THERE cannot be gainsaying the fact that Nigeria’s education system needs a revolutionary reform. Though the debate is on-going, many have come to a conclusion that the standard has taken a comatose. Some of these people derive their grousewith the system from the world ranking of universities by Times Higher Education data in 2025which placed the position of the best university in Nigeria – University of Ibadan at between 801 and 1000th globally. This is out of a total number of 275 of such establishments in the country.
There are also a group of persons, especially employers of labour who opine that while other nations of the world are battling with the high rate of unemployment, Nigeria is contending with the yearly churning out of poorly skilled and unemployable graduates from her universities. These and many more factors can be said to have been responsible for the recent innovative moves by the federal government of Nigeria.
It all began with the contentious provision of 18 years as the minimum age requirement for seeking admission into the nation’s universities. While the arguments rage, the government came up with the news that it has completed a comprehensive review of school curricula for basic, senior secondary and technical education aimed at making Nigerian learners “future-ready.” This has led to the introduction of the Chinese language, among other subjects as some of the subjects of study at secondary education levels in the country.
As discussions remained on-going on these, the West African Examinations Council came up with its own input which suggests that science students can no longer take Economics, a subject that has traditionally bridged the gap between science and the social sciences. Even more baffling is that students in the Humanities are also excluded from offering Economics. According to the new subject list, only students in the Business department are allowed to take Economics.
Additionally, the Minister of Education, Dr. TunjiAlausa, recently announced that Nigerian senior secondary school students in arts and humanities will no longer be required to present a credit in mathematics in their Senior School Certificate Examination, organised by the West African Examination Council and National Examination Council, WAEC as a condition for gaining admission into universities and polytechnics in the country.
To say the least, these may be good intentions. But superb as they may seem, they can, at best be described as cosmetic solutions that are akin to placing the cat before the horse. None of them will yield the desired results until the battered existing educational management structures are re-enforced. For example, Alausa should research into the reasons why the teaching profession at the primary and post primary school levels has been mainly left for the female folks. The findings he comes up with will certainly guide him better in repositioning the sector.
Apart from the issues of low morale among the nation’s teaching class due to poor rewards, the minister must delve into the root causes of students’ hatred for mathematics. The few available teachers in this subject are inadequate for the country’s teeming seekers of scientific knowledge.
It is disheartening to always note that an average senior high school teacher in the US, according to the US the Bureau of Labor Statistics earns about $64,000 (N92,800,000) per year, with all the paraphernalia that go with well-paying jobs while their counterparts in Nigeria, probably on as high as salary grade level 17 hardly can hardly afford the ownership of a good car without help from relatives or cutting corners.
Many students and pupils hardly afford the cost of buying books and other learning tools such as computers and associated software. In like manner, many teachers do not have comfortable staff rooms or personal offices that are convenient enough for them to attend to students’ needs within the school hours.
To buttress the point being made here, lecturers in the country’s universities are currently on two-week warning strike to press home their demand for welfare agreements reached between the federal government and the dons as back as 2009.
The federal government must also address the burning issues around the number of out-of-school population among the country’s children. And this can be resolved with free and compulsory education at the early stages of learning if not at all levels in government schools.
Schools in the private sector requires to be regulated to ensure that they must not continue to be for all-comers’. Everything from mode of conduct to salaries of workers should tally with government standards.
Meanwhile, for any new innovation to work better than what is already on ground in the education sector, training and retraining of those at the fore front of making them achieve desired goals – the teachers must be given priorities along with remunerations that are attractive to those genuinely cut out for the profession.
Additionally, those seeking professional careers in education should have their costs of training subsidized to a reasonable extent if not entirely exempt there from. And parents, guardians and teachers must also play their roles in ensuring that examination malpractices at illegal special centres are curtailed.
Enough is enough of placing the cart before the horse in Nigeria’s educational adventures!If yesterday’s developing country like China that got her independence only thirteen years earlier than Nigeria can boast of five of the best forty universities in the world in the 2025/2026 university rankings, the country should, at least strive to be in the first one hundred best universities globally.
