SOUTH AFRICA, NIGERIA AND EDUCATION DISASTER

Okello Oculi argues that Nigeria and South Africa are allies in denying education to majorities of their population in rural communities

BOTH COUNTRIES HAVE 80 PER CENT OF THEIR PEOPLE TRAPPED IN POVERTY YET EDUCATION IS NOT PROMOTING ECONOMIC ‘INCLUSIVENESS’

The opposition by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) to the expulsion, by the Kaduna State government, from its schools of over 25,000 teachers who had failed to pass a test set for Primary Four pupils is similar to activities of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), an ally of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). In a test administered in 2007, 79 per cent of teachers of state primary schools for South Africa’s Blacks ‘’scored below the level expected of the pupils’’. In Ekiti State, teachers vigorously resisted tests carried out in South Africa. Sokoto, Zamfara, Kano and other states are yet to have Kaduna’s courage.

The ECONOMIST magazine reports that the SADTU ‘’successfully lobbied for the cancellation of standardisation tests’’ which would have exposed deficiencies in performances by teachers and the status of learning by pupils.

A recent BBC documentary showed a typical South Korean secondary school culture of pupils mandatorily being inside a classroom by 8 a.m. After regular lessons, students attend ‘’extra-lessons’’ till 10 p.m. and top up with personal study till 12 midnight. Visiting students from Wales were overwhelmed by the tyranny of sleep when their Korean hosts launched the 10 p.m. lap. When a one-hour Mathematics test set from Wales was administered, Korean students completed it in 15 minutes while their guests were still plodding at it. Nigeria and South Africa are stuck in historical swamps of denial of education to majorities of their population in rural and riverine communities.

South Africa has 25,000 schools. In the Eastern Cape Province a total of 500 schools have mud walls, while formerly segregated schools for white children have exquisite architectures, vast campuses and lawns as smooth as Britain’s top football pitches. Under ‘’apartheid’’, the Bantu Education Act of 1953 virtually prohibited the teaching of mathematics and sciences to Black pupils. The white minister of education proclaimed that they were to be ‘’hewers of wood and carriers of water’’ for European immigrants.

The legacy of this brutal policy is that by 2015 as high as 27 per cent of pupils who had attended school for six years could not read. In Zimbabwe, 19 % of pupils could not read. In Tanzania the figure was only 4 %. The South African condition was also compounded by the political boycott of classes by Black students against condemning them to learning only AFRIKAANS language, thereby crippling their ability to understand radio broadcasts in the English language by leaders of liberation struggles living in Tanzania and in exile elsewhere.

The boycott was marked by pupils breaking up classroom desks, chairs and other teaching aides. They also beat up their Black teachers, while groups of them could pull a driver out of his car; beat him to death, and calmly return to playing street football. Angus Duffett, owner of a reformist private school, noted in 2016 that ‘’the desire to learn has been eroded as a ‘’deeper sickness’’ which subsequently afflicted the education culture in South Africa. It is little wonder that in a 2015 test in mathematics and science taken by 580,000 pupils in 57 countries, South Africa often scored lowest marks. Some who wish to build ignorance about apartheid as a ‘’crime against humanity’’ have started a campaign against teaching History in schools.

The erosion of ‘’the desire to learn’’ among Nigerian pupils have strong Verwoerd-like roots anchored in strong colonial and post-colonial political classes fearful of the spread of literacy among the masses: including education for women. South Africa’s White rulers closed ‘’most independent church-run schools that provided good education in Black areas’’. In Nigeria, the 1970s saw rising claims that taking control of schools away from religious denominations in the 1960s caused the collapse of standards of education. In the North, pupils struggled to handle low competence in the use of English by teachers recruited from Pakistan, India, and Philippines. Nigerian teachers lost morale when their tenures were suddenly converted to contract service.

In areas that were hit by the 1967 to 1970 civil war, schooling was wrecked and war injected horrendous violence into experiences of children; devalued the moral status of teachers in local communities, and mobilised youths into militarised manhood.

Remedial responses in South Africa have included forcing black pupils into schools for whites; reform-minded individuals starting private schools with women teachers not forced to provide sexual favours to get jobs, and teachers receiving regular ‘’refresher training’’. Some private schools are receiving help from schools in Britain and the Americas. Paradoxically, corruption promoted by SADTU is wrecking the quality of education for Blacks just as apartheid had done. In Nigeria dreadful statistics of over 15 million children not inside classrooms 50 years after independence, is also similar to British colonial policy, albeit with a little improvement.

Both countries have 80 per cent of their people trapped in poverty yet education is not promoting economic ‘’inclusiveness’’. Primary schools are NOT FOR TRAINING HIGH QUALITY SKILLS that would equip its mass graduates for quality productivity, notably: weaving of textiles; winning government contracts for wood products for school furniture and global urban consumers. Politicians import grinders, generators, tractors for voters instead of funding their fabrications as the road to self-reliant rural industrialisation.