Overnight, I modified my priors on the issue of planning in Nigeria. On the surface, it seems we do not plan but we do! In the last 3 days I have sat down on with 3 brilliant minds to birth an operational and conceptual framework for transformation in a certain area. In one of our gripe sessions, education came into focus and one of them mentioned the Ashby Report. He promised to get me the report. Overnight, I searched online for the report and found it in the archives of many universities abroad. I will have to find time and read it because it is over 200 pages. However, I got the highlights.
The 1959 Ashby Commission advised the Nigerian government on her needs for post-school certificate and higher education over ‘the next 20 years’. The commission found out that the need for intermediate and high-level manpower in the decade following its sitting, outstripped not only the actual supply rate but also the estimated capacity of the existing institutions.
Their far-reaching recommendations cuts across the length and breadth of the Nigerian educational system. The report recommended the production of 2,000 graduates a year by 1970, a proposal on the establishment of a National Universities Commission and that enrolment in the universities should reflect national needs in terms of technical and non-technical fields.
Included in the report were recommendations on teacher certificate grades one and two crash programmes to meet the acute shortage of qualified teachers, an enrolment of 7,500 students in the universities by 1970 and an exponential growth beyond this figure by 1980. Most of the recommendations were not implemented. Especially in the area of funding and infrastructure.
Who headed the commission? His name is Eric Ashby MBE. Sir Eric Ashby was a lecturer at the university of Ibadan. He was such a talent that he was head hunted from Ibadan to become Master of Clarence College, Cambridge, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge; he later served as President and Chancellor of Queen’s University, Belfast. This was at a time when Time Magazine named Ibadan the Harvard of Africa! The man left lasting legacies wherever he went. Nigeria largely ignored his report. Finding copies of commissioned reports being used to wrap guguru and epa did not start today. Every new government discards whatever the previous one did. Nigeria has always planned! We always plan to fail!