There is perhaps no more jarring illustration of Nigeria’s confused understanding of educational opportunity and social investment than the widely criticised suggestion by Mrs Oluremi Tinubu that beneficiaries of the Federal Government’s Nigerian Education Loan Fund, having received an opportunity to acquire education, could also “start small” by selling akara and kuli kuli to support themselves.
On the surface, the remark may have been intended to emphasise the virtues of enterprise, resilience and self-reliance. Yet it exposes an uncomfortable irony: Nigerian students, born in a country that has earned hundreds of billions of dollars from oil and possesses vast deposits of gas and solid minerals, are being encouraged to borrow money to finance their education and, where their upkeep allowance proves inadequate, supplement it through petty trading.
The issue is not whether honest enterprise has dignity. There certainly is. Nor is entrepreneurship incompatible with education. The more fundamental question is whether, in an oil-producing country with enormous natural resource wealth such as Nigeria, the burden of financing higher education should increasingly fall on students, who are expected to become the human capital on which the country’s economic transformation depends.
