These three plots show the education geography of Nigeria at basic level. One thing that we will note here is how Anambra state has bulldozed itself from a state where boys go into trading into the best in the nation, on basic education attainment. The generation of traders in Onitsha want all their children educated even as they desire they return to business upon graduation. More so, increasingly, the Igbo Apprenticeship System has been upgraded so that the stimulation happens for college graduates.
So, when you see Obi Cubana (a University of Nigeria Nsukka graduate) empowering 300 with N1 million, most of the recipients are college graduates. This is a data point: communities of apprentices have higher propensity to have their children educated. That is what Anambra state is telling Nigeria right now.
This is a real evolution – that boy-trader in Onitsha you see at 5pm on weekdays or Saturdays is also in school.
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Kids are going to school, it’s not even a challenge, at least from my part of Nigeria. The only challenge I see is how the education we give them aligns with national development and their own aspirations, that is where the real disconnection is.
We are still training kids on civil service modelled education, even when many of the things we tell them are not relatable, yet we keep loading them in their heads.
We still believe that medicine, engineering and law are the ‘professional’ courses, so we keep piling them up, even when our realities say otherwise…
We have been going to school and schooling, albeit with little or no education.
We need to make education very convincing and aspirational, else we are not going to get many of the new kids to finish school.
I quite agree with you, Mr Francis. But again, our educational system needs to wear more of a problem-solving approach on the sad reality we’re confronted with as a notion.