Conspiracy against primary schools
Professor Robert Scalapino held fond memories of his 1938-1945 war years spent in Japan. Of his tales two stick out. The first was his role as an intelligence officer in charge of breaking down Japanese morale. His team opened letters inside post offices to read what Japanese people were writing to each other about the American desecration of their Emperor. He was staggered by the high rate of mass literacy in the population which supported the huge circulation of newspapers; the book production industry, and workers who could read instructions in procedures for manufacturing activities; names of tools and products, and company slogans meant to boost Buddhist culture of excellence in work. It was little wonder, he argued, that a Japanese primary school teacher earned the same salary as the country’s Prime Minister.
His narrative contrasted with colonial education. Frederick Lugard directed District Officers in Northern Nigeria to do a census of household diets; and record if these food crops were planted on the most fertile soils. Such crops were to be replaced with groundnut and cotton as primary crops even though families could not use them for balanced nutrition intakes. That mass distribution of production of cotton and groundnuts for export to Britain was never matched by the distribution of literacy through primary school education among peasant farmers and their families. Primary schools had no equivalent of groundnut pyramids and lorry loads of bales of cotton.
Illiteracy became lakes out of which secondary and tertiary education stood out like few lonesome trees. The volume of the lake had a steady supply of generation of girls flowed in by child marriage and few enrolments in scanty primary schools built. The lake’s water was poisoned by bellow subsistence prices officially set for crops exported. It was also denied investment through bank loans for processing their products into industrial goods for urban and global markets. Livestock rearers saw powdered milk imported from New Zealand, Canada and Britain seize local markets while they were denied loans to finance their packaging milk and milk products for richer rural and urban markets. Primary schools were not required to serve colonial crop and livestock agricultural sector.
With grains, roots and horticultural agricultural products; livestock products, and mining products not linked to primary school education, it was clear that under-employment and non-employment would grow. The anger against work without getting higher income; deepening poverty among agricultural producers, collided with their awareness of higher levels of income and consumption among few Africans employed as auxiliaries of colonial administrative officialdom and trade in colonial imports. The denial of primary schools for the exploited was a security measure by colonial rulers as insurance against mass rebellion.
Without the right to vote, and lack of representative democracy, the exploited could only resort to periodic violent protests; and boycotts of sales of agricultural produce to exporters. Lack of electoral and representative politics and governance was stabilised by lack of universal high quality primary education and the spread of newspapers to arouse and mobilise people’s political awareness. Economic ‘’opportunity costs’’ resulting from denials of quality primary education were as grave as political ones. Primary education was subject to a sustained official colonial hostility.
Post-colonial governments have not declared mass illiteracy as a matter of criminal internal ‘’brain drain’’ kept out of national productivity. The cynical colonial government’s strategy of creating very limited and narrow ladders for climbing into jobs as auxiliaries of colonial administration became glorified as ‘’building man-power’’ or ‘’human resource development’’. The negative side of this propaganda evolved into labelling those shut out of primary, secondary and tertiary educations as ‘’failures’’. Children denied chances to pass through ‘’checkpoints’’ consisting of ‘’entrance’’ and exit ‘’examinations’’ inside the narrowing tunnels at postprimary levels became focus of political debates while the anti-democratic character of non-universal quality primary schools was covered up.
Secondary and tertiary education became a conspiracy against 98 per cent of school-age children. In Nigeria claims of 10 million children not in schools is a cliché. This lack of social democracy is anchored on tools such as: shortages of classrooms; lack of qualified teachers, textbooks, learning aids and furniture. While in 2010 Kwara State had libraries in 27 per cent of its secondary schools, Kogi State had none. Parents not able to buy school uniforms; pay costs of transportation to school, and lack of food for children to eat at midschool day constitute scandals in the vital matter of ‘’societal investment into human capital’’.
Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s 2013 Report celebrates the fact that 94% of Africans live under good governance. In 2011, the ratio of girls to boys attending primary and secondary public and private schools in Angola stood at only 64 %. Rwanda’s score was 102 %. Mali, Niger Eritrea, Chad, Cameroon and Benin had scores between 70 and 87 %. As a minimum signal of quality of education in primary schools, the 2012 scores are alarming. The number of teachers ‘’ who have received the minimum organised teacher training... required for teaching’’ were 47% in Benin; 57% in Ethiopia; 55 % in Sierra Leone; 52% in Ghana; and 65 % in Senegal. Economists and mathematicians should calculate for us the quantity of industrial, architectural, administrative or artistic talents totally or partially ruined by poor teaching skills in these and other countries.
Healing historic wound of denied universal high quality primary education waits under heaven.