01 Oct 2006 |
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A Nigerian Girl And Her Edinburgh Dream This is a true life story. It is an account of the ordeal that one of our compatriots recently went through in an attempt to get his daughter a visa to enable her travel to a university in the United Kingdom. I met father and daughter at a Prize-Giving Day ceremony earlier in the year at the MUSON centre. I was Guest Speaker at the occasion. The young lady is one of those bright female students that I once wrote about in this column. She scored excellent grades in her A/Level exams and the London Cambridge; a straight A student, she was the best and the brightest in her class. When she stepped onto the stage to speak on behalf of the graduating class, her presentation was sharp, her comportment great, she was a parent's pride, the delight of all. She had also been offered admission at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, to study Architecture. Every other student in her class was either heading for Europe or the United States for further studies, not even one of them had a Nigerian university listed against his or her name in the school brochure. Their school is one of those privileged ones where parents pay fees in millions, where emphasis is on quality and international standards. You don't send a child to such a strong preparatory school and then let her end up in a village university in Nigeria. So, our compatriot was prepared and determined to send his daughter, his second daughter and third child, who had also made him proud, to a European University. But he didn't bargain for the ordeal that awaited him and his daughter at the Embassy. The young lady's application for visa was turned down. The father appealed. The appeal failed. Meanwhile, the University of Edinburgh has its own time-table; students are expected to resume for studies at a particular time. While still struggling with the visa problem, our compatriot wrote to the University pleading that his daughter should be allowed a grace of two weeks. The University authorities obliged. But the Embassy in Lagos stuck to its guns. The Consular Office insisted that our friend should show proof that he can pay his daughter's fees and other necessary bills in Europe. He owns a company, a successful company, (90% of it is his, the remaining 10% belongs to his wife) so he took all the accounts and proof of assets of the company and submitted to the embassy. He also showed them his offshore account where he has some money and all his other bank accounts. The Embassy still turned down the application for visa. He pointed to his company's accounts: the visa officials ruled that they are not interested in the company; they are interested in his personal financial standing. Our compatriot pleaded; he drew attention to the young lady's excellent credentials and the bright future awaiting her. I suppose consular officers do not grant requests on such emotional grounds. They have had to deal with too many Nigerians who tell lies about their plans to go to school, only to get a visa and then disappear into thin air. They follow their instincts therefore, but the danger in this is that genuine applicants are sometimes treated badly. In the present case, the university's deadline was already running out. In desperation, our compatriot turned to friends, anybody who knows somebody who could help talk to them at the Embassy, to let them see reason and take a more attentive look at the documents that had been submitted to them. But it was too late. The two-week grace offered by the University of Edinburgh was up. He again pleaded for more time: if the university could allow his daughter one more week. When he told me the story on the phone, he was literally weeping. "Oh God, how can they do this to my daughter?. I have the money to sustain her. I have shown them everything; I just don't know what they want. This is my daughter's future that is at stake, I don't want to fail her when she needs me..." Two days ago, on Friday, the sad news arrived. And our friend sent me a text message: "Dear Reuben, the university finally cancelled the admission at 12 noon today. I thank you for your concern as we start the search in other lands for next year..." The unfinished nature of our society, the collapse of public institutions, the crisis of confidence in the Nigerian system is most felt at the individual level and this story, which is archetypal of the experience of many parents and families, is proof of this. It is a comment on the measure of public confidence in Nigeria's education system. Twenty-five years ago, our compatriot would not have needed to send his child to a special school because the Nigerian school system was very strong, the teachers were dedicated, the quality of instruction was excellent; he would not have been under pressure to send her to Europe because Nigerian universities were ranked among the best in the world. But with the collapse of everything around us, the education sector has been worst hit. To give your child good education, you have to send her to a private school, and these private schools are not cheap at all. A friend once opined, and perhaps he is right, that in order to curb corruption, government must make sure that the school system is restored and strengthened; he claimed that he knows parents who are ready to steal and do anything just to get enough funds to enable them send their children to good schools. But when you finally manage to send your child through a private secondary school, you also don't want her to end up in our universities where cultism is the order of the day, sexual harassment is taken for granted, the toilets are dirty and maggot-infested, the halls of residence are over-crowded; the teachers are distracted, the library is either empty or it is packed full of books that are outdated, a substantial percentage of the students population is into either drugs or prostitution; even the school calendar is unpredictable, riots could break out, students are daily being shot and beheaded on our campuses by unruly gangs. There are private universities, yes, but the admission spaces are few, and there is even no guarantee that they too will not be afflicted by the Nigerian disease sooner or later. In any case, it helps to send your child to a school abroad, because these days Corporate Nigeria prefers to employ graduates of foreign universities. Local graduates have to be retrained, and they could bring wrong attitudes to the company; bred in an environment of cultism and gangsterism; they may end up as unionists, agitators, rapists, pilferers of company assets, and sick petition-writers. Besides, no Nigerian university is listed among the first 1, 000 in the world! The effect is that Nigerian parents are sending their children to schools in South Africa, Togo, Benin, Europe, Canada and the United States. There are over 5, 000 Nigerian students in universities in Ghana for example. Some parents even travel as far as Mongolia to find space for their wards. Education is a cultural referent. It is about national identity. When these students graduate eventually, even if they work in Nigeria, they are no better than expatriates. From kindergarten to the university, they have been conditioned to think as non-Nigerians. In this country today, there are all kinds of special schools, American school, Nigerian-Turkish school, a school for Indians, Russian school, Italian School, French International School, British School, even Lebanese Community School, and Indian International School, somewhere in Ilupeju... whereas in the past, foreigners working in Nigeria had no problems sending their children to Nigerian schools. This problem is replicated in the health sector and the construction industry. We are often told that there are good Nigerian doctors but they don't have good hospitals where they can practice. The best hospitals in the country belong to the oil and gas companies and access to those hospitals is restricted. The people are left at the mercy of primary health care centres that have been taken over by rodents, medical centres that are not even as good as hospitals in Somalia and Iraq; referral hospitals on which so much money has been spent but which are still no better than consulting clinics. Life expectancy in Nigeria has dropped from 53 in the last ten years to 46. Obituaries in the newspapers often describe the cause of death as "a brief illness". Many of those "brief illnesses" could have been taken care of if the health sector was better and access to affordable healthcare could be guaranteed. Faced with this situation, the privileged members of our society do not take chances. Whenever they have malaria, common cold, cough or headache, they jump into the next available plane and head for South Africa, Germany, London, Paris etc. In the event of an emergency, they charter an air ambulance and rush out in search of help. Under normal circumstances, they go abroad every year, some do so twice annually, for medical check up. Governments at all levels also encourage this: when a government official is ill, he is ferried abroad. Nigerian hospitals are not considered good enough even by persons whose job is to make sure that the people have access to quality healthcare. The most recent example here is the decision to fly two soldiers that were involved in the Dornier 228 plane crash in Benue State to South Africa for medical treatment. By the same token, road construction is given to foreign companies, not local ones. The latter could collect money and refuse to do the job. The construction of buildings is also assigned to foreign companies; Nigerian construction agents could do a shoddy job; the builders could cut corners and later, the building could collapse. Thus, there is a widespread disdain for all things local and a flight towards foreign models. In fact, there are Nigerians who take their suits and gowns to England for dry-cleaning. Nobody trusts local dry cleaners. They could ruin your lovely suit! Our compatriot, whose story forms the substance of this piece has accepted his situation with equanimity, but he is still not planning to send his daughter to a Nigerian university. If the lady sits for the JAMB exam, there is no doubt that she will pass it, and even the Post-UME test is not likely to prove difficult for her, but she and her father have their eyes trained on other lands. "I thank you for your concern", the father says, "as we start the search in other lands for next year..." No father wants to be the cause of unhappiness for his child. The lady has played her part. She has excellent grades; she has demonstrated great ability. She can't travel abroad because of some hitches about funds. You can be sure that when she applies again for visa next year, there will be no problem about money. Her father will do whatever is humanly possible to meet the Embassy's requirements! He has a whole year at hand. He also faces the challenge of keeping his daughter focused while she waits. The poor girl must be distraught. She was class valedictorian. She scored the best grades, but her less brilliant colleagues are already in universities abroad while she, the brightest of them all, has been kept behind by visa problems. And let us not quip about patriotism. In an age of globalization, human talent can seek fulfillment anywhere on the globe. The rest of us are confronted, through her ordeal, with the crisis of social development, and the inadequacies in the supply of education in Nigeria. In the last seven and half years, the Obasanjo government has done a lot in building a framework for growth and progress; the country's debts have been paid, the private sector is being empowered, the telecom industry has revolutionised our lives, the battle against corruption is teaching the people about values, the country's international profile has improved; non-oil export is expanding; financial intermediation is stronger; the people have regained their voice and capacity to ask questions; hitherto neglected communities have been brought into the national process, but there are problems also, and the most serious being the failure to address the challenge of social development: the key area where human lives can be touched, and governance can be measured in empirical terms. The fact that the roads are still bad, the school system is abhorrent, the hospitals are inefficient and costly, and power supply is epileptic brings the people so much agony. It makes nonsense of their efforts at citizenship and patriotism. The poor young girl of our narration is not alone. There are many like her who are growing up, and having their dreams shattered, simply because our leaders are not addressing the issues that touch our lives where it matters most.
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