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The Educational Divide: Locking Out Nigeria's Vulnerable Youth

Posted by: Benjamin Onuorah

As I stood watching at the teaching hospital, where interns and doctors moved between the wards and beds, the IDs they wore confirmed the social experiment. Most of them bore the surnames of retired doctors, permanent secretaries, and serving professors. It wasn’t like those years when the 25-year-old pharmacist was a young man without a post-office box who, seven years earlier, had written his School Certificate examination at Ifira Community High School, Akoko. Things have changed!

At the Nigerian Law School and University of Ibadan medical college induction ceremonies, the graduands and inductees are now largely products of Telnet, Preston, Redeemer School, Deeper Life, Homaj, Hallmark private secondary schools. Unlike the years when Afolabi Babajide, a professor of computer science, who shared Form 1 with me at our six-classroom Ijebu Community School, or Femi Mimiko mni, a professor of political science and former vice chancellor who attended public established St Joseph's College Ondo, or when President Goodluck Jonathan attended Mater Dei High School, Imiringi, Bayelsa, rose through the public school system.

In the past, education and educational institutions were vehicles for social mobility. My generation - those who graduated between the 1980s to mid 1990s - were the last to enjoy the privilege of sitting side by side with upper class and the aristocracy at university common rooms and residences. At Unilag, you could be in the same lecture hall with Lt Gen Oladipo Diya kids. I shared restaurants and birthday parties with Rear Admiral Augustus Akhiomu's girls at the University of Benin. The Akenzua were present too. Now the elite have moved their kids to Covenant, Afe Babalola, Babcock, Baze, Pan African University.

The disruption in socialisation and social mobility now permeates the quality of students and staff. Education, especially higher education, goes beyond syllabi, tests, and measurement. It should be a melting pot of castes and a blending of the beautiful and the ugly so that society can be given the fair. If everyone at the Federal University of Otuoke is the son of a fisherman or the daughter of a cassava planter, how would they be properly socialised, and what would their worldview be?
Private universities attract better-trained, more cultured, and higher-scoring candidates. The public school system, meanwhile, is gasping. The elite have quietly withdrawn their children from the mess, leaving the remainder to struggling parents who can scarcely afford basic textbooks. When was the last time Uso Grammar School, Uso produced a cohort of sixteen-year-old whose scores earned the merit to study Medicine and Surgery at prestigious Ahmadu Bello University?
By contrast, seventy percent of the students at Model Secondary School, Akure, routinely score 270 or above in JAMB. These are the candidates that the University of Ibadan, Obafemi Awolowo University, and the University of Lagos will claim for Medicine, Law, Engineering, and Accounting. Those with scores between 200 and 240 will fill the remaining places at Covenant, Afe Babalola, Babcock, and Nile. Their parents can afford the tuition and fees in millions of naira.

For emphasis, the children of the rich now occupy by merit the juicier spaces in public universities. That same elite class supplies the candidates for the faculties of engineering, medicine, law and architecture in private universities. The rich kids occupy the pathways of advancement everywhere. You might think
Baze University is second-rated; we once thought the same of Covenant University when it started. But chances are that the Baze graduate lawyer and the Nile University accountant would have started their jobs at a Big Five law/accounting/consulting firm before the Akungba University graduate even got word of the recruitment.

Conduct a quiet survey and the social experiment results are unmistakable. The thirty-four-year-old PhD senior lecturer teaching you is the son of a professor in the department down the hall. He will make professorship by 2031 and will be seconded to head NELFUND. In the courtroom, the twenty-six-year-old female magistrate is the daughter of the Court Registrar; within eight years she will almost certainly be nominated to the Federal High Court as a judge. In the Navy, that captain is the son of a retired army general. Even in the church, the Spirit, it seems, increasingly chooses those already well placed.

Conclusion:
I watch the underprivileged teens daily, and my heart sinks for them. Disadvantaged in education, consequently pushed down the poverty belt by their better competitive elite mates. There seems to be no hope for them to climb up the social class. What is the solution? I am helpless to proffer one that is immediate and workable. I honestly do not know.

Goodluck Ebele Jonathan may well be the last president who can tell the story of having no shoes. E. A. Adeboye may be the last of the truly poor to rise and lead a mighty Pentecostal church.

By: Taiwo Olanegan.
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