Our parents have always taught us that good formal education holds the key to success in life. As such, they strived so much to enable us to earn certificates from good schools and universities. But over time the palpable determinants of economic successes did not so much support those views. Illiterates that crossed over to foreign lands to wash plates and serve as nannies came back wealthier and more prosperous. Motor park touts who served as thugs to politicians, and eventually stood for elections were manipulated into enviable positions of authority. They also became more prosperous and ruled over those who religiously burned the night candles reading their books. Those who learnt how to dupe foreigners through the advance fee frauds scam were able to smile to the banks as multimillionaires who turned around to hire the very well educated ones. Even those who went into the performing arts without any education turned out better. It is also a commonly held notion that the reward of all those knowledgeable teachers who propagate knowledge is in heaven. And so, formal training, therefore, stood for something different in the eyes of many young people.
Virtually every Nigerian today wants to be a multimillionaire in the strongest of currencies. And some people’s vision ends at that. They want to have the money for the sake of having it and utilise it any way they desire. Most people are conversant with the positive somersaults of some otherwise well-known touts into respectable multimillionaire status. The people know-how the young man in the neighbourhood who dropped out of school to do “Yahoo-Yahoo” suddenly became a multimillionaire and is intimidating every person with a chieftaincy title given to him in the community as well as the position of honour accorded him in the church. The shortcuts were worth it. Education presented a long boring route which frequently never guaranteed such opportunity. However, virtually every Nigerian also wants to be seen as well educated. Many are conversant with the caricature of many “money miss-roads” who have so much money but lacked the finesse, etiquette and diction of the educated. And therefore, there is this “do or die” race for formal education even by those who do not need it at post-primary or post-secondary levels.
The result is that many young people enter school with the same hustling spirit that they apply or have seen others use in other spheres of their lives. The mindset is that it is the end that justifies the means. Such that what matters most is to have a paper certificate regardless of the means of obtaining it. Consequently, many such ways blossomed. Many lecturers also saw a good market on it. Students received pass grades for buying a lecturer’s handouts and lecture notes instead of robustly researched textbooks. Other means of securing pass grades included the trading of sex for marks, outright payment or purchase of examination grades, the purchase of exam questions and scripts, the purchase of favour by carrying bags of rice or giving gifts to lecturers and their family members. The lists can get longer depending on the school and the lecturers there. Even the lecturers and teachers seem to share the view that the pains of studying to pass exams were not worth it and therefore, what the student needed was to be certificated. That is the reason why we have thousands of graduates who cannot write an acceptable one-page letter. There have been several stories of graduates that could not spell the names of their departments correctly. But even those deficiencies are no sources of worry because jobs meant for well-educated graduates can easily be purchased in much the same way the certificates came about.
Since the late 1980s, holders of every single certificate issued in Nigeria fall into any of five channels. The first category is those who are holding certificates earned through mercenaries and ghost exam writer channels. This channel was rife when photographs of candidates were not required to be on the main-side of the certifying document. In this channel, the mercenary receives payment to sit for the exams on behalf of the prospective certificate holder. The second category comprises those holding ‘oluwole’ certificates which are a fraudulent clone of the authentic certificate that those who legitimately sit for the exam earn. There is a booming market for such fake documents in Lagos. Any sensitive paper is clonable in that market. And because of our deficient data management and verification infrastructure, many successfully go through life with these fake documents undetected.
The third category of certificates come from the schools. There are two variants of this. One is when the school consciously helps candidates with fraudulently achieving impressive results to signal that they have bright students. The other is when the school becomes complicit and allow its teachers to be bought and used to actualise the faking objectives. Many students have graduated simply by regularly paying lecturers each semester and earning unmerited grades. Money for scores is much more rampant in universities and tertiary institutions in Nigeria than the so-called sex for grades. The fourth category is the sex for marks, while the fifth is those who genuinely earned their certificates.
All holders of certificates obtained through all of these channels approach the Nigerian job market, which is separable into two. On the one hand, is the public sector job market with its distinguishable characteristics. The other is the job market for private-sector employees. Over the years, the public sector employment market is replete with rackets and fraud. First, highly placed public sector officials naturally reserve jobs for their friends and relatives who need not necessarily meet ‘all’ the requirements for the job. There is also another set of job reservation for income generation for the ‘boys’ who perform the tasks of the recruitment. They sell these jobs to those who can afford their prices and make some returns to the big bosses who provide cover for them. No fewer than 50% of the public sector labour force in Nigeria got their jobs through these two channels. The third category is those who secured their jobs without any assistance from the system. The private sector market is understandably much more rigorous with processes put in place to sieve out those that are not employable. But because the requirements at entry do not necessarily demand the restatement of what was supposed to have been learned at school, many holders of doubtful certificates still scale through their onboarding processes. Even in a few instances, there could be a deliberate lowering of these standards to hire some candidates of interest. However, the system usually recognises this and takes it upon themselves to re-skill the recruited human resources.
Teaching employments also suffer from this shameful job fraud. Frontline students with excellent results who have an interest in taking up teaching roles are deliberately frustrated by the system while parcelling those jobs out to those who are friends of the house who need not be as qualified. Getting employment in Nigeria, particularly in the public sector, has very little if anything at all to do with competence. Cronyism and the financial power to purchase jobs matter most. And therefore it is not surprising why we have thousands of engineering graduates over the decades who claim to have studied the same thing that their counterparts overseas studied yet we rely on the expertise of foreign engineers for our infrastructural development. That is why in spite of the so-called abundant natural resources, our population suffer in poverty because we lack the expertise to convert them into marketable forms that could earn income. That is why we have thousands of mechanical engineering graduates with specialisations in motor mechanics who cannot repay the smallest car engines. That is why we are always copying foreign developed models for running our businesses when it is evident that the contexts differ.
When the foundations are faulty, what do we expect? Most of our political leaders follow the same line because that was how they emerged in the first instance. And therefore, the faulty political staffing model shows that one does not need to have a demonstrable understanding of the workings of the economy as such to be the leader of the country’s, economic team. One does not need to have evident cutting-edge experiences of how the education sector works in the developed world to become the Minister of education in Nigeria. Experiences, proven competences and known skills are not relevant in making political appointments. And shamefully, we have traded those rare qualities that should make us produce the best simply because of political friends and associates. From the point of certification, we got it wrong and blatantly rejected merits as the key to unlocking our greatness.
In retrospect, I reminisce over my late father’s stern posture when he hammered down to my siblings and me that the pen is mightier than the sword and that education is the key to success. It is difficult to believe that the pen is indeed more potent than the sword. In Nigeria, the over four decades of military rule and the conscious decimation of the architecture of the pen proves that the sword perhaps might be mightier. Our intelligentsia and academia are still struggling to rise from the ruins of that defeat. Shamefully, our tertiary institutions still regard themselves as umbilically tied extensions of the structures of government created through the sword. In similar ways, the shameful culture where illicit money is adored and worshipped as the superstructure has also made it appear as if knowledge is not the key to success. By elevating wealth, regardless of the means of its acquisition above the naturally superior values of education and expertise, merits and fairness, we deliberately destroyed the foundations of a greater Nigeria. Our parents were right. High-quality education remains a powerful key to unlocking the hidden treasures of prosperity through continuous innovation and efficient production. The certification of those who possess should be on the foundations of merit and fair competition.
