DOES THE NIGERIAN EDUCATION SYSTEM PREPARE STUDENTS FOR THE WORK ENVIROMENT?

This was a piece I wrote for an essay competition last year (wasn't so lucky to win it anyways...). I had just started off my writing career...my inexperience is so lucid in the essay. Nonetheless,it is the message that is most important. Enjoy!

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Nigeria remains one the countries with the highest rate of unemployment in Nigeria. Year by year, tons of graduates are being pumped into the Nigerian labour market. Yet, the unemployment stats just keep on soaring high. According to a survey carried out by Centre for Entrepreneurship Development, University of Nigeria, Nssuka, the number of graduate students is at approximately a hundred thousand per year and growing steadily each year while unemployment rate is approximately forty-one percent, seventy-one percent of students who graduated from Nigerian universities, polytechnics and colleges of education in the year (2000-2006) are yet to find jobs. What seems to be the problem? Are there no jobs available any longer? Is it that our fresh graduates are incapable of successfully surviving the ordeals associated with getting employed? After all, they spend not less than four years in various higher institutions of learning getting equipped for this arduous task. Without a doubt, it is apparent that the Nigerian education system is lapsing in its responsibility to adequately groom students for life after school. Several incapacities in the Nigerian education system of today account for this lapse.
The first and perhaps the greatest challenge facing the Nigerian education system, which makes it difficult for good quality education capable of all-round development to be delivered to Nigerian students, is inadequate funding by federal, state and local governments. The high level of corruption and misappropriation of public funds that has swarmed the public sector has gradually crept into the critical and important divisions of the education sector. Although the Federal Government of Nigeria has received commendations from stakeholders for appropriating N426.53 billion to education in the 2013 budget, a critical examination of the entire N4.92trillion ($32billion) budget proposal presented by President Goodluck Jonathan to the seventh National Assembly clearly showed a modest increase by only five per cent from that of N4.697 trillion in 2012. Nonetheless, large percentage of this budget will eventually siphoned by those in charge of the education sector. There are no proper measures in place to ensure that funds appropriated for the education sector are effectively harnessed to clear up pressing issues in the sector. Secondary schools are established without funds to erect enough classrooms for learning, without funds to secure properly trained instructors, without funds to set-up well-equipped standard science laboratories, without funds to purchase modern sport facilities and several other inadequacies. Universities, colleges of technology and other higher institutions of learning are not left out. Lecture-halls primarily built to comfortably accommodate nine hundred students are used to lecture over two thousand students. Machines and equipment due for replacement are still employed in the various science and engineering workshops. If proper procedure for disbursement of education funds is duly followed, all these hiccups experienced in our institutions of learning would not exist. Accountability and transparency should be evident in the allocation of funds in the academic sector. The sector should be purged of bad eggs embezzling education funds. Without this, the Nigerian education system will not be able to impact necessary knowledge into its students.
Furthermore, most undergraduates, especially those in the science and engineering related fields, are not exposed to individual practical application of theories they have learnt while in the classroom. Right from elementary school, all what students receive are verbal non-vivid description of practical theories. No wonder it is no surprise that a lot of Computer Science graduates fail recruitment tests for their inability to switch on a computer. Some of them have never had the opportunity of individually operating such machines before. Mass Communication graduates struggle to make simple and correct sentences. Engineering graduates, who ought to have conducted researches in the course of their studies, culminating in inventions, get to touch most of the elementary engineering tools for the first time, after their graduation. This should not be case. Students should be exposed to practical basics of what they will entangle upon employment. Students should be taught how handle machineries necessary for their work environment while in school. They should not graduate only to find out they are novices in the application of theories they have learnt for not less than four years.
If all parties involved in the Nigerian education system (Government, Stakeholders, Academia and Academicians) can join hands and fight the lapses of the system, I believe change will come into the system. All we need is cooperation.