Education: The Most Powerful Weapon for Changing the World by Muhammad Muntasir Adamu

As Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”.  Education is the key to eliminating, gender inequality as well as to reducing poverty, to creating a sustainable planet,, to preventing needless deaths and illness, and to fostering peace. Also in a stable economy, education is the new currency by which nations maintain economic competitiveness and global prosperity.

The importance of education to human beings cannot be overemphasized. Globally, education is considered as a human right that should be accorded to all human beings, in fact it was the reason why a lot of international human right bodies consider education as a fundamental human right.  It can also be seen in our 1999 Constitutional of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended in Chapter 2 which deals with Fundamental Objectives and Directives Principles of State Policy which states that the government shall provide free, compulsory and universal primary education, free university, and free adult literacy education but sadly as we all know, our Chapter 2 is unjusticiable.

          Sadly in Nigeria today, the system of education only keeps on deteriorating. These days, we have more schools with little education.  Today, we produce graduates who are not only half baked but in most cases even not baked at all. Failure is recorded at mass level, one wonders how after 6 years in Secondary school and qualifying exams in WAEC, and or NECO, JAMB and post-UME we record monumental failures in the education sector. Today our tertiary institutions have been on strike for five month, this is the only country that such has been done.  

UNESCO recommendation of 26% of national budgets must be adopted in our annual budget if at all our leaders are willing to save this sector. A sustainable amount of fund must be allocated to education sector like is done in the advance society.  The varsities are suffering under the weight of underfunding to the extent that even the quality of teachers is now going down, we are have schools where students hang on the windows during lectures due to lack of chairs because the class is overcrowded, the teachers don’t have ordinary microphones to speak so that students can hear, there is no electricity and running water, laboratories cannot function and so on. What type graduate do you expect from that kind of institution?

Another problem of Education in Nigerian schools today is the politicization of Education; which seriously affected the development of education. Today many educational institutions are opened and run in many states on political ground or other flimsy reasons. In Nigerian schools today admission in universities, colleges, polytechnics, secondary and primary schools are sometimes guided by connection and 'padi padi system' not academic performance. Parent today use their political offices or influences for the education of their children.  Another critical area that hinder development of education today is indiscipline, this is manifested in examination malpractices, secret cult menace, corruption etc. 

If these and even more rigorous steps are taken, we may be saved the irony of "we have failed" in the future--Time will tell

Muntasir is a student of University of Jos

@muntaseeer (on twitter)