Let us veer slightly away from the
headlines overflowing with tales of amazing savagery from the slaughter
houses of North East Nigeria or with the puzzles of dignifying a
colonial amalgamation with a national carnival staged in the full glare
of world attention; and raise the question: Is there still something
called Nigerian education? That rumination was occasioned by two recent
events, namely, the recent report that many Nigerian youths are paying
through their noses to get degrees in Ghanaian universities which
operate illegally.
Ironically, some of these so-called
universities operate in ramshackle settings and are run by Nigerian
proprietors possibly fleeing the crackdown of the National Universities
Commission (NUC) on illegitimate universities in Nigeria. The second
propeller for the current inquiry came from the unanimous perspective of
leading western publications such as the Times of London, The Economist and Forbes magazine on the recent Sanusi suspension saga.
The journals constructed the former
governor of the Central Bank as a persecuted whistle-blower hounded out
of office by a corrupt administration adding that such a move would hurt
Nigeria’s macro economic stability which they argue is fast tracking
economic growth. This is a point of view shared to a large extent by
many Nigerians. However, the Nigerian debate on the matter was far more
robust, more nuanced with several commentators interrogating Sanusi’s
conduct and to what extent he applied the moral standards he set for
others in the way he ran the Central Bank. Some other Nigerian writers
questioned the appropriateness of the Governor of the Central Bank
acting as a whistle-blower while seeking to remain in office.
What we got therefore are prestigious
western journals offering opinions with a perspective familiar to
western readers but in the end shallow and did not get to grips with
several aspects of the problem – an updated version of what has been
called parachute journalism. Much the same thing applies to several
books written on Nigeria in the United States and Europe especially
those done by ‘experts’ that have little real acquaintance with the
country. In the same vein, Master’s and Doctoral degrees are supervised
by academics whose expertise on Nigerian affairs is suspect.
And this brings us back to the issue of
whether there exists any longer the concept of Nigerian education
majoring in the country’s narratives, its history, identity, culture
including those factors that it shares with the rest of the world and
those somewhat exclusive to it. Such education if it exists any longer
would be the opposite of the current rush for external degrees from
almost any country around the globe and almost any destination that
calls itself a university.
At some point, every country must answer
for itself such questions as the purpose and goals of schooling, what
and how students are taught, the role of teachers or instructors as well
as what instructional technologies are adopted. In the social sciences
for example and looking at Universities in particular the 1970s and
1980s witnessed the flourishing of what we may broadly call
Nigerian-centered perspectives with many scholars interrogating
inherited or Western-oriented approaches. The professional associations
based in the universities developed critiques of imported but seemingly
universal policies such as structural adjustment programme. This writer
recalls, for example, that the Nigerian Economic Society devoted one of
its annual conferences to structural adjustment rooted in neo-liberal
economics and of course arrived at the verdict that it is harshly
inappropriate for Nigeria and other African countries. I remember
Professor Eskor Toyo thundering in the midst of a heated argument that
“I know more economics than the experts at the IMF and the World Bank.”
As we now know it took a decade or more
for the IMF and the World Bank to catch up somewhat with some of the
insights concerning the fallouts of adjustment and post-adjustment
policies on the Nigerian economy. This scenario of the unfortunate
effects of so-called universal knowledge converted to policy
prescriptions for Nigeria was repeated in the after math of the
magnificent civil uprising over the removal of fuel subsidy in 2012. Two
influential economists much sought after around the globe, Professor
Paul Collier of Oxford University and Professor Jeffery Sachs condemned
the Nigerian protesters and even likened the protest to a cranky right
wing movement in the United States. They were of course totally wrong
for although fuel subsidy had been converted into a giant rip off by
thieving cabals with access to government removing it carried a domino
effect around the entire economy and threatened to impoverish all but
those Nigerians who live out a subsidized existence paid for by
government.
It was easy for non-Nigerians
interpreting the country from the optic and frameworks of their own
cultural experiences or alternatively who are using the country to test
the applicability of right wing nostrums to totally misread the
protest. The more fundamental issue of course is that in the absence
of what I have here described as a Nigerian education our citizens are
open to all kind of ideas from the West especially those that are
dressed in the prestigious garb of world acclaimed expertise. Nigerian
education as it is conceived here will unpack and interrogate western
concepts with a view to testing the limits of their application to
Nigerian circumstances. It will also see through cultural and racial
baggage disguised as scientific theories just as it will not blandly
assume that there is only one grand Nigerian narrative.
As is well known there is a hidden
curriculum to education which relates to the values, preconceptions and
biases of the educator and the system which produced him or her. Nobel
laureate and famed essayist, Toni Morrison is one of those who revealed
in a widely quoted essay that “the experiences of people outside the
white mainstream has been the invisible presence in North American
literature.” In other words, the so-called great texts and great
education proceed on premises that may be hidden or at least not so
obvious to the student. A few years ago, I was outraged about the
outpourings in one of our newspapers of a young lady who apparently had
just returned from the United States with a degree in the humanities.
She extolled in her write-up the virtues of the American founding
fathers. Fair enough; my grouse was that she went on to deride Nigerian
founding fathers such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Ahmadu
Bello. That example brought home to me the dangers of having the youths
of any country exposed to the kind of education which teaches them
more or less to look down if not have contempt for their own countries.
All great nations let us remember invest in the kind of education that
will reproduce the core values and identities of their peoples in the
medium and long terms. And this goes on in spite of globalisation
currents which throw up transnational and cosmopolitan identities.
As the nation contemplates the rebuilding
of our dishevelled educational infrastructure we should bring back the
fading or lost concept of Nigerian education which will serve as a
filter for myths and suspect ideas masquerading as expertise from other
lands.
Source Punchng.com