The World Bank’s human development index (HDI) released last week is harrowing enough to send jitters down the spines of the rulers of Nigeria.
Ironically, the politicians and top civil servants at the helm of affairs have developed sturdy shock absorbers against such demoralizing reports.
They are not perturbed.
As usual, the report ranks Nigeria among war-torn and impoverished countries like Niger, Chad and Central African Republic.
Nigeria was rated 152 among 157 nations in terms of investment in education and healthcare facilities.
The World Bank report described Nigeria as the only oil-rich nation that invests very little in education.
While lamenting that Nigeria spends less than four per cent of its budget on education, it stressed that Nigeria’s education is largely funded by the World Bank and other donors.
The report just amplified what Bill Gates, the world’s richest man whose foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ploughs billions of naira annually into Nigeria’s fraudulent and decrepit healthcare delivery system, said recently about Nigeria.
Gates had warned earlier this year that Nigeria was not investing in its human resources and that it might soon run out of the manpower to manage the physical infrastructure it is developing.
Gates’ assessment is indubitable.
Nigeria’s education system is in a shamble.
The number of children of school age now roaming the streets hawking sachet water and all sorts of wares rather than taking tutorials in cozy classrooms, has risen from 10 million to 13.4 million.
The reason is obvious.
The few public schools can no longer cope with population explosion.
The impoverished parents of the 13 million unlucky out-of-school kids are too poor to send their children to private schools where the classrooms are empty due to high fees.
In the lyrics of one of his numerous melodious tunes, the late Lucky Dube, a South African Reggae maestro who was cut down in his prime by his country’s xenophobic criminals who mistook him for a Nigerian, warned that those who do not build schools must build prisons.
The late music icon believed that most of those who cannot find space in classrooms would end up as criminals who have to spend time in prison.
The rulers of Nigeria in the last 40 years do not reason along that line.
They neither build schools nor prisons.
The message from Nigeria’s seat of power is that those who cannot find space in the nation’s few classrooms must eke out a living through hawking.
If they resort to crime, they would rot in overcrowded prisons.
It is even more difficult to find space in prisons than in schools.
The situation is even more irksome in the country’s universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.
More than 1.6 million candidates sat for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) conducted by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB).
By last week, JAMB had only offered admission to 200,000 in the so-called merit list.
It might probably admit an additional 200,000 in the inglorious supplementary list.
By implication, 1.1 million candidates would not have seats in any of the higher institutions.
The contest for the few seats is keen, demoralizing, intricate and expensive.
The brilliant young minds in Nigeria can no longer find seats in the universities because population explosion has crowded many out of affordable public universities.
JAMB’s 2018 cut-off for admission into universities is 200.
Unfortunately, many who scored as high as 280 have been denied admission.
A candidate from Osun state who scored 76.4 per cent in post-UTME could not find a seat to read medicine in Lagos State University (LASU) because the cut-off point for non-indigenes is 79 per cent.
The candidate’s crime is that she is not from Lagos state.
The cut-off for indigenes of Lagos state is lower.
Another candidate who scored 278 in JAMB and 70.7 per cent in post-UTME was not allowed to read nursing in the same university because the cut-off for non-indigenes is 74.4 per cent.
Ironically, the cut-off for indigenes is 69 per cent.
Even those who have secured admission are not sure of what would happen the next day.
Last session, LASU admitted 104 students to read nursing.
After the first year in the main campus in Ojo, four of the students were not allowed to continue their course at the Nursing Department in LASUCOM, Ikeja.
The facilities at LASUCOM could only accommodate 100 students.
The four students who had successfully completed their first year in the university were sent home unceremoniously.
Last year, there was drama in one of the universities in the south-east.
Those who were offered admission rushed to pay the nonrefundable acceptance fee of N20,000.
Without telling anybody that the offers were on first come-first-served basis, the university authorities quietly registered the first set of students who paid the school fees early enough.
After an interval, the university drew a line in the roster and halted further payment and registrations.
All the candidates who could not meet the secret deadline lost their admissions along with the non-refundable fee of N20,000.
That is how low Nigeria has descended in its human development rating.
The World Bank rating paints a more pleasant picture than what is happening on the campuses.
