Debating the Roots of Poor Academic Performance in the West African Subregion: The Perspective of a Philosopher

Abstract

Recent nationalistic arguments have tended to blame the use of foreign language as responsible for poor academic performance and even underdevelopment. Although I theoretically agree with the mother tongue (MT) proposal concerning early elementary education, I identify some narrowness in the meaning of MT that drives the nationalistic school. A correction of this connotative inaccuracy would mean that the importance of the MT proposal to education is not as all embracing as nationalists would love to see. Even presuming theoretical correctness, I also see a number of grave practical problems with the MT initiative, including the unwillingness to develop local languages in terms of equiping them with the lexical power to serve as medium for modern research, academics, science, and technology. I also see a potential of the MT idea to sustain ethnicity, a political problem that ultimately undermines the quality of education itself. I conclude that the most critically determining factor for academic performance in this region is not the use (or lack of use) of MT but the political handling of education. I discuss, and tentatively suggest solutions to (a) the monopoly of salary fixing by politicians and (2) the extremely low budget percentage allocated to the educational sector.

Introduction

The background to this article is a debate that erupted on the university intranet (community email platform) of the University of Ghana concerning the roots of poor education in Ghana (and neighboring West African nations) within the context of global evaluation. This debate was triggered by the release of an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 2015 report on average performance of students from various countries around the world in a number of international student achievement tests in mathematics and science. The result showed that five Asian countries (Singapore, Hong Kong/China, Korea, Japan, and Chinese Taipei) scored the highest globally, followed by Finland (the highest performing in the West), and Ghana, a West African country, came at the bottom of the (global) list. ¹

Considering that Ghana was the only West African country whose students participated in the tests, and Ghana’s students routinely score the highest results in the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) examinations, Ghana’s performance has significance for, and sends very serious messages to, her neighbors who did not participate, prominently Nigeria. Owing to the striking similarities between these two countries, and owing to the need to show that many of Ghana’s problems are not peculiar to her, I would discuss the Ghanaian and Nigerian educational systems in this article, and their political systems to the extent that they affect their educational systems. Second, and importantly, I will summarize the debate, citing only its major turning points. I will also cite certain arguments made during the debate where they may be needed during the course of the article.

In a swift reaction to the release of the report, a debate erupted with some faculty members blaming the use of local languages for poor performance and others blaming the use of foreign language. But those who blamed foreign language soon took control of the debate. The greatest turning point of the debate was when George Akanlig-Pare posts a study conducted in the University of Ife (Nigeria) regarding mother tongue (which I will simply call MT) in early education. I would prefer to cite George’s own summary of the study:

Augustine, an empirical study on this same issue was carried out in Ife (Obafemi Awolowo Univ) between 1970 and 1976. An Experimental group was taught English Language, Science, Maths among other subjects using Yoruba for 6 years, with well trained and motivated staff and well designed teaching and learning materials. The Control group was taught for the same period using English as the medium of instruction. At the end of the 6 years, the progress of the pupils was evaluated. The pupils in the Experimental class performed better in all the subjects than the other group. Interestingly, the Experimental group performed better in English than the Control group who had English as a medium of instruction! How about that? I attach a pdf copy of the Ife project doc. ²

This post led to the view of Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh, who blamed educational underperformance (and societal underdevelopment) on the use of foreign language:

My take is that for as long as learning and instruction are not derived from context, we would continue to struggle. We can continue running away from a simple philosophical and pragmatic position of, to know is to understand the context of knowing. Learning out of context will continue to lead us to the usual outcome of unsuccessful, and especially, unmeaningful learning and instruction in application. Those of us who learned how to write the English language first before learning how to speak it, have tended to do better with it than our fellow Ghanaians who learned to speak it first at home before learning how to properly write it in school. ³

While I pondered over this, I also noticed a little issue with grammar in Ansu-Kyeremeh’s contribution (as can be seen in the quotation above).

Significantly, both George’s and Ansu-Kyeremeh’s postings marked a turning point in this debate: They silenced the opponents of the MT proposal concerning early education and opened the floodgates for comments that created all sorts of causal connections between language and learning: Without the appropriate language, learning would be in vein, and so on. But in this article, I shall argue that the focus on mother tongue use or nonuse misses the point almost entirely about what is responsible for general poor educational performance in West African countries.

Brief Review of the Literature

Literature supporting the adoption of mother tongue in early education is huge, but I will mention only a few important ones. Research by Cummins (1981, 1993) makes it clear that development of first language (or mother tongue) supports development of second language. In an evaluation of a 6-year primary school project, Ayo Bamgbose (1984) emerged with the conclusion that Nigerian students who were taught in their mother tongue (Yoruba) for the first 6 years of primary school scored higher academically than students who were taught with their mother tongue for the first 3 years and then were switched to English. David Atkinson (1987) argues that first language can play a huge translation role toward fluency development of other languages. Swain, Lapkin, Rowen, and Hart (1990) put this into test, and their results showed that literacy in Heritage language has strong positive impact in learning a third language, whereas Heritage language use without literacy has little effect. This is also supported by the research of Holm and Dodd (1996). In an experiment comparing students with alphabetic and nonalphabetic First Languages, Holm and Dodd (1996) found that those from nonalphabetic written language backgrounds are likely to have difficulties with new or unfamiliar words when attending universities where English is the medium of instruction. Wolfgang Butzkamm (1998) argues that when teaching in a foreign language, switching occasionally to the mother tongue can function as a learning aid to enhance communicative competence in the foreign language. More recently, Vivian Cook (2001) argues that first language has a lot of uses, such as being used “to convey meaning, explain grammar, and organize the class, and for students to use as part of their collaborative learning and individual strategy use” (p. 402). Gulbrandsen, Schroeder, Milerad, and Nylenna (2002) have shown that mother tongue enhances learning clarity and memory retention in comparison with another language. Kosonen (2005) observed that when children are taught in their mother tongue, they are more likely to enroll in school, and Benson (2002) observed that their parents are more likely to communicate with teachers and participate in their children’s learning. The conclusion then is that it is better for people to be literate in their mother tongue or first language to enhance their ease of learning other languages and even general academic performance.

There are those who argue in support of MT education for political and social reasons. I would term these scholars the nationalistic (school of) proponents. For instance, Mohanty (2006) notes that English has been acting as an international killer language that suppresses indigenous languages where it is lingua franca, and in reaction, the suppressed major local languages suppress the minority local languages even further, restricting them to areas of little socioeconomic resources, intrafamily and small intragroup communication. On the other hand, Hovens (2002) observed that MT education especially benefits disadvantaged groups, such as children from rural communities. So clearly, MT education is a way of working toward equality of consideration, even in education.

However, this concern for the survival of indigenous societies can lead to inaccurate charges resulting from unbridled nationalism. For instance, many scholars share the sentiment that the use of foreign language is responsible for the underdevelopment of African (and other non-Western) nations. In the foreword to the 6-year Ife mother tongue project, Fafunwa, Macauley, and Sokoya (1989) writes, “We are also aware that our state of underdevelopment has remained for so long due largely to our use of English and French” (p. vii). Apart from the fact that this view is an exaggeration of the role of language in development, it has a serious logical problem. And we see this problem when we test the view in reverse: Changing education to mother tongue would make us developed. But this cannot be true because several factors are responsible for quality education and development. And, the colonial educational systems and languages are not entirely blamable for the underdevelopment of former colonies, or even the underdevelopment of their educational systems.

We see this cautionary note in some other literature. For instance, the general enthusiasm for mother tongue has been cautioned by Niyi Akinnaso (1993) who argued that the use of mother tongue as the medium of literacy in schools cannot compensate for deficiencies of the educational system such as poor instructional facilities, or difficulties in the social system such as the social barriers, which prevent minority children from learning well in school. He observed that the Ife Primary Project may have been successful because of the use of better and special teaching materials just as well as because of the use of mother tongue. He noticed that the project provided better teaching materials and specially trained English teachers for the experimental group (the group that ended up performing better in English). These special arrangements will not be available in normal circumstances. William Mackey (1984) has also cautioned that if citizens (of a multilinguistic nation) do not know a language of wide communication, the country could suffer economically. Gupta (1997) has pointed out that MT would be much harder to implement in densely cosmopolitan settings where languages are probably as many as individuals.

In this article, I am on the side of this cautionary school. In my case, I seek to clarify certain points of exaggeration directed at the importance of mother tongue. These exaggerations include the assumption of a deterministic relationship between language and learning (once the language is right, learning would be fine); a narrow meaning of MT that assumes that every child is in the care of her biological parents and ethnic origin; an unwillingness to develop local languages to meet academic, scientific, and technological needs; certain social implications of the extensive use of local languages such as the tendency to deepen ethnicity in a multilinguistic nation. Finally, I argue that whatever gains may be made by mother tongue policies could be ultimately undermined by lack of government funding of education. I suggest certain attitudes to general budgeting by affected countries to privilege education.

The Implied Meaning of MT Is Narrow

To begin, while I appreciate the theoretical correctness of the proposal to begin elementary education in mother tongue (MT), I notice that a somewhat narrow definition of mother tongue drives the debate. There is a tendency by nationalistic proponents to ascribe wholly ethnic configurations to the meaning of mother tongue. What is mother tongue? The meaning of mother tongue that I get from the debate is that it is the tongue of the ethnicity of the parents of a child. But this definition is too narrow because if we are to work with it, then those without parents or who were removed from the ethnic origins of their parents have no mother tongue. But this is too narrow a meaning of mother tongue. By mother tongue, I would mean any language that a baby acquires from whoever acted as its parents or were its guardians, even if they were the authorities of a motherless babies home across the world, or even if they hail from anywhere but the ethnic grouping of the baby’s biological parents. I will substantiate this definition with an example. Let us assume that an Akan couple suddenly met their death, and their new born baby is taken over by a Caribbean couple, who then head back to the Caribbean. Let us then imagine that the baby is raised in the Caribbean, and then goes to the United States, where she eventually heads the U.S. NASA space program. What is the MT of this child? Is it Akan? A positive answer would be ludicrous. This child’s mother tongue is Caribbean. This is the first reason why the ethnic connotation of mother tongue is too narrow. But let me look at the second.

Could we say that this baby would not have realized her full intellectual potential because she did not speak Akan? Or do we suppose that she has Akan DNA, and because she was not linguistically in consonance with this DNA in her life, she would not excel to the extent of heading frontier astronomical research, or as much as her colleagues who respected their ethnic DNAs would? We cannot say these things, because there is no such thing as an ethnic gene: people do not go about with Akan, Igbo, or Hausa genes in them. An African American whose ancestors were uprooted from their roots centuries ago as slaves in fact currently heads the NASA program, which is socially regarded as the ultimate symbol as well as epitome of intellectual development in the United States and around the world. ⁴ So, obviously, the ethnic casting of the definition of mother tongue is too narrow.

The broader definition of mother tongue does not conflict with Osam’s argument about going from the known to the unknown. It is consistent with it. But it does conflict with the assumption that one must be educated in the language of one’s ethnic group to attain her full intellectual potentials, as nationalistic proponents would have us believe. As such, it seems to me that the kind of overarching relationship that is being touted as existing between one’s education and the ethnicity of the person’s biological parents is overstretched.

Other Limitations of the MT Proposal

My clarifications of the inaccuracies surrounding the advocacy for mother tongue do not translate to my opposition to the use of mother tongue in educational curriculum. Quite on the contrary, it is consistent with it. Whether a child is born into the tongue of her mother or whoever is her guardian, it is obvious that she would learn better (at least at initial stages) in the tongue with which she was first reared. Added to this is the majority argument: If majority of people in the environment of a child speak a particular language, it is wiser to educate the child in that language, because, first, the child has begun to use the language, and second, it fulfills the requirement of moving from the known to the unknown. But this does not mean that any language a child encounters first will remain the only language through which she can excel. Globalization has made it obvious that a child will more unlikely than likely remain in her neighborhood of birth or ethnic origin. This is where I may again disagree with some proponents of MT. More important, research has shown that the more languages a person learns to speak, the more her overall proficiency (see Bialystok et al., 2005; Bialystok & Martin, 2004; Kaushanskaya & Marian, 2009; Kluger, 2013).

Although I agree that the shared language of a community is the most essential carrier of their common culture, it is fallacious to think that the form of language determines individual thought. This is linguistic determinism. It assumes that only when you go through a particular language would you be able to imagine certain ideas, would you gain more access to certain ideas, and so on. It, therefore, assumes that Akans, Ewes, Hausas, and Igbos would have different modes of thinking. There is no such causal link between language and mode of thinking or the acquisition of knowledge. I notice this fallacy as underlying the arguments of some supporters of MT. During the debate, Kwashie Kuwor argued, “What we must all recognise is the point that English language contains English Knowledge and Ghanaian language is a repository of Ghanaian indigenous knowledge.” ⁵ With due respect, this is a fallacy, and is not necessary to support the MT proposal. Rather than propose MT on the basis of linguistic determinism, I would rather propose MT on the basis of linguistic convenience, that is, I would argue that children learn with their first language in their earliest years because it would be the most convenient for them. Even so, one still notices a lacuna in the proposal of linguistic convenience: There is no such thing as a convenient language for very young people; their minds are open to learn as many languages as possible. As such, I find the following argument by Kweku Osam (during the debate) to be wrong:

So take a child who has been following the mother to the farm for the first four years of his life at Ekubaah hamlet in the Swedru area. The child turns 5 and the parents decide it’s time to send him to school. So he starts Class One and right from Day One all he’s taught in is English. Can you imagine the psychological trauma this child will be in? ⁶

No psychological trauma is involved in learning any new language, more so at an early age, or indeed any time in life. If there were, it would be clearly inadvisable to learn a new language. But research has advised that the more languages that one learns, the more her general proficiency, I mean general rather than simply linguistic proficiency. Language is simply a set of rules. And if language is a set of rules, rather than a worldview whose syntactic form determines how one thinks, then the MT proposal suffers a little more decrease in its importance.

A second major problem with the proposal for giving local languages more prominence in education is that we are not making efforts to equip our local languages with the lexical power to enable us live our lives as scientists, researchers, and technologists in these languages. Proponents of local language curricula content focus on merely calling for local languages: They hardly consider that these languages must be built to enable us manufacture vehicles, computers, and other technological novelties that Africa may offer to the world. It has been demonstrated that mother literacy encourages proficiency in mother tongue. But what use is proficiency in a language that is itself not proficient regarding most of the items of modern reality?

During the debate, countries such as Germany and Japan were cited as examples in the use of MT. But proponents of MT fail to notice that Germany and Japan conduct their entire life activities in their MT, and one can see that instruction manuals accompanying technological products from these countries are written in their MT. Without any serious intents to developing our local languages to facilitate advanced intellectual pursuits, calls for the adoption of local languages in education would seem like little more than being uncritically nationalistic.

The above point leads to this: It is misleading to use the research findings of Germany and Japan to legislate MT concerning early elementary education in West Africa. This is because Germany and Japan have developed their languages to the extent that they are used throughout the education of an individual up to doctoral level. As such, certain questions emerge that need to be considered, such as the following: What would have been the fate of education in Germany and Japan if these countries used their MT for early elementary schooling and then switched to English midstream before later education? Why would we use MT for education for a few years and then switch to English midstream? What would be the practical benefit of this policy of two half-cooked meals instead of a fully cooked one? As of now, nothing prevents a dissenter from successfully arguing that it is either you use your local language throughout or do not use it at all. If, in fact, proponents of MT are serious about the benefits they hope that MT would accord learning, it seems more consistent with their position that they should be arguing for a full-out educational system based on MT instead of the first 3 or 6 years of elementary education. That would mean that every level from First School Leaving Certificate, through Senior Secondary Certificate, university-level education, up to postdoctoral research should be transacted in MT. This is precisely what the countries reaping from the benefits of using their MT are doing.

If we are to take this issue seriously, it seems to me that university linguists need to collaborate with industrial stakeholders to begin to overhaul the entire lexical structure of different disciplines in favor of local languages. Just as the bible has been rewritten in different languages, so entire fields of endeavor have to acquire totally indigenous lexicons, and we should, just like the Chinese, be able to go to space in local languages. But here, we meet another challenge: There are so many languages in Africa that in places such as Nigeria, one kilometer means another language. ⁷ Germany and Japan each have a single national language, but Africa has more than 3,000 languages, Nigeria has more than 400, and Ghana has 80. As such, one can see why MT in education was such an easy accomplishment (if it were even an accomplishment) in the countries of reference (Germany and Japan). Developing all these languages to fit modern day intellectual pursuits would require incredible man power, the man power that we have not yet seen for only the major languages. And, if we were to focus on only major languages, why would some other languages be left out of such a language development deal? Even if major languages were fully developed for advanced intellectual pursuits, would the speakers of neglected languages have to revert to learning through the major languages? If so, would the speakers of these languages, in having to learn through the other languages, not suffer what MT proponents say they were suffering under the colonial language? What would be the difference? And, why would they even agree to such a proposal, instead of crying foul on ethnic marginalization? These are issues that proponents of MT should be thinking about, rather than merely call for MT and presume that everything would be fine with such an adoption.

A fourth issue is that although we agree that there are benefits to be had from the adoption of local languages in educational curriculum, there are other problems of a more practical nature that will accrue from this, and these problems may pose themselves as grave costs. One of them is that ethnic localization of curricula content will do anything but help to reduce the levels of ethnicity in national affairs, including ethnicity in politics. One can already see elements of this around the world. Anna Kwan-Terry (2000) reports that in the early days of Singapore, education was offered in regional languages, which reinforced ethno-linguistic categorizations. We can also see its effects in Naazie’s observation:

Since the introduction of this language policy, teachers are now posted only to places where they can speak the local dialect—indeed most to their own village schools. Unfortunately, this has led in many places to the local dialect being used up to JHS (Junior High School)! I won’t say anything about teachers from their own localities adopting attitudes and characters they won’t adopt elsewhere. ⁸

Sub-Saharan African countries are evolving to the stage where they are gradually beginning to hope that ethnicity would gradually give way to focusing on issues of concrete relevance, and that issue-based politics would gradually begin to edge out, even though not completely remove, ethnic politics. What would be the effect of the intensification of local language in curricula content? This is open to debate, but one can already begin to sense the dangers inherent in it. The fact that teachers have to be unavoidably posted back to their places of origin to teach in their own languages means that the entire staff and students of any particular elementary school would be coextensive with the ethnicity of the locality. This potentially removes all the cultural heterogeneity that may have succeeded at early educational levels, and may make it more challenging for such a student (and staff) to deal with cultural heterogeneity in general later in life. Like language, cultural heterogeneity also demands to be mastered as a skill as early in life as possible. It thus puts an additional strain on the project of national integration. Apart from the fact that such a recipe for a narrow background in education would limit and undermine the education of the student, it may further divide students at higher levels (such as tertiary educational levels) into ethnically driven bodies and factions, it could turn students into ethnically driven politicians, it could further balkanize nations along ethnic lines, and none of these would help national integration. Again, the countries used as reference points (Germany and Japan) cannot help us here, because they have single languages. As such, to promote MT in those countries is automatically to promote unity and national integration. What would be interesting is to see the success of thoroughgoing MT in linguistically very diverse countries.

A fifth limitation of MT proposals is that the role of language in education is a bit exaggerated. One notices that the debate, although being about educational performance, became skewed toward language, and the importance of language to learning is elevated to the extent of superseding other factors that are responsible for educational outcomes. Whereas some participants argued (such as Jesse Ayivor and Augustine Naazie) that using local language in elementary education is responsible for poor academic performance, some other participants (such as Kwashie Kuwor and Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh) argued that it is foreign language that is responsible. Let me demonstrate that neither of these sides is correct. True, language is an important medium for learning and thinking because we think and speak in sentence-like ways (this is called propositional attitudes or the sentence-cruncher model in philosophy of mind). But it is a mistake to think that human beings think only in sentence-like ways: There are mathematical and graphic ways of thinking as well. In addition, there seems a purely intuitive and subconscious way, which goes on largely independent of a person’s volition. This type of mental activity is neither fully conscious nor fully unconscious, and although it begins with what I call “experiential impressions,” it could go on for very long periods of time, a sort of subconscious “incubation.” Great ideas (including great scientific breakthroughs) may have emerged from this kind of mental activity, because this is the kind of chain process that could end (though not in every case) with an inspirational idea dropping into the conscious mind. As such, although this kind of mental activity may not be fully conscious and sentence like, it seems very important. It also explains why no language has monopoly of inventions or innovativeness. In fact, Daniel Wegner (2002) has demonstrated that most of our mental activities (including the highly constructive ones) are unconscious, and our conscious mental activities are only a tip of the iceberg. The sequel to this is that we must place language in proper context: Although language is an important medium for learning, it is not the only medium. Moreover, it is only a medium for understanding what is being learned, an ancillary or auxiliary instrument to help us understand something: It is not the “stuff” that is being learned, and, therefore, cannot substitute for what is being learned (except of course if we are learning language itself). We must distinguish medium from content, and not make the mistake of assuming that medium is necessarily or always content. By content or “stuff,” I would mean both information and skill. Skill here would consist of specific skills such as technical or speculative skills, and general skills such as creative thinking, critical analysis, and evaluative abilities. As I have already stated, there is no direct causal relationship between what language you are speaking and these skills. If pupils in developing nations are not acquiring these skills (the specific and the general), we may look at other causes. As such, blaming either local or colonial language for general academic poor performance misses the broad picture.

The book that George refers to, a result of research by Fafunwa and others, blames the imposition of foreign language on local learning as cause of Africa’s underdevelopment, but there is a contradiction when they note that the British had approved (and possibly encouraged) MT in learning as far back as 1925. According to the 1925 Memorandum on Education in British Colonial Territories,

Education should be adapted to local conditions in such a manner as would enable it to conserve all sound elements in local tradition and social organization. The study of the educational use of the vernacular and the provision of textbooks in the vernacular are of primary importance. (Fafunwa et al., 1989, p. 4)

If colonial masters had encouraged us to use our MT, then what had gone wrong?

To amplify the significance of this problem, we may look at countries that were never colonized, and were never constrained to use a foreign language as their medium of academic pursuit. Ethiopia was never colonized. Its official language is Amharic, which is its second largest language. But in spite of freedom from colonialism, and even the absence of any major wars, Ethiopia is among the poorest countries with one of the most dysfunctional educational systems in the world. The average Ethiopian earned an average of US$160.21 annually from 1981 to 2013 (less than a quarter of most former colonized countries in Africa). In fact, the average Ethiopian earned roughly a little more than US$100 in 1991, and he reached an all-time high of US$289.25 in 2013 (Trading Economics, 2015a). In terms of education, one can be very skeptical of what quality of education is possible with the per capita income that this country has, because it shows that a feedback loop between education and the economy (as I would explain later) has not begun. As such, I am not sure that anyone admires the Ethiopian educational system to the extent of desiring to send her children there for schooling. So, one can see that the preoccupation with the debate about MT, though relevant, does not tell the whole story about the roots of poor academic performance. Put simply, the biggest culprit may not be MT but how we handle education in general, including how we handle MT itself.

Let me begin to examine the wider picture of how we handle education. This is what Cynthia A. Sottie had to say about the situation in Ghana:

I spent about eight months collecting data in public schools in Accra and became quite concerned about the future of education in Ghana. The teaching method I observed did not make room for creativity . . . the cane is a symbol of punishment as opposed to a pointer, which constantly instils fear in learners. In addition, the nature of verbal reprimand is so strong that the child comes to associate learning with fear and punishment. A 9 year-old elementary school girl in Canada (a Ghanaian who had attended school in Ghana up to Class 2) told me some years back that she missed Ghana but was afraid of returning to school in Ghana. According to her, in Ghana, she was always afraid of going to school, and even more scared if they had to learn something new that day; but in Canada she looked forward to going to school every day especially when they had to learn a new topic. She said the teachers in Canada were friendly and had a fun way of teaching. ⁹

Sottie also showed that teacher indiscipline is a result of a defense mechanism to shield incompetence. According to her,

I interviewed a teacher who was an English teacher in one of the schools I visited. That interview constantly reminds me of the harm GES is doing to our children. I keep wondering why someone who could not express himself in English be assigned to teach the language. His frustration in not being able to teach for the kids to understand led him to constantly use the cane as a defense mechanism. Some teachers confided they had not upgraded themselves professionally (not even taken any short in-service trainings) since they started teaching decades ago. In countries like Canada (Alberta Province) elementary school teachers have professional learning days (often twice a month). (See Note 9)

Incompetence encourages authoritarianism as an attitude toward pupils, because incompetence breeds insecurity, and insecurity toward one’s inferiors encourages defense mechanisms toward them such as a closed and rigid mind, and a hostility toward inquiry. But widespread incompetence can be traced ultimately to lack of proper teacher training, a problem that ultimately also goes back to insufficient funding of education: It is either that unqualified people are employed as teachers or that teacher colleges are not delivering the requisite training. Either of these points to lack of professionalism, and they would both owe their genesis to the general unattractiveness of the teaching profession. In turn, unattractiveness would point to low remuneration, poor conditions of service, and poor supporting infrastructure and facilities. Here is a remark from Osam, “For example, do we put our best brains in the classroom? Of course not” (see Note 6). Here is what Sottie again had to say:

I just watched a documentary on JOY NEWS this morning. Very young children were sitting outside in the sand (their classroom). I honestly don’t think decision makers in Ghana are committed to basic education. We must remember that access is only a first step, it does not automatically translate into quality and school survival. (See Note 6)

It is not only that government generally ignores the educational sector, even efforts by private individuals, such as university professors, to contribute to their society by establishing foundations to facilitate the love of mathematics and science are discouraged through the shutting down or frustrating of these foundations by government bodies. Here is what Ansu-Kyeremeh, a university don, had to say:

As for the science and maths issue, my small effort to establish a “science, technology, engineering and mathematics incubator” (STEMI) has been stalled by some “illiterate” DCE for some three years with no idea about its final realisation. The idea was to encourage research into demystifying those “dry” areas early in the child’s life.

There used to be an elementary science teaching programme (in which I was involved) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I don’t know why and how it was abandoned. (See Note 3)

All the above considerations demonstrate that it will not do to blame the poverty of our educational systems on colonial language, and a lot of work needs to be done to yield any gains from using MT in education. For instance, wide-ranging aspects such as “ . . . teaching method, teacher quality, teacher attitude, and the general school environment both physical and emotional” (see Note 9) are gravely problematic. One can see that these features of education are in need of a necessary but not sufficient condition: adequate funding. Because discussing the necessity of a foundation is metaphysically prior to discussing its sufficiency, and because this article cannot accommodate discussing both, I will devote the rest of the article to making (what I see as) some crucial suggestions about adequate funding. As such, I will discuss and make recommendations regarding (a) teacher remuneration and (b) capital funding of education. As such, I argue that the problem of poor academic performance is mainly political.

The Political Question

It is not unreasonable to identify poor remuneration as responsible for much of poor academic performance. Osam describes this beautifully:

When was the last time you encountered a student in a College of Education (where teachers are trained) who got aggregate 6 at the WASSCE and who voluntarily, not because of funding issues, chose to go to train as a teacher rather than go to Medical School? Remember I’m not talking of somebody who gets 6 but goes to train as a teacher because they didn’t have the money to take up the offer from the Medical School. The truth is that many who end up as teachers do so because their options are limited. This is part of the reason why a number of people in the teaching field when they get the opportunity they leave. (See Note 6)

The poverty of our educational systems is mainly the function of dysfunctional politics. This is because it is politicians that fix salaries, and the salaries of teachers are so poor that literally everyone runs away from teaching. This is something on which I agree with Osam. Let me briefly address two things here: first, the relationship between remuneration and dedication, and second, the relationship between monopoly of salary fixing by politicians and lopsided salary structuring in society.

First, there is no gainsaying that poor performance, lack of dedication, and corruption (I shall here treat them as the same, because they all contribute to the problem at issue) can result from low remuneration. When we increase the remuneration of teachers, the idea is that high wages means higher cost of shirking one’s duties, such as losing a high-paying job. As such, by raising wages, you raise the stakes: You make incompetence and lack of dedication more costly and unattractive.

Second is that it is politicians who fix the salaries of teachers in general. This is because, even if private educational entrepreneurs are to fix salaries for their teachers, they would first take note of the rates fixed by politicians for public schools, because there would be no need to “waste money” by offering something far above it: Just a little margin of superiority is enough for entrepreneurs to achieve the incentive of attracting teachers to the private sector. The question, therefore is, margin over what? Margin over what politicians have fixed, of course. As such, we see that even salaries of most private school teachers could still be poor in countries where public school teachers’ salaries are very poor. What it means is that politicians fix salaries in general. We may not mind the fact that the salaries may be fixed by some emolument agency, sent to Parliament for approval, then sent to the President for final approval. It is all the same: These bodies pander to each other in a “grease my palm I grease your palm” fashion. It is important to see that this relationship between arms of government comes with an implied threat: It is either “grease my palm I grease your palm” or “scratch my back I scratch your back.” This mutual preference for “unhealthy cooperation” or collusion over “unhealthy rivalry” comes at a cost to the rest of society outside the circle of understanding. As such, it is “they” the politicians who do the “fixing.”

If politicians fix the salaries of others, and then fix their own salaries, and do all of these without oversight from their subjects, then it raises a problem of the tyranny of unequal salary fixing. This is a residue of military or monarchical political systems even within modern democracy. Let me examine some examples of the disparity between the salaries of teachers and politicians. Take Nigeria for example. A Nigerian senator earns more than the President of the United States, Barack Obama, and the British Prime Minister, David Cameron (see Adegode, 2013; Efe, 2012; Joseph, 2014). This is because a Nigerian senator, at an annual earning of US$1.4 million, earns three and a half times as much as the U.S. President (US$400,000; see Adegode, 2013; Efe, 2012; Joseph, 2014). But the income of an average American (US$45,863.02) is more than 40 times that of an average Nigerian (US$1,097.97). ¹⁰ On top of that, an average Nigerian teacher earns about US$469.5 annually, less than half of the average income of a Nigerian, and 0.03% of the salary of a Nigerian senator. In fact, a U.S. senator has to work for 8 years to earn what a Nigerian senator earns in a year, and the U.S. President has to work for 4 years and a few months to earn what the President of the Nigerian Senate is earning in a year. Because the salary of the U.S. President is more than twice that of U.S. senators (see Efe, 2012), the salary of a Nigerian President, being expectedly even higher in proportion above those of Nigerian senators, is anyone’s guess. The Ghanaian salary inequality gap is less, because the salaries of politicians are less and those of teachers a bit higher in comparison. Whereas a cabinet minister in Ghana earns more than US$120,000 annually (see Sarpong, 2014), a schoolteacher with basic teaching certificate earns about US$2,388 annually, or 1.99% of the salary of a minister. I would not compare the salary of a Ghanaian teacher with that of a Ghanaian member of Parliament, because these politicians receive a lot of allowances that are separate from their official salary, which have to be properly accounted for in total. Importantly, although the political class salaries in the two countries rival those of developed countries (and supersede them in the case of Nigeria), the basic teaching salaries in the two countries can hardly sustain the earner, much less a family.

All of this is terrible. It is like empowering a party to a conflict to be the judge of the conflict, as well as the executioner of judgment. If the pendulum of salary fixing and approval by government arms must swing either toward unhealthy rivalry or collusion, then it is obvious that we must seek ways of removing the power to fix salaries from government functionaries. There seems no other alternative other than to entrust this crucial function to a body that is independent of political control: Such a body must be in charge of fixing salaries in general, those of politicians and educationists inclusive. Importantly, salaries must be fixed comprehensively and across board. More important, salaries must be reviewed at least twice every year to account for inflation in developing countries (I bet that politicians do this for themselves consistently or much more frequently). Most important, and to check political control, whatever body is established to do this must not have the final say, for this would be a recipe for another kind of dictatorship and hegemony: Their recommendations must be subject to public vote. To help, such a vote can be undertaken in much less expensive ways than is done to elect public office holders, such as online voting. Searching for such a less expensive way would not be my most crucial concern here, and can be sorted by experts in the related field. The crucial point is that if salaries in general are subjected to public deliberation, the landslide discrepancies in remuneration would come under the spotlight, and the drastic reduction to the remuneration rates of politicians, which is inevitable from such an arrangement, would make politics much less attractive to scheming criminals and much more attractive to dedicated professionals in various fields. In other words, this arrangement, apart from improving education, would improve politics and make it less of a “dirty game.”

Let me now focus on some other benefits of raising the salaries of teachers. The first is that if the remuneration in a profession is very attractive, the demand for that profession will rise. Second is that if demand for a profession rises, then proprietors and authorities in that profession can afford to demand higher standards of service quality from employees. As an example, the banking sector in some West African countries witnessed a salary boom in the 1990s before the global economic meltdown. During this period, banking employees earned very enviable paychecks in comparison with their counterparts in other professions. In exchange, banks extracted extraordinary amounts of service and imposed rigorous in-house training on their employees. In other words, many employees had to work for extraordinarily long hours and were subjected to constant professional training and upgrade. The general idea was to extract good value for good salary. My argument here is that this should not be seen as an isolated trend, it should be treated as a law of nature. When you pay highly, you expect highly too. As such, a radical raise in the remuneration of teachers must be accompanied by a deep-reaching overhaul of the standard of teacher training meted out by teacher-training colleges and colleges of education. International comparisons focused on best practices around the world could be of immense help in this regard. I am talking about the overhaul of content in teachers’ training. Instead, what we see as responses to poor academic performance in West African countries is the change of the titles of colleges of education to universities of education, a change of graduating titles from teacher certificates to university degrees, or a raise of minimum teaching requirement from teacher certificate to university degree. ¹¹ In other words, what we often see is a change in nomenclature rather than content, a terribly cosmetic move.

The problem of the monopoly in salary fixing also extends to general budgeting, and this is where we see the genesis of poor educational infrastructure and facilities. As we see with salaries, political leaders prioritize their personal welfare, and then sectors such as defense. To reduce the crippling effect of these budgetary partialities on the economy, they make a pittance of other budgetary allocations such as education. Let me examine some examples. Again, we begin with Nigeria. The recent history of education funding shows that, out of total government expenditure, education received as low as 0.08% in 1970 (see Ijaiya & Lawal, n.d.), then an average expenditure of 6.5% for the range 1981 to 1989, 5.6% from 1990 to 1998, 7.1% from 1999 to 2007, 5.3% in 2008 (see Campbell, 2013), and climbed to 10.7% in 2014, largely due to a 6-month strike by academics in Nigerian public universities (see Fatunde, 2014). It took 6 months of death in Nigerian universities to raise budgetary allocation to education to a “heroic” 10.7%. But this falls terribly short of the UNESCO prescription of 26% budgetary allocation to education. Even the increase was more a response to higher than to elementary education. In short, a glance at Table 1a of Kpolovie and Obilor (2013) shows the yearly budget allocation to education in Nigeria from 1960 to 2013. The average for the entire 43-year period is 5.72%. The Ghana government had shown an earlier awakening toward education, allocating averages ranging from 18.3% in 2004, 23.2% in 2010 (see Ministry of Education, 2012), to 26.06% in 2013. But in Ghana’s case, this allocation is still not enough considering that the country’s average GDP from 1960 to 2014 is US$9.14 billion and its total GDP in 2014 is US$38.58 billion (Trading Economics, 2015b); the average Ghanaian earned US$459.62 from 1960 to 2013 and the per capita in 2014 was US$766.05 (Trading Economics, 2015c). Against this background, more budgetary percentage still needs to be allocated to education to stimulate skilled labor.

Let me now suggest some implications of neglecting the educational sector in general budgeting. Except when a developing country is at war, the budgetary prioritization of defense to the extent that education suffers is short sighted. This is because such a country cannot even be a strong military power in the real sense: a strong military power in today’s terms can only result from a strong economic power. If a weak economy is focused on its military strength rather than its economy and war breaks out, such an economy cannot sustain a war in terms of replenishing its depleting military resources. As such, a strong military power can only be a result of a strong economic power. But a strong economy is possible not really by natural resources but by skilled man power, and it is education that provides skilled man power. As such, only by improving its educational system can a nation achieve both economic and military prominence in the long term.

The negative version of this is that a weak economy (and ultimately a weak military) is a natural retribution for neglecting teachers and education. No society in which teaching is a thankless job can ultimately be a strong economic (and military) power. In short, no nation that undermines teachers will develop.

Here is how it works. Improvement in education can provide improved skills, improved skills expands an economy. As an economy expands, spending in every other area, such as defense will expand automatically by simply being the same proportion of an expanding economy, even without increasing the budgetary allocation to them.

On the whole, I see an inextricable relationship of correlation and feedback loops between education and the larger economy: Better education leads to better economy in the long term, and better economy, barring stinginess toward the educational sector, sustains better education (or reinforces it). An evidence of this is that countries at the top of the OECD mathematics and science rankings are also countries whose economies are expanding rapidly. The giant and surprising advances of South Korean technological initiatives such as Samsung, LG, Kia, and Hyundai could not have been possible without a solid educational foundation spanning the last few decades. And, the high per capita income of this country will, among other things, make it unlikely that its educational system would deteriorate. This is continuous mutual reinforcement or feedback loop. A feedback loop means, for instance, that if A strengthens B, B strengthens C, and C in turn strengthens A, the process ensures a perpetually continuous mutual reinforcement or strengthening of the entity containing the A, B, and C components.

However, a feedback loop connecting education and the economy depends on three major conditions. First is that a feedback loop can only begin with a good political decision regarding education. Second is that at no time (even in periods of economic prominence) do we yield to some stinginess regarding the educational sector. Third is that adequate funding to education is not enough for quality education: Educational funding is a necessary but not sufficient condition for quality education. All the money in a nation can go to education and it is still mismanaged or the wrong decisions about educational methods still taken. As such, adequate funding of education should be complimented with taking the right decisions about the educational system. Again, the problem I see is about the decision-making bodies. Here, I propose a decentralization of decision-making bodies in education: Fundamental and foundational decisions about education must, like the decisions of bodies managing salaries, be subjected to public deliberation and ultimately public vote (at least a narrower “public” involving teachers, to receive their input and experiences). This is because, although many countries have democratized, their educational sectors are still steeped in the old military style of doing business, and little or no attention has been paid to this steeply hierarchical structure.

On the whole, we have seen that academic performance goes beyond the issue of language of medium, and politics supercedes langauge in determining general academic performance. Education cannot be divorced from the wider economy, and cannot ultimately be divorced from the actions of politicians. However, we see that the matter of education must in large part be taken away from politicians and be increasingly subjected to public deliberation and democratic procedures.