Parents can save or kill Nigeria

In the 1987/88 academic session, I sat for the Interim Joint Matriculation Board Advanced Level Examinations. When the results of the examinations, which came after two years of intensive coursework at the Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin, were released, I failed Geography, one of the three mandatory subjects that I took. History and English Literature, the other subjects I entered for gave me a meagre five out of the possible 15 points, a result of which I could not get into a university alongside my successful friends and classmates.

This was more so because my father, then in the Kwara State civil service, refused to intervene on my behalf. He told anyone who asked him to speak to people he knew at the university that he would not go begging on account of a son whose result was unimpressive. It was the first time that I would be in such a spot but then, I lost the academic year.

Although I had reasons to insist that this failure was not entirely my fault, it was all the same a failure, it was the product of nothing other than lack of preparation and I faced the repercussion alone.

I learnt two invaluable things, both of which gave me the right perspective of what success is. The first lesson I learnt was that there would never be an adequate excuse for laziness and lack of preparation. I also learnt that failure comes with an opportunity to do things better just like Thomas Edison said in his popular quote.

And for these two lessons, I had my dad to thank. If he had forced my way into the university with those poor results, I would have taken everything for granted and possibly gone ahead to make a mess of the university admission, which I would have got undeservedly though. I could tell endless stories of how parents insisted that their children must walk the moral even if torturous ways in the days that I was growing up.

This is the lesson that most of today's parents fail to inculcate in their children. The average parent is in pathological fright of failure, yet, he does not encourage hard work as a necessary antidote to failure. All that we teach our children these days is the importance of being successful and wealthy, without much care about how success and wealth are attained. We forget that the health and sustenance of society are more dependent on the values of hard work and respect for procedure than ostentation of success and wealth.

A friend related the following heart-rending story to me in the course of the week. On the day that candidates were sitting for Economics in the current West African Senior School Certificate examinations organised by the West African Examinations Council, he had taken his ward to one of the exams centres in Lagos. At this centre, he noticed that certain candidates were allowed to bring mercenaries into the examination venue after supervising officials would have been “settled”.

According to him, the real candidate and his hireling would take the examinations at the same time although in different rooms. So, when the exams are over, invigilators would collate the papers of the authentic candidates and collate the papers of the mercenaries after which they would replace each candidate's answer sheets with that of his mercenary and destroy the former! This sounds totally incredible but it would explain some of the strange aftermaths of secondary education in the country.

For instance, it shows the reason why students make excellent results in their school certificate without the intellectual capacity to pursue university or polytechnic education. It would also account for Nigeria's notoriety for the production of unemployable graduates in the past couple of years.

The tragedy of the situation is the involvement of parents, even community leaders, in this “my child must pass examinations and get into higher institution” mentality that has gripped our country. While there is nothing wrong in aspiring that our children get the best of education possible, we put the future of the country at risk when we manipulate the ways of candidates who do not qualify to get into these institutions.

Because of the way our society is, these candidates would very likely meander their way out of whatever universities or polytechnics they find themselves in and thereafter unleash their half-baked, mediocre aptitude on the rest of us.

Having mastered the art of manipulation and rigging, they are the teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, bankers, politicians, pastors and imams of Nigeria's future. And you can tell the future of a country where almost everyone is a con artist, that is nothing but a society going nowhere to happen.

These ill-tutored young people will not just ruin Nigeria, they will also be unable to compete with their mates from more serious countries. At the moment, Ghana, which has the population of just one state in Nigeria, is doing better in the education of their children than the giant of Africa. How do we then compare ourselves to China where students go as far as tying their hair (with clothespins or scarves) to ceilings in an effort not to fall asleep while studying? The idea is that every time they nod off, the pins will pull on their hair, jerking them awake. How do our own laid back, indulged youths compete with such hard-working children in the future?

Currently, government at all levels in Nigeria concerns itself with the building of infrastructure while the moral firmament of the country is tattered. Of course, the building of infrastructure is laudable, but it is only a matter of time, of course, that children who do not understand the value of hard work will destroy whatever physical structure that we build today.

While the elite are training their children in private schools or in schools scattered all over the world, they forget that society is organic and that these well-trained children would be at the mercy of those who remain at home sometime in the future.

I consider it important therefore that government takes an emphatic and serious look at restructuring education in Nigeria. We must lay a lot of emphasis on fitting the right pegs into the right holes. For instance, attention needs to be paid to the quality of teachers produced in the country. Although I do not have statistics to back up this claim, I am convinced that the preponderance of those who end up studying education as a course in Nigeria do so because they cannot get into other departments, so we have a lot of teachers who ply trade without passion. And this is clearly not limited to teaching.

Government must also give attention to technical education such that those who cannot stand the intellectual rigours of a university can legitimately invest their intellect, which every child is blessed with in some other things. This is how the world got blessed with the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford and so many others.

Over and above everything, Nigeria must begin to embrace the virtues of hard work and diligence once again. Every great and potentially great country lives by a moral code to which everyone-ruler and the ruled are subject. Unless this happens, everyone, wealthy or otherwise, risk a country which might crash on all our heads.