“If you work with glue, sooner or
later you are bound to get stuck.”
AFTER almost six years of
operating the Structural Adjustment Programme, SAP, without achieving the
success promised at the start, President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, IBB, asked
in exasperation. “Why is it that economic principles and programmes which work
elsewhere don’t work in Nigeria?”
Writing at the time on Mondays,
the MARKET FACT series, I replied IBB that “neither economic principles and
programmes nor any others will work in Nigeria as long as we have the NIGERIAN
FACTOR to contend with. At the time the Nigerian factor was defined as adopting
successful programmes from other nations and deliberately bastardizing them in
Nigeria for political, ethnic, religious and personal reasons.
JAMB, whose framework was
borrowed from the United States’ Scholastic Aptitude Test, SAT, managed by an
outfit in New Jersey, USA, for the admission of intending university/college
students into American universities, is a clear example of how the NIGERIAN FACTOR
can ruin a programme which had been successful elsewhere in the world. From
1978 till now, we had been playing with glue. Now we are stuck.
However, while Nigeria’s Joint
Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, which was established in 1978, under the
regime of Obasanjo, has at last demonstrated all the weaknesses involved in
getting governments involved in matters, which elsewhere, are largely settled
by the private sector.
Nigerian
factor
It has become a victim of the
NIGERIAN FACTOR since its creation in 1978. Instead of promoting excellence in
university education, JAMB had increasingly fostered mediocrity. Along the way,
the Federal Governments which imposed JAMB on the nation forgot a lesson which
computer education taught the universe at its inception – Garbage In Garbage
Out, GIGO. Today, JAMB had become a system for processing mediocrity for
admission into Nigerian universities.
Kindly permit me to make a
digression to illustrate how GIGO had permeated all of our tertiary
institutions – not just universities. Unitary Schools were once centres of
excellence in secondary school education. Pupils from those secondary schools,
who were mostly admitted on merit, scored 270 or more in the JAMB examinations
in the 1970s to 1980s. Any candidate scoring under 200 in JAMB from those
schools was considered unfit for university education.
The decline in the quality of
education in general, and the Unity Schools in particular, has resulted in a situation
in which Unity Schools pupils are among those seeking admission to universities
after scoring 180. The current controversy over whether applicants who scored
180 are admissible is nothing more than a dispute over whether dullards are fit
for enrollment in universities.
Unfortunately, the inexorable
decline in university education in Nigeria started years ago. From the US we borrowed a largely merit-based system.
Bringing it to Nigeria, we bastardized it by imposing on the admission process
issues such as ethnicity (Federal Character), states (contiguous states),
catchments’ areas, educationally disadvantaged states, State House List, NASS
List, faculty List etc.
In short we introduced all sorts
of criteria for admission which defeated the goal of excellence in university
education. Today, virtually everybody talks about “half-baked” or
“unemployable” graduates. It has never occurred to us to conduct a study. That
study is crucial at this point in our history. Before proceeding further with
the controversy about whether the dullards who scored less than 200 are
admissible, we should find out the percentage of those dullards turned out to
be university material.
Given those I came across, they
were often the same people who could not present five credits, including
English and Maths, at one examination. Most need two exams to fulfill the five
credit requirement; and some up to three exams. Dullards!! Thousands are
admitted while awaiting results which are seldom favourable. Dullards!!!
Yet, absolute know-nothings about
university expect Nigerian universities to admit these people with little
prospect of finishing their education. It will be interesting if UNILAG and
other universities in Nigeria will publish the number of students they admitted
with less than 200 JAMB score who
completed their programme or ended Second Class Lower or higher.
0 comments:
Post a Comment