COMMON ENTRANCE: A glimpse of the bizarre state of education in Northern Nigeria

By Benjamin Ugbana…

Perhaps, I am one of the very few who aren’t flabbergasted at the news of Lagos state having successfully registered 24,465 candidates for the 2018 National Common Entrance Examination whereas some northern states like Zamfara, Kebbi & Taraba could only register 28, 50 & 95 respectively.

In a statement released in Abuja earlier this week by the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, the Federal Government said it is worried about the low number of candidates seeking admission into its 104 colleges across the country. But after expressing your worries, what is the next line of action, I’d ask.

Alas, this rather unfortunate revelation about northern Nigeria is coming at a time when there’s been an increased report of prevailing drug abuse and social violence in the region. And it baffles me that the Education Minister concluded his statement by saying the examination would go on as planned and merely urged “state governments, parents, heads of schools and relevant interest groups in the areas” to take steps to remedy the situation.

Problems are never solved like this. Never. That’s an entire academic year we are about to wave away like nothing bad happened. The truth is, until we become willing and courageous enough to halt a moving train – and refuse to allow it continue its journey until a fault is fixed – we may never stop having hitches in our collective ride as a nation.

During my service year in Taraba state, I came to realise that the Common Entrance exam – or any other form of entrance exam – is not a compulsory route to ply in making it to secondary school. With the very poor primary education the pupils get especially outside the state capital, most parents know full well that registering for such a national exam would be a sheer waste of money and time. And so they’d rather pay a little sign-on fee at a community secondary school and get their wards enrolled without a test.

But if these community schools are being well maintained as regards structures, library and laboratory facilities, no one would dare accuse the northern elites of purposely depriving a great chunk of their youth of formal education.

Public schools in Taraba for instance are so understaffed – and so poorly funded – that they depend mainly on fees from students to run academic and administrative affairs.

In the science secondary school where I taught for a year, the situation is so bad that only five Teachers (in both the Junior and Senior schools) are in government’s payroll, while the rest are being serviced by students’ school fees – a predicament that results to administrators laying undue emphasis on the number of students that attend their school.

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For the higher the numbers, the more money available to run the institution.

This is supposed to be the case in private schools, but it had become obtainable in government-owned citadels of learning. That is why it doesn’t matter what a student’s previous qualification is, with or without a First School Leaving Certificate, all he or she needs do in order to have a taste of secondary education is walk up to any school of their choice, pay the ‘official’ price and they get enrolled.

If the achievement of academic certificates and the admission into new levels in the ladder have been made so cheap, of what use is registering for the National Common Entrance Examination? Or how can a perpetually ‘blind’ man see the difference between enrolling into a community playhouse and being admitted into a Federal Government Unity school?

Before I left Taraba, I met some really concerned teachers and administrators who strongly desire to effect a lasting change in their communities, but end up asking the same question Professor J.P. Clark asked many years ago: “What is it in ourselves or in our soil that things which connect so well elsewhere like the telephone, the motorway, the airways, dislocate our lives so much that we all begin to doubt our own intelligence?”

Sincerely, I had a feel of the frustration the day I was going to conduct an SS 2 Chemistry exam. That morning, a student I haven’t seen throughout the term appeared on the front seat stretching his arm to collect my question paper. Dude was a total stranger and his name was not even in my subject register. “Uncle, who are you?” “I belong to this class sir.” “No you dont! …Man, I don’t know you, please, leave my exam hall.”

I watched him leave without saying another word, no protest of any sort, only to see him return to the class some minutes later with the school’s Vice Principal (Academics).

While the boy stood at the entrance waiting for my approval, the vice principal called me aside and whispered to my ears the most ridiculous sermon of the year 2016: “You see, Mr. Ben, this boy paid his school fees long before others even started to pay. His name is on our register. Allow him to write the exam even though we know he will fail. Because if you don’t allow him, he will ask for a refund of the school fees, and you know that’s not good for us.”

Brethren, I died! …Almost literally.

 

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