For us, merit should be the issue

It seems the dust is yet to settle on the dichotomy between the Higher National Diploma (HND) and university first degrees. The bill that was passed by the Ninth National Assembly in 2021 to end the dichotomy was not signed into law by the last administration of President Muhammadu Buhari which exited in May, 2023. Somehow, the National Assembly too did nothing after. The bill was therefore dead on arrival.

The present administration would seem to be standing on the status quo, going by the affirmation of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Dr Folasade Yemi-Esan, that HND holders would still have to undergo one-year mandatory training before their conversion from Executive to Officers cadre.

Dr Yemi-Esan made this position clear at a virtual interactive session with civil servants on June 22, at the occasion organised to commemorate the 2024 Civil Service Week. She spoke in response to a question that a Level 14 officer in the Federal Civil Service, Adebayo Hassan, asked about what the Federal Government was doing on the issue.

According to her, “The curriculum for HND and B.Sc holders were not the same, hence, HND graduates would have to undergo mandatory one-year training before conversion from Executive to Officers’ cadre.”

This idea of bridging the gap between HND and university degrees has remained a bone of contention between the National Universities Commission (NUC) and the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) for long.

The NBTE regulates technical and vocational education while NUC overseas the universities.

But it would seem the NBTE bowed to pressure, with its introduction, last year, of what it described as a one-year top-up programme which offers a platform for HND holders to level up towards obtaining a bachelor’s degree. But the NUC swiftly disowned the programme, and asked the NBTE to concentrate on its core mandate.

“The unsuspecting general public and all relevant ministries, departments, and agencies should note that the NUC is not a party to and, indeed, disavows the so-called top-up scheme, being concocted by the NBTE,” the commission said.

Dr Yemi-Esan’s declaration would seem in alignment with the position of the NUC.

But this would still be for the purpose of the Federal Civil Service alone.

It is true that the curricular for HND and first degree differ. This is a natural consequence of their raison d’être.

Polytechnics and sundry institutions were established to produce middle level manpower leading to the award of certificates, National Diploma, HND and Advanced Professional Diploma. University education, on the other hand, is meant to educate, train and provide the graduates with the relevant knowledge and skills for continuous learning and critical thinking.

But then, while HND holders are better recognised in some countries because their training is hands-on and university graduates’ is essentially theoretical, it has not been so in Nigeria. This is due probably to the fact that the entry requirements into the universities are quite tougher than those for polytechnics. The belief, especially in university circles, is that polytechnic education is inferior to university education.

For us, however, that argument is neither here nor there. Mercifully, the dichotomy is more pronounced in the civil service. It is not so in the private sector where merit is the major criterion. We have seen many outstanding HND graduates who outperform their university counterparts in their workplaces.

We would therefore wish to promote merit because, in the final analysis, that is what would make the workplaces, societies and ultimately the country, to excel. It is what would eventually drive development and growth. Not paper qualifications.

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