By Foyin Ejilola
The students of the public tertiary institutions in Nigeria have always encountered difficulties in their academic journey. Many student martyrs and scapegoats have emerged from the struggle against the obstacles that keep towering above the students.
Some of these obstacles that students are battling to date include strikes, inadequate learning facilities, poor infrastructures, cruel lecturers, unfair institution policies, and low-quality education. Strikes, indefinite or within a time frame, are not new to Nigerian students, although some have experienced it in extreme severity than others, depending on the university. While Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH) has the highest record of its lecturers going on long strikes, the University of Ibadan also has its fair share of frequent strikes.
These never-ending strikes often stem from the insufficiency of budgeted funds from the government which often lead to the inability to pay the lecturers, and eventually, a strike which translates to the suspension of academic activities in the institution. Sometimes, the strike is nationwide as was the case in 2020 when the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) went on a nine-month strike that began in March 2020 and lasted till December 2020.
The devastating effect of these strikes include students having to spend a few more years in addition to the original number of years designed for their courses of study. In some cases, students have spent twice the number of years they are supposed to study for due to incessant strikes.
Besides strikes, the quality of education that the students in Nigerian tertiary institutions get is undoubtedly low. First, there is a shortage of learning facilities in Nigerian tertiary institutions. At the appropriate time, students do not get to practise what they have been taught with technological facilities as they have been taught theoretically. The curriculum can also be best described as outdated as students are not being taught even basic new things in their fields of study, so they possess little to no problem-solving skills to current problems if they solely rely on the classroom knowledge. Hence, the Nigerian student who is passionate about their field will have to spend almost the same amount of time he spends inside the classroom outside it to gain practical and updated knowledge about their course.
In addition to this, the students are often subjected to the high handedness of lecturers who make the academic journey almost unbearable with ridiculous tasks that do not impact the students positively. These lecturers are also unapproachable, are ruthless in their dealings with students, and do not care about the success of the students that they are teaching. A huge fraction of them is also unscrupulous. Lecturers deliberately failing students because they have refused to pay them in cash or kind is not news in Nigerian public tertiary institutions.
After a student who attends a public tertiary institution in Nigeria has to go through all these before graduating, they still get plunged into the harsh situation of un-endless job-seeking. According to Bloomberg, in a report on March 15, 2021, the rate of unemployment in Nigeria has risen from 27.1 per cent to 33.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2020. Unemployed graduates constitute a large part of the whole 33.3 per cent. Asides from this, Nigerian citizens, students or not, are denied the necessary measures needed for survival, which is an additional blow to the crumbling economy.
The effect of this is the craze for money which has eaten deep into the systems of the young people. Nigerians are well-known for finding a way when there is no way and students, unemployed and underemployed graduates are not an exception. The alarming surge in the wave of internet fraudsters in the country is an evidence. Internet fraud is now seen as a legitimate business in Nigeria. The common excuse for this is that the youth who are engaging in this criminal activity are graduates who could not find a job after graduating for a long time or students who do not want to go through the strenuous process of going to tertiary institutions only to end up being a hungry jobseeker. Combined with the economic disaster that has befallen the country since 2016 and the current insane inflation in the price of commodities. While this may be an excuse to embrace immorality without being judged, it is a real cause.
Other students and graduates who are trying to escape the pangs of hunger and unemployment but do not want to engage in crime are going into fields that are not related to their courses of study by being entrepreneurs. It is now common in Nigeria to find a graduate of Medicine making shoes for a living, a graduate of Construction Engineering baking cakes, and a History and International Relations student selling skincare products.
It is, however, worrisome that we continue to experience the growth in the numbers of entrepreneurs who specialise in fashion, skincare, food, make-up, and other related fields while there is an alarming shortage of professionals with long term problem-solving jobs and skills. For a country that its citizens are exposed to all sorts of health risks, the number of trained doctors is far from what the country needs presently and may need in the nearest future.
Lately, Nigeria has been tottering more than ever. The country is being faced with a shortage of food, insurgency and insecurity, epileptic electricity, intense environmental pollution, a decrease in manufacturing companies and so on. Obviously, we need more professional health workers, manufacturers–fabrics and readymade clothes manufacturers, too. It is high time Nigerians stopped purchasing Okrika (second-hand clothes), construction experts, green energy experts, technology experts etc.
Unfortunately, the quality of education which is not in sync with the present society is not helping matters. Worse still, there is the unavailability of jobs in some important fields whose courses are studied in Nigerian public tertiary institutions. The government does not pay attention to creative inventions. What then is the future of the country if a large percentage of the youths are unemployed, internet fraudsters, and entrepreneurs of consumer beauty products?
