predominant form of cordiality and
felicitous exchange among the Igbo
and other inhabitants of South-East
who survived the trauma and
murderous incivility of the Nigerian civil war. Thank God Nigeria today is not at war; that is if you discount various manifestations of what experts refer to as low intensity warfare. But then, everyday life around the country — harsh and harrowing — reminds one of the horrors of war. As this article was
being concluded, fuel queues had
returned to Ibadan with the commodity selling for between N100 and N120 per litre.

This is in a country where 80 per cent
of the population live on less than $1 a
day. Commuting within and between
cities remains a tedious task,
considering the state of the roads and
sundry criminals. Power generation, in
spite of a recent modest mark-up, trails behind what obtains in several African countries while educational and health infrastructure remain in tatters.
Against this depressing backdrop, the
revelation published in Sunday PUNCH
of April 9, 2012 that Nigerians spend
N160bn annually on university
education in Ghana hardly came as a
surprise. This is even if it qualifies and
puts in context recent triumphalist
claims that Nigeria’s ‘fast-growing
economy’ suggests that the
transformation agenda of the Goodluck
Jonathan administration is on course
and that the country is on the high
road to achieving its goal of ranking
among the 20 largest economies by
2020. The information about how much

Nigerians spend on education for their
children in Ghanaian universities was
given by the Chairman, Committee of
Pro-chancellors of Nigerian Universities,
Dr. Wale Babalakin. He went on to say
that Nigeria’s budget for education in
2011 was less than the amount
Nigerian parents commit to educating
their sons and daughters in Ghana
yearly. Talking about spending on education, Nigeria’s budget remains scandalously low in comparison with other African countries, much less the new centres of industrial prominence in Asia. For example, in the 2012 budget, Nigeria voted less than nine per cent of its total expenditure on education; a far cry from UNESCO’s stipulated target of 26 per cent. In contrast, Ghana’s educational budget in the last decade hovered between 26 and 35 per cent of its annual budgets; South Africa is roughly 26 per cent and Kenya 24 per cent. In other words, Nigerian leaders for whatever reason have consistently underfunded the educational sector even at the level of budget proclamations which, as everybody knows, does not tell the full story about actual expenditure. Is it any wonder then that Ghana’s better funded educational sector has become a haven for Nigerian students seeking a modicum of quality and order?
For countries eager to rapidly ascend
the development ladder, investment in
human capital formation which refers to resources committed to making the
human agent healthy, productive and
knowledgeable is absolutely crucial. It
is surprising therefore if not outrageous that an administration that recently proclaimed a transformation in the mould of the Asian Tigers as cardinal objective continues to treat education and health as backwaters in its spending priorities. Obviously,
universities run on shoestring budgets
and located in an inhospitable clime
with its harvest of infrastructural woes
can hardly avoid a beggarly existence.

The logic of Nigerians sending their
children to Ghanaian universities flows
from the structural deficiencies of an
underfunded educational sector. There
are other problems with our universities apart from funding. It is no secret, for example, that many public universities are still struggling to complete the 2011 /2012 session at a time when they ought to have commenced the 2012/ 2013 academic year. The calendar has become a casualty of the prevalent anomie. Several years ago, I wrote about absentee classes in our universities, by which I lamented that graduation classes had to be shifted forward because of protracted strikes.

The 1994/1995 academic session had
to be cancelled in view of pervasive
strikes which wiped out the session. It
is to be deeply regretted that the
syndrome of truncated calendars
continues to be a marked feature of our universities in the same way as our public hospitals are often deserted
because of elongated strikes by health
workers. Indeed, a culture of
dysfunction replete with gangs of
student cults; ‘sorting’ which is a code
word for back-handed deals between
lecturers and students trading money
or sex for marks; overcrowded
classrooms; dry taps; and dilapidated
public toilets is evident and militates
against a conducive learning
environment.

Nigeria, despite the abundance of
natural and human resources, is fast
becoming a graveyard of abandoned
projects and aborted visions. Between
the Scylla Charybdis of visionless
military autocrats and the incoherence
of a civilian predatory class, the country has had a raw deal. In the 1990s, education and health for all by the year 2000 was the overwhelming political slogan. The year 2000 came and passed and the slogan became a
mutilated, almost comical, dream. Then we had Vision 2010, which summoned the energies of the cream of technocrats and the business class.
The year arrived and the country
moved farther away from its eloquently advertised goal. Apparently undaunted, the political class proclaimed the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy but we are still waiting for its dividends. These programmatic wreckages were followed up by the Umaru Yar’Adua administration’s Vision 2020 and Seven-Point Agenda. Then, the Jonathan administration came up with a transformation agenda within the context of Vision 2020 but it will take the most incurable optimist to accept that the country is moving in those directions. Is this an exaggeration? Not if you consider the evidence closely. Life expectancy in Nigeria by UNDP figures is one of the lowest in Africa while the country’s maternal and infant mortality rate is one of the highest on the continent. It exceeds the situation in former war-torn countries such as Angola, Liberia and Sierra Leone. When you add to this, the virtual state of siege created by insurgents, a dismal and desolate scenario emerges.

The exodus of Nigerian students to
Ghanaian universities, as well as the
country becoming a bazaar for
universities all over the world in search
of students because of our dilapidated
educational sector is a metaphor for the increasing cost of governance failure symptomised by a harvest of promises and slogans which actually amount to little or nothing.

As the 2015 elections approach, we will be bombarded with yet more attractive slogans but many Nigerians in search of respite and if they have the wherewithal may be sourcing for
countries even on the African continent where the disparity between official proclamations and existential
conditions is not so wide. The human
condition in Nigeria often appears to be a chapter taken straight out of the
fable written by a famous Yoruba
novelist concerning memorable
vicissitudes in a forest of ghosts.
Interestingly, the way forward may be
to travel backwards to the 1950s where visionary statesmen such as Obafemi Awolowo postulated that because the human agent is both the target and the catalyst of transformation, his welfare and wellbeing should be the centre piece of economic and social development. Awolowo not only theorised this ideal but went ahead to inaugurate a democratic developmental regime which devoted as much as 50
percent of annual budget in the
Western region to health and
education.

If the hemorrhage of capital to Ghana
and other countries must be stopped or even reduced, then we must initiate
the kind of social re-engineering that
prioritises human capital development
as well as builds those institutions
which can carry through that sort of
visionary intervention. But is any such
agenda on the political cards today?

•Olukotun is a professor of Political
Science at Lead City University, Ibadan.
ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com
07055841236

Source: punchng.com/opinion/governance-and-nigerians-quest-for-ghanaian-degrees/