Speeches

End Of Year Luncheon Of Government College Ughelli Old Boys' Association (Lagos Branch)

Dec 4, 2011 - Let me start by congratulating you all for making this such a happy reunion. As usual, the coming together of old students offers an opportunity to be young again; to cast our minds back to those years when, with much vigour, relative innocence and not so many concerns and responsibilities, we lived life more freely and spontaneously.

It also gives us a unique perspective, I think; now that many things that made us fearful and concerned in those days have turned out to be mere trifles. On the other hand, we have grown to see many things we considered unimportant turning out to be so very crucial. But such is life, and, as they say, every fool must learn.

I think, above all, this must be an occasion to appreciate and thank God for His benevolence. Being able to show up today is of course a significant manifestation of the Grace of God, considering the many vicissitudes of life that strike in unexpected places and the various dangers we had all been exposed to, before and since our departure from secondary school.

Government College Ughelli is one of those Nigerian colleges of stature of which we can be justifiable proud, ranking, I think, just a little behind my own Igbobi College.

But I will console you quickly with the factor we have in common. Both colleges, and a good number that were at their best in the seventies and eighties, were world class institutions, offering world class education to lucky us! Students went from these institutions to all parts of the world and were never found wanting in depth and breadth.

In fact, Nigerians who had their secondary education here achieved great notoriety for leading their university classes wherever they found themselves all over the world. For those, like me, who chose to remain at home, our grounding proved equally firm. We completed our education and took on the world without even a stray thought of having missed nothing.

But what is the state of our educational institutions today? Somewhere in the answer to that simple question, the word 'decaying' is often mentioned.

This is most unfortunate because 'decay' itself suggests a thing of good or vibrant beginning getting spoilt, losing its goodness and progressing gradually to a sad end.

That word gets even more troubling when it is used in reference to our dear country, Nigeria. But it can be easily explained if we are mindful of the sometimes obscured correlation between a country and its educational institutions.

The countries that lead the world today are only as good as the education their citizens get. We all know how universities in the most developed economies fight hard to attract, fund and retain the best brains from all nooks and crannies of the world.

We see how these advanced economies, at all costs and at all levels, promote all branches of education and give innovation a driving seat. The undeniable consequence is that they always have something of value to sell to the rest of the world. To that extent, their prosperity is assured.

Meanwhile, countries that ignore matters of education are subjugated to the rank of perpetual consumers, always importing goods and services (including food and education!) when they can, and suffering, literally in the midst of plenty, when they cannot.

Oftentimes I wonder where Nigeria would be today, if we had no oil from which to derive this constant flow of forex we now squander shamelessly on all manner of imports.

Ladies and Gentlemen, your answer may not be as good as mine.

Perhaps we would now be in abject poverty, famine and civil strife you may say; but perhaps not. Perhaps we would have taken education more seriously, promoted local industry more tenaciously, and become more self-sustaining and influential, leading Africa in the arts, sciences, technology and innovation.

Of the latter scenario, I have an undeniable fact in support.

All over the world, and even today, Nigerians are acclaimed for their intelligence, drive, creativity and vibrancy. What is more, empirical studies show that we have a natural tendency to be hopeful and happy. In what way then, has our supposed wealth killed our creativity?

How has it happened that in spite of our intelligence, creativity and hope; in spite of the education you and I were so well-equipped with; in spite of our country being among the first in Africa to strike oil and earn foreign exchange in large quantities, we are today so completely incapacitated, depending on the rest of the world for our underwears, shoes, suits and ankara fabrics?

Why is it that, even as a 51 - year old oil producing country, we rely on the rest of the world for petrol to drive our imported cars, diesel to fuel our imported generators and kerosene to cook our imported rice?

Before I depress your appetite for lunch, let me leave the nagging questions and consider a small but crucial part of the possible answers.

In doing this, I think we must first acknowledge and appreciate our great error, especially in the area of education. Seeing so clearly that our future depends so much on our ability to fend for ourselves, we must go back to our educational institutions and set things right before it becomes too late to do so.

Just for illustration, I will use our experience at the Lagos State University, considering the fact that what happens there substantially reflects developments in similar Nigerian institutions.

The Lagos State University started very well as an effort to make tertiary education more readily available to the people. In fact, it was so dogged and inspired at inception that its graduates performed better than most from older institutions at the law school or in post graduate studies.

Over the years the student population grew, funding became strained and the facilities were soon stretched beyond capacity. In the meantime, rather than reflect the dire needs of its community, the university curriculum remained stubbornly inflexible. Rather than reflect the paucity of funds, the school fees remained equally stagnant.

Eventually, the Nigerian Universities Commission began to withdraw accreditation from the University's Faculties, one after the other, and things began to slide towards a shameful collapse. Before our very eyes, what was supposed to be the symbol of Lagos as a centre of excellence was beginning to wallow in mediocrity.

In the midst of all that, campus politics became dangerously divisive. The teachers union went from one strike to another. The student union became resistant to change and, the university administration was in regular conflict with all the unions. As a community, constant strife was becoming the norm at LASU.

One of the suggestions made to us then was to abandon the University to its own ways and set up a new one with fresh parameters. Although not altogether strange in the way we do things in Nigeria (witness the new wave of federal universities and growing number of private ones), we resisted that suggestion and renewed, instead, our determination to rescue LASU from its morass.

We have resolved never to hide problems or to pretend that they do not exist; on the contrary, we remind ourselves constantly that we enjoy the privilege to serve because there are problems and it is our job to solve them. When problems cease to exist our jobs lose their relevance.

In our determination to place this institution in the forefront of educational development in Africa, our first challenge was of course, funding.

Competing demands on public resources are growing more intense as Government faced equally daunting challenges in our health institutions, housing and social welfare sector, environment and infrastructure development.

Notably, we also faced the problem of security, law and order, having to set up or maintain increasingly large institutions for traffic management (LASTMA), maintenance of law and order (KAI) and sanitation (LAWMA) apart from supporting the Police with billions of naira on an annual basis.

Without all these, the growing population of Lagos would, of course, have posed an insurmountable challenge. Even in the area of basic and secondary education, our commitments grew with the student population and, apart from keeping the schools completely free of charge, we had to buy books and pay WAEC fees for the students while supplying furniture and rebuilding structures to keep the sector functional.

We have restored the 5 (Five) Technical Colleges in the State, and in addition to that we are operating and maintaining 17 (Seventeen) Skill Acquisition Centres that are all providing different levels of education and skills for our children.

Even if these myriad challenges were not there, how much of university education can a State Government fund?

In all parts of the world, it has become increasingly obvious that education is a costly venture. Academics are more or less international personalities and, to retain them in service, the reward offered must be good enough.

Books, laboratory equipment, chemicals and other teaching aids must be of international standard and would cost more or less the same whether procured by English or a Nigerian University. Countries far richer than us do not offer university education for N25,000.00 (Twenty Five Thousand Naira) not even for N250,000.00 (Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand Naira.

In fact, it is increasingly hard, internationally, to get a good school for much less than N2,500,000.00 million per session.

Of course we cannot charge so much in Nigeria, not because our institutions do not need or cannot absorb it, but because of so many socio-economic factors which compels government to inject a heavy dose of subsidy.

But surely we can do better than where we are at the moment. We see now an increasing proliferation of private universities to which as many Nigerians as can afford it have fled. Others that can do better go to Ghana or South Africa, and still many others send their children to the U.K., USA or other countries of the world, importing education as we do virtually all other goods and services we consume.

The occasion compels me to define the frontiers of the argument and it raises the choice we must make at the tertiary level of education.

In 1955 when free education was launched, the problem was that of poor access to education and low literacy level. In 2011 when we have 34 (Thirty Four) State Universities, 27 (Twenty Seven) Federal Universities and 41 (Forty One) Private universities, clearly the problem of access is mitigated.

The flight from home speaks to a new problem, which is quality. Can we run Universities that will compete with Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Legon by refusing to do what they do?

The question to honestly ask ourselves is this, do they pay N25,000.00 (Twenty Five Thousand Naira) in those foreign institutions.

And the political jobbers have the temerity to accuse us of not loving the poor, when all they do is grand-stand and shout themselves hoarse in support of the poor.

Please ask them where their own children are receiving education. How many of them have children in Nigerian schools not to talk of in LASU.

By this trend of things, it becomes clear that we are unconsciously growing a stratified society of the haves and the have nots, making LASU and some other State Universities the preferred institutions of the poor.

These universities attract a steady stream of students from all parts of Nigeria who seek university education for little or nothing. If we do not arrest the situation, the bitter pool we so create may become intensely destructive of our societal cohesion.

As the better educated graduates return to take the choicest jobs, the networks of their 'old students associations create a safety net for succeeding generations while the poor locals become increasingly left out, developing an envious and vindictive feeling of inferiority.

If we continuously pretend to run a university where the middle class and upper class of our society do not feel able to send their children to, and we pursue this in the name of cheap populism, I truly fear for the children of the poor and their future.

What I am saying in essence is that we must either build proper educational institutions or simply leave the business to those who can.

We must build institutions that are well staffed, equipped to world standards and endowed with great infrastructure, whether in terms of buildings and other facilities or in terms of equipment, information technology and other essentials of modern education.

We must build solid tertiary institutions with an environment that inspire infinite hope and creativity; institutions that can compete for international endowment and research funds and attract students and teachers from all parts of the world, and from the rich and the poor, both for our local flavour of life and living and for our renown in innovation and technology.

Only then can we produce graduates who stand with confidence alongside their counterparts and are able to compete all over the world in terms of employability, creativity and productivity. Only then can Nigeria stride to its rightful place among the comity of advanced nations.

Should Government therefore place the entire burden on hapless parents? Of course not.

Even the increased fees announced for LASU would not be sufficient to offset the personnel costs alone, and we are not paying a single international professor yet.

Whichever way you look at it, government will remain in the foreseeable future the major funder of tertiary education in Nigeria, providing huge subsidies to keep our institutions functioning.

However, truth be told, Government cannot do it alone. Reasonable fees must be paid by students to guarantee the University a fair amount of self-sustainability and even credibility and class which are arguably the bedrock of academic autonomy and freedom.

If, as we expect, our graduates prosper in various fields around the world, it will not be long before they come back to augment the university's resources by private and institutional endowments, either as individuals or on the platform of old students' association such as we have in this hall today.

As we all can testify, investment in tertiary education is well worth it. It has been demonstrated that the economic value of attaining a tertiary education, when measured by rates of return, is faster than the returns accruing to those who receive a secondary education or less.

However, where the so called tertiary institution is a place of inferior resource for equipment and research, where creativity is stunted, the reverse might be the case and tertiary education might prove more of a burden than a benefit to the hapless graduate who is condemned to a life of under-achievement, failed aspirations and perpetual discontent.

These were the considerations that influenced our decision in the State Executive Council to increase fees, renew and redirect the university towards our developmental goals.

The suggestion that we are insensitive to the needs of the poor is certainly incorrect. This is just one of those situations where emotion must give way to logic and reasoning and we all must suffer some uncomfortable twist, even to our way of thinking, in order to gain a lasting legacy for the future.

I believe that the money we spend in overseas scholarships to enrich European professors and lecturers can be put to better use for our own local professors and teachers and we will reduce these foreign scholarships and increase local scholarship

To cater for less advantaged students, we shall continue to make provision for bursaries, grants and scholarships and we shall encourage many individuals and corporate bodies who can afford it to join in that effort.

We shall also continue to fine tune the curriculum so as to make our tertiary institutions more relevant to the needs of our society and make the graduates more readily employable or able to start their own business if they so wish.

It is my sincere hope and desire that the citizenry especially the prospective students who are the only ones affected, will embrace this change and work with us to realise the innumerable opportunities that will emerge from this effort.

I hope I have said enough to justify one free lunch. As I leave you to enjoy the camaraderie of rejoining your old school mates, I thank you once again for inviting me and wish you all a merry Christmas and very happy 2012.

I also thank you for your attention.

Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN
Governor of Lagos State