A lecturer with Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, Prof. Busuyi Mekusi, has called on President Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu to look critically into the challenges confronting the development of education in Nigeria.
He asked the new Nigeria’s President to refocus the nation’s educational system from just theoretical concentration to scientific application and skill acquisition.
In achieving the above, Mekusi asked Tinubu to prioritise the peculiar needs of the country with available environmental materials to produce needed tools and encase productive initiatives.
The Professor of English spoke at the lecture he delivered entitled, “Applied Education as tool for Nigeria development (The analogy of human development from infancy to adulthood),” during the Southwest Herald Magazine Public Lecture and Award, held at State Information Technology Agency (SITA) Hall, Alagbaka, Akure, Ondo State.
According to the University Don, education in Nigeria, as once deployed by developed nations, should be driven by the vehicle of ‘live what you preach’.
Mekusi, who said the challenges hampering education in Nigeria range from bad curriculum to poor funding, from instability induced by strike actions of institutional staff unions to poor remuneration of personnel, from unqualified teachers to quackery and tokenism, and from corruption to lack of corresponding expansion of space for enrolment in relation to increased population, among others, noted that the educational sector had struggled with many limitations that left it with huge recession.
He opined that beyond the STEM educational policy of the Nigerian government that stipulates more funding and greater attention to science and technology related courses, over those of Social Sciences and Humanities, there should be the need for science and technology oriented courses to be practically driven, etched on interdisciplinary and institutional collaborations in the area of research and innovations.
Mekusi said: “In line with Applied Educational propositions that include Problem-Based Learning (PBL), Nigeria educational system should be made more problem-solving and need-meeting, as part of the deliberate actions to walk the development the nation has talked for so long.”
He canvassed the need for Nigeria to learn from the educational policies of nations like China and India, in the area of applied research to stimulate indigenous technology, rather than the technology that is imported wholly and subserviently.
He added: “As the importation of immediate needed technology is regulated to protect local efforts, synergy should be built between educational institutions and research centres, on the one hand, as well as the privately-driven industrial sector for the purpose of undertaking commissioned funded researches that would meet the productive desire of the industrial sector, to move Nigeria from a consuming nation to a productive one.”
Mekusi is of the cogent view that the collaboration between research institutions and industries should galvanise the production of tools, development of vaccines, even as government set new mandates for higher institutions that would stimulate research outputs and patency that are needed to enhance the various sectors, including the agricultural sub-sector.
The University Don, however, recalled that different educational policies had been evolved over the years, to justify the place of education for national development, with so many of them handicapped by bureaucratic bottleneck and misapplication of funds.
He said: “Executions of many educational programmes are poorly done, with many fathom projects doting isolated bushes and remote villages in an apparent display of poor planning and management.
He identified the obstacles to this subject of discussion as over-centralisation and management of funds for projects executed in local government areas in Abuja and the needless disjunction occasioned by faulty federalism,” adding, “the politics of education in Nigeria is another major area that is open to investigation.
He said: “Amidst inadequate funding of education in Nigeria, by way of budgetary allocations and releases, which falls way below the 26% benchmark by UNESCO, the country has continued to wrestle with developmental challenges of infrastructures, poor power generation and distribution, insecurity, poor agricultural engineering, absence of industrialisation and low production, weak naira precipitated by uncontrollable importation and consumption, etc.
“The neo-liberal order used by developed nations remains damning to developing ones, with huge loans sustaining economic subservience and negatively skewed transnational engagements.
“Earnings from the monolithic oil industry have been hazily rendered; with lack of clarity dwarfing the rhetoric about fuel subsidy payment that has gulped trillions of naira budgeted for it over the years.
“The report by the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) that recently indicated that 133 million Nigerians are multidimensionally poor is a testimony about the ineffectiveness of education in Nigeria, specifically as it relates to helping in solving societal problems and engendering national development.”
He therefore advocates a reversal of the identified indices hampering educational growth, development and effective deployment for national growth in Nigeria to conclude his submissions at the forum.
