Recently on TV, I watched with dismay as supposedly intelligent students proffered reasons for the mass failure of candidates at the recently concluded WAEC Examinations. All I heard were the same rehearsed "my parents and teachers said so" rhetoric... the candidates did not study hard, they spent too much time on other activities rather than their books. And pray tell, why would they not?
Are we still belligerently ignorant of the fact that the contents of study are redundant especially in a society like ours, where technology adaptability supersedes the economic wherewithal to curtail its excesses and direct its noble causes?
It appears so.
Only in a country like Nigeria will alphabets depicting grades substantially represent the intellectual worth of a human being. Only a country with a vast youth force capable of redefining industries and shaping a new nation will allow its most prized resources to roam the hinterlands of unemployment like Zombies in a horror flick.
For those who find nefarious ways to put their knowledge to subsistent use, we offer no solace but unveiled envy and loathing.
Back to the results. What manner of education is being applied in our institutions of learning, especially when the quality of tutors is greatly diminished despite the mass proliferation of schools? Some schools provide books for students, half of which are not recommended by WAEC syllabus standards. Those books which recommended are either too expensive or inaccessible to as school libraries are poorly funded or non existent.
Let me at this juncture proffer reasons for the ever dwindling efforts at upping grades at WAEC examinations:
1. REDUNDANCY: The syllabus serves no relevance to the emerging trends of knowledge acquisition and application. From 1979 or thereabouts to date, questions have been rearranged and reset like gamblers cards. Some have imbibed the habit of profiting from this misdeed by reprinting and reselling past questions!
2. LOSS OF INTEREST: the students are fed up. Reality posits a more realistic view to the fact that academic results do not guaranty intellectual elevation. Social Networking has not been added to the school curriculum. Big mistake! Why? It could be the new wave of exchange student programming and penpalship. Find a way to convince the Nigerian child that he is either at par or superior to his counterpart abroad while here in the motherland and watch the evolution.
3. LACK OF QUALITY TUTORS: Everyone wants their reward here. It is true that many good teachers hoard knowledge over bitter flashbacks of not being duly rewarded for their academic prowess. The good ones are usually those who ensure that their students fail.The others, simply have no business in the classroom but its what was offered as the bank doors and oil wells clammed up.
My solution to this problem is rather simple. Kill off WAEC Examinations or introduce Decertification. After all, when last did a certified Nigerian obtain a patent for developing a car, a solar system to power our outages or a better mixture of appropriate glug to forever plug those holes on our highways? When last did the well worn speeches and lectures at birthdays spurn an urge to get up and invent, provide or sustain?
Save for the lady who sells boli and groundnuts or the one who sells akara and buns, very few would miss these sheets of fate we clamour for and coerce our children to obtain by hook or crook. Our nation is in dire need of an intellectual and maybe forceful revolution. The WAEC results will not give us that or sustain the hope in that possibility. But i know one day, e go happen.
Until the brilliant mind shines without hindrance and applicable knowledge outweighs the redundant certification, i will look to the skies for answers to a nation's growing pains as conveyed in the arrangement of the constellation.
PS: For the ones, who have not been inspired yet, watch the Bollywood movie titled: 3 Idiots. I could send it to you. If that does not expand your horizons though fictionally, I do not know what will.
I'm done.
