Nigeria Is A Lost Nation!

By Tijani Sheriffdeen

Countries around the world wake up every new day to do something different, and of course productive. They attend to the challenges their yesterday brought them, and draw brilliant inferences from them to improve on their today. When one understands this, one begins to wonder less why their tomorrow is always a lesson for many others. Nations around the world who mean to develop and grow don’t look down on anything, especially elements capable of irreversible and inerasable growth and development. Developed nations understand the impact every single member of a community has on that particular community, as such; they respect their contributions, suggestions and complaints when they come, because they are only meant to bring about growth or change when need be. Who respect opinions in Africa? Not to talk of Nigeria!

Nigeria is a country with over 180 million people, one of the facts we enjoy telling people, yet, with the status of a developing nation since ever. Why should a country have the number without it amounting to anything? Maybe this question is not as important as when we want to make the number we have count as a nation. Looking beyond population, Nigeria is blessed with bounteous natural resources, but it has only help in tearing apart our nation, rather than helping it gain good grounds. Maybe the only time Nigerians appreciate their ethnic diversity is when they have to come closer with Ayodeji Balogun (Wizkid) hit song titled “come closer.” Our ethnic diversity is a reason for us to worry as a nation, as if other nations are monotonous in this regard.

Should Math Determine Who Can Read English In Nigerian Universities?

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye  

Great expectations are usually piled on our universities as very essential intellectual factories for the production of reliable human resources for achieving our lofty dreams and aspirations as a people. That is what it should be. Every year, the universities are expected to give the country quality graduates whose formal education and other forms of grooming ought to duly equip with sound intellectual, psychological and even ethical properties to assume very important and strategic positions in both private and public institutions for the advancement of national development.  

But what appears to be seriously in doubt now is whether the National Universities Commission (NUC), could still be considered a reliable ally in this aspiration, either because it has run out of quality ideas, or it is being savagely influenced by some unwholesome sentiments within its ranks to, in fact, brazenly sabotage this grand expectation.  It is tragically surprising that we have had to sit passively and watch a handful of men and women that constitute the NUC churn out a cocktail of clearly misguided policies whose only benefit is their ability to effectively erect uncrossable mountains before otherwise brilliant students and promote devastating mediocrity in the university system, with far-reaching implications to the larger society. While several local and foreign observers are bemoaning the quality of the graduates our universities are turning out these days, the NUC is busy compounding the problem by formulating policies that can only further devalue the degrees awarded in Nigeria. 

I wish to examine one of the most offensive and pernicious of these policies, and I would like to begin with an illustration.  A young girl who chose English Studies as a course of study sat for the last Unified Tertiary  Matriculations Examinations (UTME), and passed very well. She went to her university of choice, sat for the Post-UTME tests and performed brilliantly and was offered admission by the university. But when she packed her bags and went to the university to register in order to commence her programme, she met a brick wall. Even though that university had stated in the JAMB brochure that it required a pass in Mathematics to admit students to study English, she was now told at the departmental office that only a credit in Mathematics would qualify her for an admission. Okay, she would be considered if she had a credit in a science subject.  That is what the 'almighty' NUC has decreed.