For Nigeria, 24 million reasons to fear the future?

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

When Olusegun Obasanjo took over in the middle of 1976 from the slain Murtala Mohammed as Nigeria’s military Head of State, the regime was already committed as a matter policy to transition power to an elected civilian administration in 1979. This was a big deal alright but not one over which he had much say as such. As military Head of State, General Obasanjo identified two issues to define his personal legacy.

One was food security. To address that, he launched “Operation Feed the Nation”, better known by the acronym (OFN). Those were the same initials of Obasanjo Farms Nigeria, the name of the company under which the General would later pursue his post-retirement vocation in agriculture. The coincidence was not lost on many.

The other issue was education. To pursue this, General Obasanjo launched the Universal Primary Education (UPE) in 1976. 40 years later, an independent study determined that the UPE had “a statistically significant impact on schooling attainment of beneficiaries” but there were questions as to its reach and coverage. Quite apart from the usual dysfunctions associated with centrally dictated government programmes, the UPE also faced opposition from traditional and religious leaders in some parts of Nigeria, who reportedly felt “that it is a Christian brainwashing which alienates their children from their own religious beliefs.” Those were also people who largely opposed the education of the girl-child.

The three and a half years of the Obasanjo military regime were too short for such an ambitious programme as the UPE to prove itself. The best he could hope for was that his civilian successors would continue with the idea.

At the launch of the UPE, the country was in the middle of what its rulers believed would be an interminable Oil Boom. In hindsight, the onset of the UPE coincided with the beginning of a bust. The programme became one of the casualties of the rampant corruption and the subsequent Austerity that bedevilled the administration of Obasanjo’s chosen successor, President Shehu Shagari.

The military regime that toppled Shehu Shagari four years later paid no heed to basic education. Chronically careening from the twin crises of balance of payments and elite banditry of the Nigerian political class, the system never quite rediscovered the will to invest in basic education as a duty of the Nigerian state. By the time Obasanjo returned as civilian president 20 years after his first tour of duty, the country had begun to reap whirlwind from decades of costly omission.

President Obasanjo appeared to understand this but arguably waited too long to address it. In the fifth year of his eight year tenure, he enacted the Universal Basic Education Programme (UBE), which made basic education compulsory for all children in Nigeria. Basic education under the law was defined as nine years of formal education – six years in primary school and three years of junior secondary education. It also became a federal crime to deny a child in Nigeria access to such education. To encourage uptake by the states, the Federal Government offered generous co-financing incentives to the states. Many failed to take it up.

Two years later, in 2006, President Obasanjo launched a National Policy on Education. By this time, a diagnosis had indicated the depth of the emergency. Of 42.1 million Nigerian children eligible for primary education at the end of 2005, “only 22.3m were in the primary schools. This figure implies that about 19.8m or 47% Nigerian children that should [have] been in primary schools [were] not.”

It is no surprise that this period coincided with the onset of what would later become an Islamist insurgency founded on an ideology opposed to Western education.

As with his first tour of presidential duty, the policy measures implemented by President Obasanjo on his second coming equally relied for their durability on his successors sharing his sense of mission and urgency. It was a tall hope. In the two decades since Obasanjo’s National Policy on Education of 2006, successive administrations neglected it to a point where the country has become the most natural recruiting ground in the world for radicalisation.

On Monday, 13 November, 2017, Muhammadu Buhari, another Nigerian ruler on his second tour of presidential duty, hosted a Cabinet retreat on education. Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, himself a teacher of considerable stature and Education Minister, Adamu Adamu, also addressed the retreat which, however, involved little deliberation and ended with an inconclusive communique.

A high point of the Buhari Cabinet retreat was the presentation of Minister Adamu Adamu’s “Education for Change: A Ministerial Strategic Plan, 2016-2019.” Launched in August 2016 and better known under the acronym MSP, its title was a play upon the “Change” mantra of the then government, and the United Nations’ Education for All campaign. If it had been launched today, the plan would probably have been called “Education for Renewed Hope”.

At over 120 pages, most Nigerians, including senior staff of the Federal Ministry of Education (FMoE), were unlikely ever to read the MSP. In his foreword, Minister Adamu promised to “welcome rigorous discussion with all levels of stakeholders to ensure a sustainable and enduring document.” It never happened.

The MSP offered the government’s vision for education in Nigeria, setting out three strategic outcomes namely: improving access, enhancing quality, and strengthening sectoral systems. The scope covered ten major areas. Under access, in particular, the MSP focused on out-of-school children (OOSC).

The MSP identified a priority in the twin challenges of OOSC and mass illiteracy. The plan estimated the number of OOSC at 10.5 million and illiteracy at 38% or 60 million Nigerians. With reference to OOSC, it proposed “a state of emergency on education in the states most affected by the (Boko Haram) insurgency.” This was an implicit recognition of the relationship of cause and effect between policy failure and national security consequence.

By 2019, the plan hoped to reduce by half the number of illiterate people in Nigeria through the deployment of 170,000 instructors, 100,000 of whom will be mobilised by the Federal Government and another 70,000 by the States. For the first time, the MSP offered a plan for a pre-primary (nursery) education curriculum. Not much has been heard of these since then.

The pivotal planning data on which the MSP was anchored was dubious and dated. On the issue of OOSC, for instance, it claimed that Nigeria had “10.5 million out-of-school children”, a figure first used by the FMoE in its planning in 2006. Contradicting the MSP, however, President Buhari informed the country at the retreat that in Nigeria “an estimated 13.2 million children are out of school.” This was one-third more than the estimate by the MSP.

On the back of this frightening number, President Buhari then touted the goal of the FMoE as “fostering the development of all Nigerian citizens to their full potentials, in the promotion of a strong, democratic, egalitarian, indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God.”

For all its ambition, the MSP was starkly un-costed. Instead, it proposed to increase already bloated education overheads by elevating the National Board for Arabic and Islamic Studies (NBAIS) to a parastatal. It is hardly any surprise that President Buhari’s goal of enlightened governance based on egalitarian civics came to naught.

These and many more flaws in the MSP highlight the reasons why Nigeria’s educational sector drifted into a zone of dangerous incoherence under President Buhari’s watch. In the period since then, the country has descended into a snarling cauldron of inter-ethnic hate.

This past week, President Obasanjo disclosed that the population of OOSC in Nigeria has nearly doubled to 24 million, which is over 10% of the country’s current population estimate. He predictably warned: “You don’t need an oracle to know they will become the recruiting ground for the Boko Haram of tomorrow.”

Education should be a national security priority for all levels of government. States need both a coherent policy environment and a committed partner at the federal level. Yet very few Nigerians can say who the Minister of Education is, what is his or her name and what is their plan for addressing Nigeria’s 24 million reasons to fear the future.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu

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