ecently, there was a spate of articles on education by back page columnists in ThisDay and BusinessDay. The writers include Wale Adebanwi, the Gates Fellow in Cambridge, Simon Kolawole, Yusuph Olaniyonu and Kayode Komolafe of ThisDay and Femi Okunnu, a former Federal Works Commissioner. This article brings historical insights to the analysis of the relationships between education policy, social justice, economic development and the role of the civil service.
Watercolours for a few
Our sports store in Government College Ibadan (GCI) was filled shinny cricket bats, football boots and spike shoes. The wood and metal workshops had new machines. Students who came in before 1984 enjoyed a swimming pool. An older brother went to a Federal Government College and got dozens of "Made in England " textbooks, technical drawing sets, water colour palettes etc. We enjoyed "free education" like students in remote villages where teachers and chairs were scarce. No one ever argued about the uneven quality of "free education”. Reasonable parents lobbied or bribed someone to prevent their children been sent to "mushroom" schools.
University too was virtually free. We paid N40 naira per annum for accommodation. Some got extra spaces which they sold to other students; just the sort of criminality subsidies breed. Universities were like Sheraton Hotel until the early 1980s. Students were fed whole chickens and rice for 50 kobo. The now dilapidated cafeterias of the University of Ibadan beat anything today's fast food chains offer. Lecturers routinely published in international journals. Now local journals, with the occasional plagiarized work, are the norm.
A vicious spiral of injustice
Subsidizing secondary and university education has been unfair to everyone. It makes quality education free for those who should pay and gives a poor one to those who cannot pay and/or for whom is it may prove not useful or even harmful. It eventually spoilt the quality for the former, forcing them to pay higher private sector fees in Nigeria or abroad. Only the better-off possess the social and material resources to prepare kids for competitive entrance examinations. According to a friend, only two people from his secondary school in Iseyin went to university. Serious economists (as opposed to the official historians of free education) noticed as early as the 1960s that the expansion of free education in Western Nigeria was harming agriculture. To quote one, thousands too qualified to farm preferred to "roam on the fringes of the urban economy". In a world of finite resources, no social good is absolutely good; it is good only to the extent to which it represents the best use of public resources.
Rather than educate people for non-existent office jobs, rural infrastructure, healthcare and agricultural extension services should have been extended. For anything that is free, the wrong people somewhere are paying; excessive agrarian taxes funded "free education". Rural incomes, which would have boosted domestic manufactures, were also diverted towards parasitic industrial sectors using high exchanges rates. The economic historian, Peter Bauer described the process as an assault on "private capital formation". Indonesia (where the army taught farmers modern rice cultivation) expanded both manufacturing and agrarian production because it spent on the rural sector.
Every Nigerian family has "travel planners" i.e. young people looking for visas who do nothing productive for 4-6 years. Others spend 4 years trying to pass the JME, then another 6 years for a 4-year Religious Studies degree due to strikes by ill-paid lecturers, 1 year for NYSC and 3 job hunting. Many finally get a N16, 000 job as a “supervisor” in a dry cleaning business (the Director of the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation proudly announced recently that 20 graduates have applied as attendants at its public toilets). So many Nigerians spend 14 years acquiring qualifications they won't use and preparing for jobs they won’t get, a terrible waste of personal, parental and public resources. As the economy shrank and formal sector jobs disappeared, the universities, which multiplied in number, became parking lots for unemployed and unemployable youths. Deterring those whom higher secondary and university education would not benefit from pursuing it and making those whom it would benefit pay for it is both socially just and economically efficient. Our public policies have for too long diverted energies and talents away from doing or creating real jobs. In the Yoruba classic, Oleku set in 1970s University of Ibadan , new graduates sang "A o tun kawe ma, owo la omaka" (we will "count" only money from now). Government policies helped many to honour this vow.
The government almost totally lacks institutions and policies to regulate operations or improve skills in vast swathes of our economy that do not require 14-year B.As. These have been abandoned to stark illiterates, condemning them to informality and stagnation. The horrendous economic costs include lost taxes and the chaos of urban environments. To build a perfectly finished house, you may have to hire "expatriate" artisans from Benin Republic. Our rich spend on Indian and English bespoke suits. A consultant at AfricaRecuit, the London-based recruitment firm laments receiving too many Nigerian resumes with esoteric BScs, B.As and PhDs; his clients often want a humble technical certificate in underwater wielding. These two- thousand-dollars-a-week jobs go to tattooed "expatriates" from Dublin or Manchester. Despite the expensive machine tools installed in GCI, even the dimmest student did not choose to become master carpenters. The fascination with Religious Studies B.As would have been checked by charging full market prices for them and significant cost recovery at high secondary school. (The implementation of the 6-3-3-4 system suggested a greater interest in buying machines than a serious intention to align education to the real economy). Public funds are better spent enhancing the quality of secondary, vocational and teacher education, quality graduates of which can do the routine jobs telecoms firms and banks employ graduates for. Those with privileged social backgrounds, which now often include private secondary education, benefit disproportionately from Religious Studies B.As. Graduates who schooled in Iseyin seldom get those cushy relationship management jobs.
A revamped education system should be highly focused on limited goals. It should prepare all Nigerians for effective citizenship. It should generously fund talented but indigent students at all levels (thus guaranteeing an equal social experience). Third, there should be limited but very generous funding of doctoral and post-doctoral research. Now the best graduates do routine jobs in banks while those with incredibly mediocre degrees lecture. When universities recover the true cost of every B.A, lecturers will get competitive salaries and stop striking like coal miners. Yet many difficult questions remain about how jobs are to be created even after our education system has stopped producing over-certified "illiterates" while aspiring to make everyone a graduate (governors still amazingly list “new universities” as achievements).
Just too many trophies left
It is easier now to implement cross-sectoral reforms that will promote structural economic changes and disperse the gains of liberalisation. A combination of infrastructure and education policies, sector regulations and economic incentives is required to transform rural economies and improve incomes and productivity of urban trades. Agricultural loans (private) are better steered towards attracting big (foreign and local) plantations and agro-industrial complexes rather than bantamweight farms. (Indonesia is driving the conversion of rice fields to palm oil estates in response to rising world prices). The cost of new roads connecting cities to hinterlands could be recovered with tolls. Electricity tariffs could be lowered and schools and healthcare facilities made free. Microfinance lending should also be biased towards the rural sector.
Investing towards the transformation of rural Nigeria would be a far more worthy use of the petroleum subsidy. Too many able-bodied people struggle to make N300 per day selling handkerchiefs, bananas and chewing sticks in Lagos, a terrible waste of manpower that only contributes to making our cities ugly, crime-ridden and unlivable (hindering productivity and deterring investment). Rural education should aim to enhance agricultural productivity, supply easily trainable manpower for simple manufactures or create clusters for export-quality arts and crafts products. New rural infrastructure should be planned with an eye on boosting tourism; the neglect of this sector's potentials is comparable to gas flaring. Universities with decent research budgets will make critical contributions to improving rural productivity and the utility of rural produce to modern industries.
Regulating trades and squeezing roadside table operators so that formally trained carpenters, mechanics, bricklayers, wielders, tailors, photographers etc will boost both rural labour and the market for its produce. Banks can support businesses that render safer and better services, which expand and pay taxes. In all organized economies, planning/building permissions are biased towards businesses that generate jobs. In Nigeria, “unruly trades” fester and suffocate the formal sector. The Lagos state government is taking the first steps to modernizing the urban environment to generate investment and jobs. It has introduced mass transit buses in partnership with private investors and is pulling down shops and signboards that violate relevant regulations. The scope for improvement is huge. The entire Lagos state transport system could be operated by 3 to 5 competitively licensed investors. This would spurn a range of support industries. Planning and trade regulations should modernize and expand the retail and hotel industries. It is particularly essential to find ways to "re-organise" chaotic markets in Oshodi, Ladipo, Apongbon , Balogun etc . "Consolidation" in retail would employ an army of cleaners, sales assistants, supervisors and low-level managers with spreadsheet skills. There is also clearly a “market” for creating parking spaces (and collecting fines for illegal parking) which can employ thousands. Effective urban planning requires local governments with constitutional roles and resources to govern their socio-economic environments. They require brilliant economists, town planners and architects.
President Yar'Adua should ask every Minister to produce "Consolidation Agendas" for the industries under them i.e. regulations that create competitive businesses. The era of easy reforms that boost growth by improving microeconomic conditions and which can be implemented by isolated reform teams, is nearing its end. Joined-up policy interventions which will alter the economic structure and create jobs face two major impediments. First, our civil service has become a docile service, unaware of the dynamics of sectors under their control and international innovations of pro-growth regulation and public services delivery. Whole departments exist just to pay salaries and "estacodes". Bureaucrats controlling enormous budgets and critical regulations are extremely poorly paid. The most serious policy work is farmed out to donor agencies. Secondly, key political appointments are still completely regarded as a "distribution of satisfactions". Pro-growth reforms are optional, left to only a few “over-zealous” ministers and bureaucrats. Parties have no economic agendas beyond shallow catchphrases.
The Yar'Adua administration can make a difference since most of what we need to promote growth is fairly obvious. But by abandoning their predecessors' education reforms, the President's appointees have chosen politics and stagnation over analysis and progress. Essentially, the reforms could have channeled non-public funds into secondary schools and encouraged vocational education. Whenever the cabinet is reshuffled, godfathers should nominate people who, besides representing their ethnic areas, can devise big ticket reforms. And it's high time Nigeria created a cadre of super civil servants, probably a hundred in every ministry and state, who will be remunerated as well as banks' executive directors. We can no longer afford our “cheap” bureaucracy. In India and East Asia , the civil service gets its own share of the best graduates through competitive entrance examinations. The ease with which the education reforms were overturned strongly reflects both lack of civil service ownership and its ruinous attachment to the status quo. While outsiders' fresh thinking should be welcome, researching sector conditions, studying policy options and how they connect to overall economic goals is primarily the job of a “domestic” civil service. Is our docile service up to the task?
To move anywhere near our 20/20 economic vision, Nigeria's education budget ought to be spent in ways that produce world class university graduates and research, especially in the sciences and impart technical, creative and administrative skills that are required to efficiently perform a myriad of jobs in the economy. Asking people to pay for their B.As is only the first step. The most difficult part is creating an economy where people don't have to be university graduates to live successful comfortable lives. This calls for transforming entire trades and sectors and even creating new ones and supporting them with physical and social infrastructure and a host of smart incentives. It also requires some kind of Marshall Plan for our civil service.
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