HND/BSc. Rant HQ War.

Is Bsc better than HND? 

Today I was bored so I decided to past time on Facebook, checking people’s statuses and updates. In my notifications, I got a notification about something on Rant HQ (I can’t exactly remember what the notification was all about but I clicked it and it took me to Rant HQ. While scrolling through the posts on the group, a particular post caught my attention and I decided to take a chill pill and read up. The post was from a guy lamenting the stigmatization that comes with being a HND holder and how Bsc. Holders are considered to be far better than HND holders.

 In the post, he pointed out that HND holders while in school were professionals who were taught the practical’s unlike their university counterparts whose curriculums are filled with inapplicable theories. He said and I quote “I bet, most University graduates cannot stand their polytechnics counterparts when it comes to practical in the field of study…never think that you are better than HND holders” Less than two hours of making the post, there were almost six hundred comments and over a thousand likes. Many of these comments were supportive while a lot more are opposing the view expressed by the poster. Part of the comments that seemed to be in lieu with the writer’s view was posted by someone named Iyama Peter Perk who said “I have HND but work as an English/Literature teacher with high level of respect. Mind you, I only studied secretariat studies. The last school I taught is a British school, and when I left, my boss was embittered. I’m also a poultry farmer with many BSc and PhD holders working under my tutelage.

Why is there stigmatisation against HND and NCE holders? 

 I have published a book which was edited by a doctorate degree holder. All these didn’t happen because I have HND, it happened because I developed myself beyond my certificate. It happened because I learned what school couldn’t teach me. It happened because I took the bull by the horn to get education not qualification I can never be inferior in the presence of a PhD holder, neither be superior in front of a SSCE holder. My self-esteem is so built in a way that it doesn’t feed on that of others.”

 Of course, there were statements after this to support Iyama’s views.

 There were lots of negative comments however and the sarcastic ones were innumerable. Below are some of the negative ones: Peace Ekpot: So why do you people still pick up direct entry forms? To go to Uni dey hungry una but direct admission be una problem Oluwashola Margareth: Inferiority complex at its peak. Adetola Ayodele said “Cheniba Egbunu Emmanuel. That saying is so old and needs to be confined to the history’s dustbin. I am not here to defend either university or polytechnic graduates as my education was cut short before I even got to the secondary school. However, the truth be said, the average Nigerian graduate (i.e. Who finished from a Naija University) is so poorly trained and as such, totally unprepared for employment post NYSC due to such noticeable incompetence.

 The graduates themselves are not wholly to blame. The entire Naija system is fur iously stacked against consumers of education. A Naija woman married to a British man (who runs a business in Naija) told me that her husband (who himself is not a graduate) had to interview over 80 Naija graduates for a position. He had to get that far because almost all the graduates pathetic at the interview. That is just one out of many examples. Some of our graduates who move abroad to UK, US and Canada do exceedingly well no doubt.

 However, that is because our degrees are not entirely useless. We get to those countries, we do our masters at least to paper over the cracks in the walls and hope further-on the-job training will improve our skills. So, Cheniba Egbunu Emanuel, neither graduates of either type of institution have such discernible skills that can make them standout in the world summit of graduates to be honest” There were those comments that neither supports nor oppose the post. Chinagorom Ejimofor said “HND o, BSC o, PHD O, if you don’t have connections you’re on your own. Na God dey bless CERTIFICATE” Orji Chinenye Christanah said “my friend go n make money…turn all that ur practicals into money…datzzol I care.”

The non-committing comments: 

Mercy Odei said “What has that got to do with poverty in the land?” Faith Gooday said “How e take affect Nigeria economy, mtttcheww!” And the most savage remark: Favour Patrick “I can’t believe what am hearing so people still dey carry certificate for head for dis country bros I take God beg you go hide am cos the python wry swallowed million no go school talk more of getting certificate. Won’t you rather take a wise step and join the animal kingdom. Who knows, you might be the next richest python in the world” There wre lots and of other negative comments but time will not permit me to share them all here.

  My Take On This Argument.

I wholeheartedly agree with the poster, it is one of the injustices we suffer in this country. The same way in which an uneducated politician takes in millions monthly when someone who had served his or fatherland for several decades cannot buy a plot of land because his wages is too small to even provide basic things as food and clothing for himself and his family is the same case with this academic and education stigmatization and disparity. It is only an intellectually bankrupt that would think and believe that a University graduate is better than a HND graduate. Such persons have not been educated at all though they might have passed through school. I intentionally decided not to comment on the post because the level of illiteracy displayed on the thread was heartbreaking. Even the supposedly educated ones were shamelessly saying that a university graduate is better than a HND graduate. This is not even a topic that is worthy of debate.


 A university is meant to be someone who has undergone a professional training for a fixed period of years as stipulated by the academics bodies and the institution of his or choice. He or she is expected at the end of graduation to be employable or in other cases, to be self-motivated in creating employment opportunities rather than waiting for someone else to employ him or her. This is very different from the chunk of intellectual imbeciles that are parading themselves as university graduates in Nigeria today. This is the sad truth and our reality.

In the same vein, a HND graduate is meant to be someone who had gone through practical training in his or her chosen filed or career for a period of years as designed in the educational and vocational curriculum of his or her country and after which he or she is expected to be able to effectively perform in this chosen career. Again, this is another sad tale; like someone rightly said, we have mechanical engineering lecturers who when their vehicles get spoil, they cannot unscrew a single bolt without waiting for a roadside supposedly liberate mechanic to fix it for them. Now my question, what is the usefulness of someone who claims to have a professional certificate in a career yet he or she has little or no idea about what he claimed to be his profession? About six years ago, I was learning computer engineering in an institute in Ilasamaja, Lagos. At the time, there were other students in the institute, learning other things like programming, web development and so on. I had a friend among these guys and he opened up to me that he was studying computer science in one of the leading private universities in Nigeria. Then I asked him why he had to come to the street to learn what he should have been taught in school? Why was he paying again for what his parents had already paid exorbitant price for? He said he couldn’t rely on the things that he was being taught in school. He cited an example of how one of his lecturers who was teaching him taught them programming for weeks and at the end of the day, when the lecturer built a programme and tried to run it, it couldn’t run. He said the lecturer told the class that he would work on the programme and bring it to class when he was coming but whenever they ask him after that, he would find a way to deflect the question. Hence everyone knew that to get programming, they have to go beyond the useless theories they are being fed in school. I can only imagine this guy’s course mates, who were too lazy and myopic to seek help outside; they too would graduate and start parading themselves as computer scientists, what a joke!

So the bottom line is that university graduates were trained for things that are entirely different from what polytechnics graduate were trained for. Each field is designed for a different purpose so thinking that HND is inferior to a degree certificate is the highest level of stupidity that only Nigerian half-baked educated elites can indulge in. if all of us are trained to be working on papers in offices, who will build our bridges and skyscrapers? Who will invent new machines that will give us a breakthrough in science and technology? Who would design unimaginable beautiful cities and paradises that the world would be visiting like Dubai? Who will create things that would make life easier for our farmers by having machines to do all their farm chores? Are Nigerians thinking, definitely not! Barak Obama once said in his book “Audacity of Hope” that currently in America, the number of lawyers is now more than engineers and he said this is a very big problem because engineers are builders but lawyers are….nothing, really.

Except very few of them, most lawyers will only take up cases for the things they stand to gain rather than offering help to a cheated fellow who had cried to their doorstep. Whose fault is it? It is our government’s fault. Let’s take a look at the educational structure in abroad: apart from universities, there are colleges and other tertiary institutions where individuals can go to pursuer a professional course and after graduating from such colleges and other institutions, he or she is considered a legitimate professional. He will not walk through the streets with slumping shoulders because he had not gone to the university. When he goes for interview, he will hold his head up high because he knew that the certificate he holds is as valid and important as that of one graduate from the university.

 But our government here have designed an educational structure meant for imbeciles and many of us foolishly follow this plan. If polytechnics and colleges of education are not professional, why creating them, why not scrap them? If they are as useless as some myopic degree holders would have us believe, why allowing them to exist? I have met many graduates that academically and intellectually speaking I knew more than them when I was in secondary school- I swear. I have seen many fo these so called university graduates write letters and other legal documents with unpardonable mistakes. I have listened to some of them constructing sentences and instead of listening to whatever they are saying, I am always on the alert for the number of blunders they commit within few simple sentences. I don’t want this post to be too lengthy; otherwise, I could go on and on. Yet all these graduates are the results of the wickedness of our leaders. Recently, our president’s last daughter graduated from a school abroad, holding distinctions in photography.

 Ordinary photography! That is the way life is abroad, whatever you chose as a course or profession is nobody’s business and it doesn’t make you feel inferior to anyone else. In abroad, you see the level of rapport between a farmer and banker but in Nigeria, you dare not openly declare that you are a farmer; you will instantly be categorized as ‘uneducated’. These Nigerians don’t allow their children to partake in this filthy and stinky potion that they call education; rather they are forcing us to drink and gag on it while their children are schooling in the best schools abroad with the tax payers’ money. Yet, here we are as fellow Nigerians, biting each other because of one stupid certificate. In case you don’t know, Nigerian educational certificates don’t worth a pinch of salt in countries like US, Canada, Britain and many other developed nations so all your shakara of being a university graduate ends here.

 The moment you want to seek admission abroad to further your education, they make you write a series of exams and interviews in order to be able to determine if you are useful or useless to their institution. If they find you trainable, they take you, otherwise, they dump you and the entire application fee you have paid become wasted! Solution to This Problem? Well, the solutions are very simple. Each institution should be treated as professional institution and one should not be considered inferior and the other superior. I have a friend who was a product of a college of education and I can categorically tell you dear reader that this guy is sound. There, he was trained as a professional teacher and many of the things he knows today he has gleaned from the pages of wisdom dished at the institution.

Why they then college of education graduate go to service? Were they not trained teachers? In colleges of education, there were semesters that students offer as many as twenty two courses and all these courses must be passed otherwise, they have carry over. After spending three years at the institution, he was made to understand that there was no difference between him and a secondary school certificate holder because nobody values NCE so he had to take JAMB again. You see the injustice of it all? Why can’t students spend four years also in colleges of education and after that go for service? Have you ever wondered why our schools are nothing but intellectual mortuaries?

 It is because we don’t have trained and professional teachers! Yes, there are very few trained and professional teachers. The teaching profession has been bastardized by university and polytechnic graduates who out of lack of a dream job had ended up teaching in classes when they have never been taught themselves how to teach. How do you expect these emergency teachers to be passionate about their jobs? Sadly, in Nigerian schools today, NCE holders are paid lower salaries than their University and polytechnics counterparts where the NCE holders are better trained than these usurpers. This case is just like someone who is not a trained doctor, parading himself as a doctor and giving injections to patients without prescription. Of course, many of these untrained teachers eventually get a kind of on-the-job training, yet millions of others are poorer than the students they are even teaching! The same way untrained teachers are taking over the teaching profession is the way that Nigerian governments and companies located in Nigeria keep hiring experts from abroad to do jobs that OND holders in Nigeria supposed to be able to do. When Olusegun Obasanjo was still our president, he lamented that Nigeria spends billions of dollars annually to bring in foreign experts to help us mine our mineral resources and that the academic qualifications of these expatriates is equal to that of OND holder in Nigeria but he said that Nigerian graduates are poorly trained, hence, they are unfit for the tasks. This is a story that should bring tears to every well-meaning Nigerian eyes but not many people paid attention to that. Why giving our jobs and multi-billion dollar projects belonging to Nigeria to foreigners?

 Finally, Nigeria’s academic problem is too deep rooted than to be uprooted by uninformed and primitive arguments on social media on which certificate is better. I think it’s high time we started treating people with respect and dignity irrespective of their academic certificates. Besides, None of the richest people in the world get to that peak because they hold university degrees. Thank you for ready. Don’t forget to leave your comments and share it as much as you can go!