“Sixty percent of the 13.4 million out-of-school children in Nigeria are girls.” Nigeria
Mallam Adamu Adamu, Nigeria’s education minister, often wears a sombre look. A smile hardly plays on his lips. His brows always look ruffled. His bespectacled eyes are focused. It is likely easy to conclude that the re-appointed minister is too serious-minded.
Education standards in Nigeria have continued to fall in spite of calls by experts and stakeholders for an overhauling of the sector. The minister’s response to such calls was repeated calls for a declaration of a state of emergency by all states. Of, course, nobody listened to him. In a self-appraisal, it is not likely Adamu will say he failed in his first time in office. Posterity is the ultimate judge.Then, in July of that year, his principal, President Buhari directed him to convene a summit on education to address the issue of funding.
To illustrate: in the proposed budget presented to the National Assembly, President Buhari allocated only 7.04 percent of the N8.6 trillion 2018 budget to education. The total amount allocated to the sector is N605.8 billion with N435.1 billion for recurrent expenditure, N61.73 billion for capital expenditure and N109.06 billion for the Universal Basic Education Commission .
“Sixty percent of the 13.4 million out-of-school children in Nigeria are girls. Only a fraction of 3.1 million nomadic children of school age have access to basic education despite decades of intervention. Similarly, only a small proportion of the ministry’s 2010 estimate of 9.5 million almajiri children have access to any basic education and an increasing number of displaced children are being forced out of school in the insurgency-stricken states,” Adamu had said.
In 2015, matching and non-conditional grants disbursements to 15 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory amounted to N68.4 billion while in 2016, grants disbursements to 29 states and the FCT amounted to N77 billion. “We have had labour union issues and managed to resolve them, universities have been shut down for some time and all that but I have not seen any movement in any direction. He could have done better in the area of Open and Distance Learning because I believe that conventional universities may not be the future of Nigeria.
In addition, increased enrolment rates have also created challenges in ensuring quality education and satisfactory learning achievement as resources are spread more thinly across a growing number of students. It is not rare to see cases of 100 pupils per teacher or students sitting under trees outside the school building because of the lack of classrooms.
A mass failure was recorded in the 2017 WAEC examination. At the release of the general results during the 55th annual meeting of the Nigeria national committee, only 34,664 out of 131,485 had five credits including English and Mathematics. Also, the percentage of candidates in WASSCE, for private candidates, in 2015 and 2016 was 28.58 percent and 38.50 percent, respectively.It was a mess Adamu could not clear in his first term.
At other times, Nigerian youths are forced to seek university in countries like the Republic of Benin, Togo, Ghana, and even Chad.
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