(First Published in 2008) Recently, there was a spate of articles on education by back-page columnists in ThisDay and BusinessDay. The writers include Wale Adebanwi, the Gates Fellow at 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.
How “Free” Education Deepened Inequality in Nigeria
Our sports store in Government College Ibadan (GCI) was filled with shiny cricket bats, football boots, and spike shoes. The wood and metal workshops had new machines. Students who came before 1984 enjoyed a swimming pool. An older brother attended a Federal Government College and got dozens of “Made in England” textbooks, technical drawing sets, and watercolour palettes.
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 from being sent to “mushroom” schools.
University too was virtually free. We paid ₦40 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 Hotels 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.
Why Subsidised University Degrees Hurt the Economy
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. 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—rather than official historians of “free education”—noticed as early as the 1960s that the expansion of free education in Western Nigeria was harming agriculture. 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 that 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 expanded. For anything that is free, the wrong people somewhere are paying; excessive agrarian taxes funded “free education.”
Paying for Higher Education is Fair—and Necessary
Public funds are better spent enhancing the quality of secondary, vocational, and teacher education, 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.
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). There should also be limited but very generous funding of doctoral and post-doctoral research.
When universities recover the true cost of every B.A., lecturers will earn 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.
The Real Job Crisis: Overeducated, Underemployed Nigerians
Every Nigerian family has “travel planners”—young people looking for visas who do nothing productive for 4–6 years. Others spend four years trying to pass JAMB, then another six years for a four-year degree due to strikes, one year for NYSC, and three years job-hunting.
Many finally get a ₦16,000 job as “supervisors” in a dry-cleaning business. The Director of the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation proudly announced recently that 20 graduates 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, universities multiplied in number and became parking lots for unemployed and unemployable youths.
Deterring those whom higher education would not benefit—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.
Rebuilding Vocational and Technical Education
The government almost totally lacks institutions and policies to regulate operations or improve skills in vast swathes of the 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 chaotic 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, while London recruiters report Nigerian resumes full of B.As and Ph.Ds for which there are no jobs.
What employers actually want are technical certificates in underwater welding or other skilled trades. These two-thousand-dollar-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 a master carpenter. Charging market prices for Religious Studies B.As. and introducing real cost recovery at high school could have checked this fascination.
From Docile Bureaucrats to Smart Civil Service Reform
President Yar’Adua should have asked every minister to produce “Consolidation Agendas” for the industries under them—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 that alter economic structure and create jobs face two major impediments. First, our civil service has become docile—unaware of sector dynamics or international innovations in pro-growth regulation and public service delivery. Entire departments exist just to pay salaries and per diems.
Bureaucrats controlling enormous budgets are extremely poorly paid, and serious policy work is outsourced to donor agencies. Secondly, key political appointments are still regarded as a “distribution of satisfactions.” Pro-growth reforms are optional, left to only a few “overzealous” ministers and bureaucrats.
Nigeria urgently needs a cadre of super civil servants—perhaps 100 in every ministry and state—remunerated as well as bank executives. Without this, policy continuity and reform momentum will remain elusive.
Creating a New Social Contract for Growth
To move anywhere near our 20/20 economic vision, Nigeria’s education budget ought to be spent in ways that produce world-class graduates and research—especially in the sciences—and impart technical, creative, and administrative skills that are required across the economy.
Asking people to pay for their B.As. is only the first step. The harder task 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, supporting them with infrastructure and smart incentives, and launching a “Marshall Plan” for the civil service.
Only when education, labour, and governance reforms move together can Nigeria achieve inclusive prosperity—and end the illusion that free degrees can build a productive nation.