Written By: Ezekiel Elekwa

Humans agree that a nation whose source of life is lost is on its way to a confused future. Thomas Jefferson, a onetime President of the United States of America once said that “Education is the key to achieving a buoyant state, for a country whose standard of education is staggered, is built on a shabby and weak ground”. Thus, the future of any country is dependent on the quality of education obtainable there.

Suffice it to say that the Nigerian state, in more than thousands of conferences and symposiums from independence, alluded to their deep seated desire to elevate and heighten the level of education in the country, which has taken the form of constant enactment of laws and policies to that effect but to no avail. Nigeria has been bedeviled by this condition for years with little or no effort to ameliorate it.

The term admission racketeering is the gaining of admission by students into institutions of higher learning through illegal means. In this context, there is extortion of willing and unsuspecting students, thereby making the activity appear as though it is part of the system.

There is no doubt that these students who make their way into higher institutions eventually sort or lobby their way through school. Admission racketeering is, today, making our youth live beggarly, thereby robbing the nation of the capacity of becoming an intellectual oasis.

Admission racketeering has made our students to work with no foresight and motivation, knowing that what gave them the admission is more than capable of  giving them job after school and sustaining them thereafter.

Admission racketeering has greatly affected the quality of graduates churned out of the institutions on yearly basis. Many of these graduates have little or no capacity to grapple with the lard bone of the labour market. Most of them would boast that they could do anything to get employed.

The Ministry of Justice, in a publication last year, made it clear that the quality of lawyers churned out of some universities may not be able to handle the intricacies associated with legal profession. This, no doubt, is as a result of admission racketeering, where those who are not qualified are admitted into higher institutions through the influence of parents, guardians or the affluent in the society.

This is accountable to poor performance because they are not rightly positioned in a place where their inherent potentials can be utilized to the fullest. Plato in his work “The Republic”, made it clear that an individual will best utilize his inherent potentials when rightly positioned in a work he or she is naturally fitted”.

As such when one who ought to have saved, protected and elevated the world of psychology either in practice or in the academia, finds himself in the legal profession with little or nothing to offer, creates a lacuna in the place where he could have naturally been fitted.

Unfortunately, these qualities of students gaining admission through racketeering are subsequently recycled back to the system as lecturers. This should make us more concerned about the future of Nigeria, because they end up teaching the younger generations, thereby producing the same breed of what they are made of.

Consequently, government should kick-start the process wherein the available institutions, agencies and organizations made to fight admission racketeering are strengthened and invigorated to perform their core functions.

There is no doubt that we have myriads of policies and laws to that effect, but the question remains; why are they not functional? The agencies responsible, if made stronger, can curtail the excessive political interference, resulting to the said act.

Higher institutions have serious roles to play in this direction. They should do the needful at the right time to make Nigeria “the intellectual capital of the world”. Governments, agencies, and groups, must rise for the realization of the qualitative country our fathers had always wished, worked for and hoped to actualize.

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