Education as aided by the World Bank: A critical analysis of post-independence projects in Nigeria

INTRODUCTION

The role of the World Bank in the development of education in Nigeria dates back to 1953 when the MacPherson Constitution (1951) and the colonial Education Act Number 17 of 1952 were in operation. According to the 1951 Constitution, financing of primary education was to he the job of the colonial government, the regions (East, North and West), local government bodies, communities and parents.1 Consequently, different educational priorities emerged in the Eastern, Northern and Western Regions. The Western region initiated and implemented a system of universal primary education (UPE) in 1952. The policy was designed to extend primary education to all children of primary school age. To make the program successful, the regional government decided to make primary education free so that poverty would not become a constraint to educational achievement. The Eastern Region waited until 1957 to introduce its own system of universal primary education. In the North, the Emirs, who believed that Western/European education corrupted its recipients, were not very receptive to the introduction of universal primary education, since the latter was to be based primarily on Western concepts.2 However, the Northern Region could not resist the introduction of free primary education indefinitely. As Nigeria's regional governments struggled to introduce and sustain universal primary education systems, it soon became evident, even to the colonial authorities, that external financial assistance was required in order to meet the needs of an expanding population. Thus, in 1953, the Colonial Government in Lagos and the Colonial Office in London called upon the World Bank to study the provision of primary education in the colony of Nigeria and the colony's prospects for

future economic development. Specifically, the World Bank Mission was expected to (1) assess the resources available in Nigeria for educational purposes; (2) determine the colony's future economic viability; (3) examine potential development in the colony's major economic sectors; and (4) make recommendations for practical steps to be taken to improve living standards among the people. With respect to education, the World Bank Mission recommended that enrollment in primary schools should be controlled; secondary school education should be expanded to enhance the quality of trained teachers; higher education enrollment should be increased within the limit of the national education budget; and that Trade Centers should be expanded to improve the nation's technical education.3

Each regional government responded differently to the technical advice offered by the World Bank Mission. It prompted each region to assess their local situations further. In the west, for instance, government officials were involved in estimating future enrollment at the primary school level so as to predict the resource requirements for the UPE scheme. These officials, however, under-estimated the enrollment. The government anticipated that not more than 170,000 children of school age would register in primary one in any year between 1955 and 1959. In actual fact, 391,000 new pupils registered in 1955, thereby forcing the government to spend L5,358,720 instead of the estimated expenditure of L3,121,000. Consequently, the Banjo Commission (after the Rev. Canon S. A. Banjo) was set up to review the existing structure and the working of the primary and secondary school systems between 1955 and 1960. The Commission observed that there was a falling standard in primary schools owing to the dominance of untrained teachers, low staff retention, divided interest among teachers pursuing private studies, too large classes, automatic promotion, the presence of underage children in schools, the sketchy nature of syllabi, restriction of corporal punishment, lack of parental co-operation and inadequate supervision.4

Many critics of UPE saw the problems listed above as negative consequences of non-adherence to the technical advice offered by the World Bank Mission in 1953. For instance, contrary to the suggestion that primary school enrollments should be controlled, the Western Regional Government proposed an intensive propaganda campaign program to increase enrollments at the primary levels and threatened to penalize parents who did not send their children, especially girls, to school. In fact, the government opened seven additional elementary training colleges to train primary-school teachers. Between 1954 and 1955, there was a massive teacher-training program and an expansion of teacher-training facilities in the Western Region.5 Thus, the Western Regional Government emphasized numerical growth of teachers instead of the qualitative expansion of secondary school education advocated by the World Bank Mission.

Unlike the West and the East, the North depended on foreign experts in costing and evaluating its own educational system, perhaps because the Northem Regional Government had not been able to maintain a strong planning and research unit that could analyze the situation in the North and produce imaginative proposals for educational developments. In the West, for instance, the Rev. S. A. Banjo and C. O. Taiwo were natives appointed to head the two Commissions assigned to cost and evaluate the UPE scheme while in the East, K. O. Dike and A. Ikoku were similarly commissioned to review the schooling situation in their native regions. On the other hand, in the North, there was a heavy reliance on the recommendations of the 1953 World Bank Report as well as on those of J. N. Archer, a worker from the Commonwealth Relations Office and H. Oldman, the Chief Education Officer in Yorkshire. Thus, the Northern Government was often able to do little more than react to the World Bank's proposals since it did not have the capacity to scrutinize these proposals adequately or to come up with well-researched alternatives of its own. According to N. King: