By Mary Onyia
Founder and Chancellor of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti, Chief Afe Babalola (SAN), has lamented the deepening rot in Nigeria’s education system, warning that unless urgent and holistic reforms are undertaken, the nation risks raising generations of half-baked graduates.
Babalola, who also served as former Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council of the University of Lagos, and former Chairman of all Pro-Chancellors, said the crisis in education cuts across all levels, from primary to tertiary institutions.
“The problems confronting the educational system in Nigeria are pervasive; they ravage every tier, from primary one to the university,” he wrote in an article published in Vanguard titled The Dwindling Standard of Education in Nigeria – The Way Forward.
Despite never attending secondary school or university himself, the legal luminary and educationist stressed that decades of service to Nigeria’s academic system have exposed him to the roots of its decline.
“Our situation can be likened to that of a K-legged man whose attention was drawn to the bent load on his head. He in turn asked the people to look down for the cause rather than what is on his head,” he quipped.
Babalola listed over-crowded classrooms, lack of adequate funding, poorly trained and ill-motivated teachers, and the absence of basic teaching materials as some of the major obstacles hindering effective learning at the foundation stage.
“It is these poorly taught children that graduate to secondary schools to confront the same problems,” he said, stressing that by the time they progress to universities, they have become “like dry fish – they can no longer be bent without being broken. The havoc is almost permanently done.”
He lamented that efforts made to correct such deep-seated defects at the university level often end in failure, as students arrive unprepared for higher learning.
According to him, reversing the decline will require nothing less than “total and holistic corrective measures.”