‘We shamefully cannot produce on a massive scale the simplest car’

Technology in its various shades and shapes is transforming the world. Nigeria seems left on this massive revolution. PETER OKEBUKOLA, former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission and Chairman Crawford University Governing Council in this interview with STEPHEN ONYEKWELU gauges the pulse of technology education in Nigeria. Excerpts:

What is the state of technology education in Nigeria?

The state of technology education in Nigeria today can simply be described as parlous. Happily, the new Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu and the Minister of Science and Technology Ogbonnaya Onu have vouched to do something to ensure a turnaround of fortune. Deficiencies are bountiful in terms of input especially resources for delivering quality technology education; process especially the predominance of theoretical manner in which technology is taught; and in terms of output notably poor quality of graduates.

What are some of the consequences of this?

There are a handful of consequences. For instance, we shamefully cannot produce on a massive scale the simplest car and have to import most of our technology-dependent needs including toothpicks! While there are islands of success stories in some of our universities of technology and polytechnics which deliver technology education, the terrain is largely studded with mediocrity within the context of contemporary global developments in technology.

I visit every other year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States of America, rated number one in the world in technology education, to have a sense of recent and future developments and conclude after every visit that we are just jokes in Nigeria. How did we get to this sorry state? We can turn our gaze to our polytechnics, the major delivery point for technology and technical education.

Why were polytechnics established?

Polytechnic education in Nigeria has a history dating back to 1895 when a Christian mission- the Presbyterians, established the first technical institution in Nigeria- Hope Waddell Institute Calabar, almost fifty years after the advent of western education in the country.  The Institute had three departments-secondary, teacher training and industrial.

The industrial department trained students in trades like tailoring, carpentry, baking, printing, agriculture, and bookbinding. Later in 1898, the Delta Native Pastorate established the Boys High School Bonny, which had in its curriculum a sprinkling of technology and vocational courses, such as carpentry, woodwork, typewriting and telegraphy.

In 1908, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) established the Onitsha Industrial School, which provided training in carpentry, cabinet making and building. It is instructive to note that the initiative for providing technical education in the context of formal education in Nigeria was taken by the Christian missions, and this largely accounted for the geographical disparity in the popularity of science and technical education in the various parts of the country.  Apart from the industrial/trade schools established by the missionaries, the government of the time had no specific institutions earmarked for the training of technologists and technicians.

A turning point however came with the worldwide depression of the 1930s, which made the recruitment of expatriate staff to fill vacant artisan, technician and technologist positions very expensive and uneconomical, hence the need to train indigenous manpower for such positions.  This led to the acceleration of training programmes offered in technical training institutions such as  School of Survey Oyo (1908) to train Survey Assistants for the Land and Survey Department, which was later moved to Ibadan (1928) and subsequently Oyo (1934); The Marine Department School established in 1928 to train Assistant Seamen and it awarded the United Kingdom. Board of Trade Certificate; Schools of Agriculture at Samaru, Zaria and Ibadan (1930) to produce Agricultural Assistants; a technical training school for Engineering/Architectural Assistants established by the Public Works Department in Lagos (1931) Veterinary School in Vom, near Jos ( 1935); the Nigerian Railway Training School which was established in 1942, although it had been providing some in-house apprenticeship training since 1901; and the P & T School for the training of technicians in Telegraphy and Telecommunications established in Lagos in 1932 to produce manpower with the City and Guilds of London Certificate.  It was restructured in 1964 and moved to Oshodi where it is still located, but is now known as NITEL Training School.

The Yaba Higher College was established as the first tertiary educational institution in Nigeria in 1932.  It provided courses in engineering, medicine, pharmacy, teacher education, surveying, agriculture and forestry leading to the award of Diploma.  Its establishment was ostensibly to placate the restive anti-colonial nationalists then, who were making a strident demand for a higher educational institution preferably a University in the country. Its products were employed in the civil service as “Assistants”, e.g. Agricultural Assistants, Forestry Assistants, and Survey Assistants.

The Yaba Higher College was moved to Ibadan in January 1948 and its students became the pioneer students of the newly-established University of Ibadan.  In its place, a new institute was established to provide courses mainly in engineering-civil, mechanical and electrical as well as building and architecture – the pre-cursor of the Yaba College of Technology. Today, there are now a total of 208 polytechnics and monotechnics with an impressive national spread.

How are polytechnics faring today?

The first question should be whether there is an enabling environment provided for the attainment of the objectives of polytechnic education with regard to physical facilities, infrastructure, staffing, funding and relevant curricula? To all these questions, the answer is an unqualified “no”.

Polytechnics are expected to attain an enrolment ratio of at least 70:30 between science/technology and Art/Business programmes. This has not been achieved by any polytechnic in the country. Rather the reverse is the case.

A recent survey by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) revealed an enrolment ratio of 65:35 in favour of Arts/Business against science/technology programmes at the National Diploma (ND) and Higher National Diploma (HND) levels in the nation’s polytechnic sector.  This shows clearly that our polytechnics have lost focus of the primary objective of their establishment, which is the production of technical manpower for the country.

For proper teaching and learning to take place there must be adequate physical facilities.  In many polytechnics, lecture halls are poorly lit, poorly ventilated, and laboratory equipment are obsolete. 

Thanks to the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) for bailing the system out but there is still a long way to go.

There is a state of anxiety in the polytechnics arising from the placing of a limit to the career progression of products of polytechnics in the public service which former president Olusegun Obasanjo and subsequent administrations strived to address. There is also the general societal perception of university graduates being of higher social status than the products of polytechnics. Polytechnic graduates suffer a negative individual, societal and even governmental discrimination by being described as “middle-level” manpower.

In this sense, it is implied that polytechnic graduates are forever consigned to middle-level manpower status in their careers and professions.  The question then is what is really middle level manpower? When could polytechnic graduates drop the toga of middle-level manpower? Is it after switching over to the university to do a degree? If the holder of a Bachelor’s degree is not classified as middle-level manpower, is it right to classify an HND holder as middle-level? These are questions we need to find answers for and agree on. As long as this bias continues in spite of HND-Bachelor of Science parity being touted, our polytechnic education will be the worse for it, as the academically-oriented students would always want to switch over to other careers or fields.

Both government and authorities of technology education institutions in the country are facing a challenge of making polytechnic education attractive to parents, prospective students and the general public.  Polytechnics should not be a place of last resort for applicants who could not secure admission into the universities.  Rather, polytechnics should be places where students should go into based on interest, aptitude and motivation.  Our 12 universities of technology (federal, state and private) are not faring any better in terms of resourcing and quality of products. The 2012 needs assessment survey of all Nigerian universities confirmed this.

STEPHEN ONYEKWELU