Nigeria’s education is a failure, says Soyinka

Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka has condemned the state of education in describing the country educational system as a colossal failure. Mr. Soyinka said this at the opening of a two-day education summit organised by the Osun State government in Osogbo, the state capital. He added that the government has failed woefully in the education sector, and thereby called on the federal government to declare a state of emergency in the education sector. Although he appreciated the government for recognising that there is a crisis in the educational sector, he urged the three tiers of government in the country to create an enabling environment suitable for learning.

“Students nowadays learn under very harsh conditions which in itself could lead to crisis,” he said. “There are no sufficient teaching materials in our schools again, there is poor welfare for the students and the library and laboratories are now empty.”

He also enjoined the government and others to give greater attention to education as a means of facilitating rapid socio-cultural and economic development of the country. Mr. Soyinka who lauded Governor Rauf Aregbesola for taking interest in the future of the young generation through educational development, called on President Goodluck Jonathan to call a roundtable conference to dialogue on the way forward in the education sector.

Governor Aregbesola, at the occasion, expressed his dissatisfaction with the high tuition fees of tertiary institutions in the state, describing it as “prohibitive”.

Mr. Aregbesola promised that his administration would look into the tuition fees in all the six tertiary institutions in the state with a view to reviewing them, thus bringing education nearer to all categories of people. Students drawn from all the six tertiary institutions in the state had gathered at the Osogbo campus of the Osun State Univrsity, venue of the summit hours before the programme commenced to express their dissatisfaction with the hike in their tuition fees. The former administration of Olagunsoye Oyinlola increased the tuition fees of the state-owned tertiary institutions by 20 percent before he left government on November 26, 2010, a development which attracted violent protests by the students.

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