Security and education system in Nigeria government; A call for policy intervention
ABSTRACT
In recent times, Nigeria school system has come under violent attacks that range fromkidnapping of both the faculties and students to outright suicide bombing which usually claimlives and destroys properties. The effect of these attacks has further exacerbated the fragileschool system which is antithetical to sustainable and national development. Several measureshave been implemented to tackle this menace but there are still frequent attacks beingexperienced in the school environs. If these incessant attacks are not proactively dealt with, itwill portend a longer term danger to quality of labour force and human capital needed to drive asustainable economy. This study, therefore, focused on the issues of school threat and suggeststhat the frequent attacks on the school system should be securitized and placed on red-alert forthe state actors to devote adequate attention and resources towards ameliorating this menace.To empirically assess some of the Nigerian government interventions on school insecurity, avector autogressive model was estimated for Aggregate School Enrollment (LAGSE), AggregateRecurrent Security Expenditure (LRSEX), Government Expenditure of Education (LGXE) andReal Gross Domestic Product (LRGDP) utilizing annual data spanning between 1981 and 2016.The result of the impulse response functions (IRF) showed that at impact, shock to LRSEX willcause LAGSE to permanently rise above equilibrium level throughout the forecast horizon. Thisimplies that school security will attract more children to enroll in schools. A shock to LGXE willcause an initial decline on LAGSE but rises above equilibrium level after three years. Thisimplies that investment in education only positively affect school enrollment after three yearsand remained so throughout the forecast horizon. A shock to LRGDP will cause an initialdecline on LAGSE but rises above equilibrium level after about four years. However, the effectbecomes negative about nine years later. This implies that growth in the real GDP does notguarantee increase in school enrollment. Furthermore, the result of the pairwise grangercausality shows that there is a unidirectional causality running from LRSEX, LGXE and LRGDPto LAGSE. Given the results, we recommend that government should implement policies that willimprove security, education expenditure and national income in order to improve schoolenrollmen
.