By Bashir Mohammed
Kano
A senior lecturer in the Department of Education, Bayero University, Kano (BUK), Dr. Ahmed Iliyasu, has said that western type liberal education system was in a state of crisis and had proved unsuitable and dysfunctional in its operations in Nigeria.
Delivering a paper entitled Crisis in Nigeria’s Education Sector: Addressing the Connect between Unemployment and Insecurity organised by the Progressive Governors Forum in Kano, he maintained that “Nigeria is currently faced with increasing social, political and economic problems evident in the proliferation of acts of conflict, violence, poverty and illiteracy.”
He stressed that the call for renewal of commitment to education as a tool of curbing unemployment and insecurity was not limited to Nigeria, but a global issue.
He said: “No one will deny the fact that education is the bedrock for development and no state desiring to foster its development could fail to be concerned about the long term but unavoidable investment of educating the people which should generally receive priority.”
He stated that the search for democracy, the culture of peace, the protection of environment were all incontestably involved in providing individuals with an effective and suitable education.
The don lamented that the role of education in forming young people to become change agents had been ignored with levity.
“Year after year the quality of education in Nigeria institutions has gradually been on the decline. Looking at the current trend of unemployment among Nigerians as from eight per cent in 1999, Nigeria’s unemployment rate has increased to an annual average of 13.3 per cent in 2000 to 2008 and then shot again after the global crisis to annual average of 21.66 per cent in 2009 to peak at 23.9 per cent by 2011.”
In his welcome address, Imo state Governor, Mr. Rochas Okorocha, said the problem of unemployment generally had been linked to so many factors around education, ranging from the quality of institutions, quality of instruction givers and the knowledge they pass across to the willingness of students to learn.
He said every year over 1.5 million Nigerian youths registered for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).