THE EFFECT OF INCREASED ACADEMIC FAILURE OF ATHLETES IN LAGOS STATE PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS.

It takes at least 12 years to produce a Secondary School Examination candidate. What happens within those years is what gave us the results that have scandalized everyone. There was a consistent record of over 70% failure in all competitive examinations for years, and with the aid of examination irregularities. And, mind you, the syllabus is covered over a number of years, building on nine years of Basic Education. So part of the worry today should be how it is possible to mount years of senior secondary education on top of nine years of Basic Education and come out with spectacular failure. Let’s face it: matters are much more serious than some people would have us believe and the shocking, hidden truths are legion.
Under Chief Chukwemeka Chikelu in the then Federal Ministry of Information and National Orientation, the Ministry was very excited to institute a Best Performing Students’ Award across all the states of the Federation, through the National Orientation Agency (NOA). This initiative was designed to drive competitive academic excellence. At the back of everyone’s mind was the need for a knowledge-focused counter to the absolutely irresponsible state management of sporting success through huge cash reward to footballers and athletes. But the project was stopped in its tracks by our own research findings. The details were too embarrassing for anyone to actually give public explanation for the sudden ‘loss of sound’ on this all-important, nation-rousing initiative. Problem number one was the level of examination irregularities. The second was the plethora of ‘Special Examination Centres’ which charge over ten times the official examination fees, with guarantee that any candidate in such ‘Centres’ will be enabled to pass. These ‘Centres’ operate without invigilators but use, instead, paid assistants who supervise examination irregularities in order to deliver on their promise to candidates. There was also the discovery that some states, especially in the North, had over two generations of ex-youth corps population who charged fees for writing the O’Level examinations for candidates, instead of going back to their states of origin.
Further on the matter of standards and excellence, as against the records of the Federal Ministry of Education which said, back in 2006, that there were about 97,000 secondary schools in Nigeria, a comprehensive inspection of all secondary schools in Nigeria came up with a total figure of about 14,543 schools. A nation that does not have nearly half of the ‘factories’ producing the ‘raw materials’ for its institutions of higher learning on its radar is perfectly justified in tendering the type of results we are now lamenting.
If you think that the foregoing constitute the biggest problems, then you are wrong. The major crisis is that our nation is not educating enough people to engage in a 21st century world and at the same time is recording impressive failure rates in all competitive examinations, including entrance examinations, among the few in school. Many international organizations have reported alarming enrolment figures for Nigeria. Relatively recent reports from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and UNICEF suggest that some ten million Nigerian children are out of school. This is only partly true, because the actual figure is much higher than that. Working with the nation’s population figures before the last census, Nigeria ought to have about 23million children in primary schools all over the country. When the Federal Ministry of Education carried out a census the actual number of children in school was found to be less than half of that number.
It was also discovered that drop-out rate was high and that less than 62% of the children made it to secondary school. So, there are well over 12 million Nigerian children who are not in school at the primary level alone. It also turned out that out of the 33.9 million boys and girls who ought to be in secondary school at the time only 6.4 million were in school. Tertiary education faced the same problem, in addition to third-rate lecturers, commercialized academic grades and near-absence of a truly tolerable academic culture.