Why North fails to close education gap with South

The education gap between most states in the northern part of Nigeria and their southern counterparts is growing due to a number of reasons, including the inability of schools to cover syllabus early.

The problem, according to a senior secondary school student who prefers not to be named, is further compounded by lack of qualified teachers especially in core subject areas.

Students from well-to-do families resort to private extra lessons in a bid to close the knowledge gap and be able to compete with well-educated children from other parts of the country. The lessons run for 12 hours per week.

Meanwhile, the quest by the North to reduce the long-standing educational gap with its southern counterpart has suffered a significant setback in recent years, a Daily Trust analysis of secondary school-leaving examination results revealed.

The 2016-2018 figures, released by West African Examination Council (WAEC), showed that the number of students securing the minimum grade for university admission in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) from northern Nigeria has been declining, so is the number of northern students that sat for the exam.

Another damning statistics, obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), buttresses this challenge. The figures are coming at a time political leaders from the North are claiming to be working hard to improve the quality of education, while introducing additional measures in the effort to increase school enrollment rate and performance.

One analyst described the figures as “devastating and self-inflicting” for an area that has been behind its counterpart in western education since its inception, and torn apart by a decade of deadly Boko Haram insurgency and lack of coherent policy making and implementation strategy.

Education deprivation in the North has been linked to several factors, including poverty and socio-economic norms and practices that discourage the attendance of formal education.

Some have also linked it to the area’s initial reaction to the colonial masters who first stayed in the South before heading to the North.

Unlike the southerners who accepted the Europeans and embraced their ideals, the northerners resisted. They insisted on keeping their religion, trade, governance, reading and writing.

A decrease in national spending on education

Public data of the government’s budget shows that the allocation of public spending at the national level decreased by 11% in the 2016-2018 period.

In 2016, the federal government allocated 7.92% of the national expenditures to education. By 2018, that number decreased to 7.04% of the N8.6 trillion that the government of President Muhammadu Buhari proposed to spend on education.

As the national education budget shrinks, the North takes the fall

Our analysis of the data put together for private and public schools shows that Nigeria’s southern region has the highest rate of students that scored five credits and above, including English and Math. The main requirement for university admission is five credits, including Math and English.

However, students who fail in the WAEC exam could still get admission into the university if they meet the same requirements in their Senior School Certificate Examination prepared by the National Examinations Council (NECO), a Nigerian equivalent of the WAEC.

The following chart shows the percentage of students who received five credits, including Math and English in each region, including Abuja. It is noticeable how the North (coloured red) is underperforming and how the South has a better rate of approved students than the national average.

In 2018, for instance, out of 1,006,688 southern students that sat for the exam in public and private schools, 56% of them got five credits and above, including English and Math.

The North, in comparison, had 206,183 out of 630,971 or 32% that got the same score of five credits and above.

As seen in the graph, this rating is below the national average of 47%. The North also had the lowest number of students that sat for the crucial exam.

Meanwhile, the capital city, Abuja, which is treated separately in this analysis, had 23,622 students that sat for the exam and 52% among them had five credits and above, including English and Math. This means that the capital outperformed the national average.

When translated into a map, the results of 2018 reveal how the difference in performance has a clear correlation with the part of the country where students are. The following map analyzes the .percentage of students that passed the test by state. Nigeria’s 36 states, including the capital city, Abuja, were included in the sample. In red are the worstperforming states, while in blue are the states with the best results.

The map above shows how the more up north states are, the less percentage of approved students they record. In fact, the nation’s worst-performing state is in the North. In 2018, Jigawa failed to pass 10% of the 22,000 students that sat for the exam.

On the other hand, the best results tend to be in the South. In fact, with 81% of approval within the 48.067 students that sat in the test, the south-eastern Abia is Nigeria’s best-performing state.

The capital city makes the gain

According to data obtained by Daily

Trust, Abuja is the only measured area in the country that has improved performance in the 2016-2018 period. It recorded 23.8% of increase in approved students during the period. However, data shows that the city only has 1.2% of the national population.

For the time being, the remaining 98.7% of the population lives in states considered either North or South. In both areas, the percentage of students that passed the examination shrunk during the examined period, making the national decline as significant as 10% of approved students in only three years.

The following chart also shows how the steepest decline was registered by the North, with 22.6%. This is the same macro area that already has the lowest number of approved students in the test.

Among the nine different subjects that students take, the compulsory English and Math are the major stumbling block for many of them. Failure in them has historically led to many dropouts and the increased number of street children usually associated with the region. Insiders linked this problem to lack of qualified teachers, insufficient textbooks and terrible working conditions in the North.

Hopeless teachers

“Insufficient qualified English and Math teachers coupled with their frequent transfers from one school to another are largely to blame for students’ failure in those key subjects,” says an educationist, Nura Yahaya, who has more than a decade experience of teaching in public and private schools in the northern city of Kano.

He added that instead of assigning education professionals to teach in their specialized areas, most schools had resorted to the use of a “handling” practice that promotes the idea of assigning teachers to take courses considered to be related to their field.

“This means assigning a graduate of Mass Communication to teach English; or assigning mathematics to an accountant or someone with a degree in Engineering or Economics”.

Nura added that most teachers are not qualified to teach because they “are hopeless, do not conduct research to improve their knowledge and have no clue on how to get the best out of the kids