trillion annually to education tourism. N160 billion of this amount is allegedly spent by Nigerian parents on their children and wards’ education in Ghana alone while N80 billion is spent on the same purpose in the United Kingdom.
President Goodluck Jonathan should be commended for allocating the highest budget to the education sector in the 2013 budget. However, there are other issues that require urgent attention. The emphasis on paper qualification and theoretical knowledge at the expense of competence or practical knowledge and entrepreneurial skills is a big challenge to the sector. The result is that most products of Nigeria’s tertiary institutions are mere certificate carriers and are not