Merit should guide presidential scholarships

May 10, 2015

 

President Goodluck Jonathan

AN ongoing campaign to shoot down the Presidential Special Scholarship Scheme for Innovation and Development is unconscionable and retrogressive. Typically, the strident opposition to this novel initiative is coming from the usual suspects – the hegemony-inclined faction of the northern elite whose ministrations have rendered the region a high illiteracy, poverty-stricken zone. But the scheme must go on and merit must once more take a pre-eminent position for Nigeria to develop.

A rare success for the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency, the scheme targets selecting our best youths, who have obtained first class degrees, through a competitive process, for postgraduate studies abroad in 25 of the world’s top rated universities. In a country where merit has been thrown overboard for over four decades, the scheme has thrived for the past three years, enabling some of our brightest youths to attend great institutions in America, Europe and Japan.

There is much to recommend the sustenance of this project and everything to condemn in the opposition to it. That opposition began from 2013 when names of the first batch of beneficiaries were published and those accustomed to the prevailing spoils system found that, for once, merit and adherence to laid-down criteria were allowed to guide the competitive selection process. The Arewa Consultative Forum, claiming to speak for the “North,” recently joined federal legislators from some northern states to lampoon PRESSID, accusing the government of acting “with impunity to deny students of northern extraction” participation in the scheme. Like the House of Representatives and northern senators, the ACF’s grouse is that a majority of the successful candidates are from the southern states. The House Committee on Education had, for the second year running, “directed” the government to stop the scheme pending its scrutiny of its “processes, procedures and beneficiaries.”

What the northern elite want is a return to the self-immolating federal character option where opportunities are given on the basis of quota and merit takes a back seat. This is short-sighted and totally inappropriate to PRESSID. Unlike enrolment in the Unity Schools, military or federal civil service, PRESSID is a commendable attempt to “develop a critical mass of professionals who would serve as catalysts for change and agents of scientific and technological advancement, as well as sustainable economic development.” Candidates are to have first class degrees from approved universities and, so far, 205 youths have won the scholarships. The scholarships are awarded for the sciences, medicine, biology, economics, engineering and technology. Responding to allegations of excluding northerners, Julius Okojie, chairman of the PRESSID Implementation Committee, explained that merit, not federal character, was its guiding principle, “unless we are saying that the criteria have to change.”

We agree completely with him. The argument by Aminu Suleiman, the committee chairman, that every state can produce first class degree holders misses the point. Not every first class graduate is admitted at Harvard, Cambridge, Yale, Oxford, MIT, McGill University, University of Tokyo, Cornell, Pennsylvania or Imperial College, London or any of the world’s top 25. For American universities, graduate students must pass the Graduate Record Examinations.

Federal character alone cannot apply to a scheme that seeks the very best for the specific goal of innovation. Foreign universities admit only the best, not on the basis of Nigeria’s quota system. The federal character system has held us back while entrenching a culture of entitlement and mediocrity. Admission to the 104 unity secondary schools, for instance, in 2013 allowed a male pupil from Yobe State who scored two out of 200 marks to gain admission, while his counterpart from Anambra State was set a cut-off mark of 139.

A section of the northern elite who still live in the past must change. Their problem is the entitlement and “sharing” culture by which they believe every federal project is for “sharing.” Quota system was introduced at independence to enable the educationally backward North to close the gap with the South and reflect the country’s diversity in the public service. Northern leaders should rather be embarrassed that 55 years later, the gap has widened, while it took the South-East and South-South only a decade to close the gap with the South-West. Instead of giving priority to education, northern leaders frustrate efforts to educate the northern masses and instead seek to bribe them with religion.

Ahmed Joda recalls that, as a former federal permanent secretary, “it was the North, led by Sokoto, Katsina, Kano, Zazzau (Zaria), Bauchi,” that opposed the Universal Primary Education scheme “to the point of derailment,” despite the advocacy for mass education made by leaders like Sa’ad Zungur, Aminu Kano and Abubakar Imam. Today, the region has the world’s highest population of children out of school, the highest illiteracy level after Pakistan, Somalia and Bangladesh and Nigeria’s highest poverty rates.

Instead of vainly seeking to impose the Nigerian system of “sharing” and entitlement on the world’s best universities, the northern elite and governments should start from the basics. Only Kaduna, in the 10th position, made the top 10 states in the percentage of candidates who passed the West African School Certificate Examination of June 2014. The bottom 10 were all northern states. Northern states topped the list of states with unqualified teachers in primary and secondary schools, with the then Education Minister, Ruqayyat Rufai, revealing in 2010 that 46.8 per cent of teachers in the North-West were unqualified and 57.7 per cent in the North-East, compared to 16.7 per cent in the South-East and 6.7 per cent in the South-West.

The challenge is for northern states to deploy resources into education to meet the challenge of merit posed by PRESSID, just as the late Ahmadu Bello, as premier of the defunct Northern Region, did, culminating in the establishment of Ahmadu Bello University that was once adjudged one of the best in Africa.

Unless they give education the desired priority, their youths cannot compete in this knowledge-driven global economy. We already have quotas in Unity Schools, federal polytechnics and universities, and in graduate and postgraduate scholarships given by various agencies; we should not allow the shut-down of PRESSID on the altar of sectional politics. If you compel reverse discrimination at home, you cannot impose it on the world’s top 25 schools. The North should endeavour to catch up, not slow others down.

President-elect Muhammadu Buhari should not vindicate those who feared his election would bring back the bad days of selfish, sectional scheming by succumbing to the demands of these ethnic champions.