Banji's Lamentation (1)

• This cartoon by my friend, Joel Pett, editorial cartoonist at the Lexington Herald-Leader reflect how Africa presents to the rest of the world; so, I decided to publish it. There's no question that Africa is the poorest continent in the world and that it needs all the help that it can get, to "get well." Published with permission. All rights reserved.

Banji’s Lamentation (1)

Banji Adisa was already working at The Guardian in Lagos, Nigeria when I walked in there in July 1989 to start my very first job in journalism, as production sub-editor. He still remains there, after series of career twists and turns for me. So, when on Wednesday, October 29 2008, The Guardian published an article, entitled “Students and WAEC Exams: Hope Deferred,” and credited it to Banji Adisa, I not only cried for the Nigerian child, I also made a mental picture of the man behind that piece. As I write this, I still see Banji in my mind’s eyes. For those who do not know, WAEC is the acronym for the West African Examinations Council, a body that conducts high school diploma examinations for four English-speaking West African countries of Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Banji’s lamentation was warranted by the results of the 2007 examination that WAEC conducted in Nigeria. That result showed that only 25 percent of the over one million candidates who sat for the exams passed five subjects, including English and Mathematics, the minimum entry requirement for admission to a college or university in Nigeria. For the information of my readers, it is interesting to note that since Banji’s article appeared, WAEC has released the result of the 2008 version of its exam, conducted in May-June of this year. Of the 1.2 million candidates in Nigeria who sat the exams, only 188,000 or 13.7 percent scored this minimum requirement to be admitted into college.
Back to Banji’s lamentation! After an exhaustive x-ray of the problem with Nigeria’s education system, Banji came up with the following recommendations, among others:
· Government should jettison its inconsistent policies for the education sector, right from the primary school level where the rot begins.
· Government should, adequately, fund education from the primary school level, including payment of teachers’ salaries, as and when due.
· Government should embark of massive rehabilitation of school infrastructure
· Parents should wake up to their responsibility to their children and redirect them from the path of self-destruction.
It is instructive that Tell magazine, one of Nigeria’s best newsmagazines, had in a lead article on its November 3, 2008 edition, entitled “Monument of Decay,” decried the state of education in Nigeria. The newsmagazine identified the sources of this decay as inadequate funding; poor state or supply of infrastructure, libraries, laboratories, workshops and computers; examination malpractices, and frequent changes in education policies.
The crisis in Nigeria’s public education system is manifesting itself in many ways. One of these is in the number of school-age children who are out of school. In May this year, Dr. Igwe Aja Nwachukwu, the erstwhile Nigeria’s education minister, while at a press conference to inaugurate the 2008 Education for All Week had stated that 11 million Nigerian children of school age were not enrolled in school. Worldwide, the number of out-of-school children is 80 million. At the secondary school level, examination malpractice is the face of the crisis in education in Nigeria, and this takes many forms. In one case, a nursing mother was killed in the northern city of Gombe, as she tried to stop students from cheating in an examination that she was supervising. In another case, this May, some WAEC staff who were in custody of English Language exam paper were attacked, apparently by armed students, and dispossessed of the exam papers. At the university level, teachers who insist on doing the right thing and asking same of their students have had to suffer many indignities in the hands of their students. Some female professors have been raped, some strict professors killed by their own students and the presence of violent gangs or cults in campuses is now the order of the day.
Anyone who remains in doubt about the decadent state of education in Nigeria should see the UNESCO-sponsored EFA Global Monitoring Report 2008 and what it says about Nigeria’s public education system. In 2000, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, organized a “World Education Forum” in Dakar, Senegal. In the forum, representatives of 180 governments from poor and rich nations, including Nigeria, adopted a “Framework of Action” that focused on the achievement of six Education for All (EFA) goals, by 2015. These goals included:
· Expansion of early childhood care and education
· Achievement of universal primary education (UPE).
· Development of learning opportunities for youths and adults.
· Spread of literacy.
· Gender parity and gender equality in education.
· Improvements in education quality.
The EFA Global Monitoring Report 2008 was a mid-term report on how each of the signatory nations has performed in meeting the goals set for 2015. For Nigeria and many other sub-Saharan African countries, the report has sobering news! The Education for All Development Index (EDI) calculated for 129 countries showed that 25 are far from achieving the EFA goals. Incidentally, two-thirds of these, which includes Nigeria, are in Sub-Saharan Africa! In fact, the report shows that Nigeria is among four countries considered to be too slow and moving away from any hope of achieving the EFA goals. The other countries are Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire), Namibia and Rwanda. The report is not all bad news for Africa. It says that Tanzania, Sao Tome and Principe and Seychelles have already met the targets, seven years ahead of 2015. The report further said that Benin Republic, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi and Zambia have a high chance of achieving the goals by 2015, given that they are making steady progress.
Giving insight into why some African countries are having a hard time meeting the EFA goals, the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2008 cited poverty as an obstacle. It said that children from poor families face the prospects of not enrolling in school or not completing them when enrolled. It noted that, in Nigeria, 75 percent of the population live below the poverty line of one US dollar (1 USD) per day. It says that his may be partly responsible for the slow progress with attaining EFA goals.
I strongly believe that fixing the crisis in the educational sector in Nigeria, on a long term, will require serious work in early childhood education and development. Consequently, I’ve partnered with like-minded people to establish the Power Education Foundation, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit, to raise funds to promote school readiness in Nigeria and Africa, through early childhood education. In particularly, the PEF is interested in measures to reach the poorest, most vulnerable and disadvantaged children in the rural areas of Africa to provide them with early childhood learning opportunities. The governments in Nigeria have left this sub-sector to private entrepreneurs who are motivated by profit making. Please, visit our website at www.powereducationfoundation.com, to see how you can contribute to this cause.

Azubike Aliche