When the Lagos State Government announced last week that it had reverted to the old fee structure at the Lagos State University (LASU), my heart sank. My heart sank because Lagos was supposed to be the precursor that other states of the federation looked up to and emulated. As the most cosmopolitan city-state in the country, it led in several indices, ranging from commerce, infrastructure development, urban renewal projects to social services. Yes, its multiplicity of taxes could be debated and were often deemed strangulating from a socio-economic perspective, but Lagos was in a hurry to leap frog from a slum-dwelling city to a modern city that could stand side-by-side and compete with other mega cities across the world. Unfortunately, with its politically expedient decision to take LASU back to the Stone Age, Lagos took a “popular” but very wrong decision. Over the years, Nigerian universities have not been spared the degradation that other segments of the society have suffered. From Ivory Towers and institutions of higher learning, they had turned into decrepit cesspits that churn out graduates that cannot compete with their contemporaries in Africa, much less others outside the continent. I would be willing to bet my bottom dollar that if Channels Television were to air an incisive, revealing documentary on the University of Lagos, Ibadan or University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), like it did on the Police College in Ikeja, it would come up with worse findings. As the Nigerian elite professors of the 1960s to the 1990s passed on or found better teaching environments overseas, they were replaced them with ill-educated, ill-trained and ill-exposed lectures who had no business imparting knowledge to children of kindergarten age. The resultant impact is that we have tertiary institutions that lack administrative and academic capacity – universities, which by their most simplistic definition are supposed to be universal in nature and outlook, but lack a medley of talent. Is it not ironic that UNN started out with Dr. George Marion Talbort, an African American, as it premier vice chancellor (Talbort was succeeded by Professor Glen L. Taggart, another foreigner); University of Ibadan once boasted Professor Kenneth Dike as its premier indigenous vice chancellor; University of Lagos had Professor Eni Njoku at the helm when it was established in 1962; while Ahmadu Bello University started academic studies with Sir Norman Alexander, a professor from New Zealand, as its first vice chancellor. Other than being run by non- indigenes, all first and second generation public universities in Nigeria boasted a decent local and international faculty, a quality that is a sine qua non for institutions focused on grooming and developing worldly and well educated individuals. Indeed, all notable and serious institutions of higher learning are equipped with lecturers from all over the world, including Nigerian academics that have set up notable specialist colleges and reached the zenith of their careers in these foreign institutions. But the reverse is the case in Nigeria. Here, the criteria used for the selection of vice chancellors, heads of faculties and departments are seniority and catchment area. For crying out loud, what has the federal character got to do with academia? Aside from the quality of its academic faculty, the new trend among universities that are forward looking is to appoint provosts or presidents with the right skill set. Running a university requires marketing, financial, fund-raising and administrative skills, not just academic skills. A good mix of managerial skills backed with the right qualifications is what is required, not just an academic without the foggiest clue of how to manage people and resources. For example, Lawrence (‘Larry”) Summers, now a Professor Emeritus of Economics at Harvard University, boasted a rich pedigree as an academic, Chief Economist at the World Bank and US Secretary of the Treasury, before heading back to Harvard as its president. Nigeria, auspiciously, boasts several retired captains of industry who have run blue chip corporations and possess the right academic credentials, exposure and managerial skill set to turn around public and private universities if given the opportunity to do so. Owing to Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) rules, bank CEOs are being forced to retire at an early age, yet still possess the energy to run academic institutions. But it has never occurred to anyone that they could be incentivised and challenged into transforming our universities into world-class institutions. Essentially, the best practice at universities with senate bodies that are visionary is to recruit their leaders through an open, competitive process, so that only the best are brought in to elevate their schools to global standards. Appointing the right persons to run their universities is one of the primary reasons American institutions thrive and dominate most university league tables, oftentimes accounting for more than 50 per cent of the top 100 universities in the world. But it is not just administrative and academic standards that have dropped to ground zero in Nigeria. The so- called students that our lecturers impart knowledge to are just as bad. JAMB and UTME standards or cut-off marks have been so badly compromised such that students who ordinarily would not have make the grade 20 to 30 years ago, are today deemed the best the country is capable of producing. We need not add the squalid conditions under which these students are taught and reside, the lack of teaching tools and aids, obsolete technology, absence of research and development faculties and non-existent libraries, all in the name of acquiring a university education. Is it any wonder that two persons in Jos have died and many others in the country have fallen ill in the last few days from consuming and adorning themselves with copious quantities of sodium chloride, better known as table salt, under the misconceived notion that they could make themselves immune to the Ebola virus? Besides, the popular but misconstrued notion that university education must be cheap and open to all has served to destroy our universities. Medical students at LASU, among other students, kicked up a storm recently after the state government raised their tuition fee to N250,000 a session (that is for a whole year). In the meantime, a single decent hospital bed with all the necessary gadgets and fixtures could cost the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), where they are taught, about the same amount or more. And this precludes top of the range equipment, laboratories and facilities that a teaching hospital is expected to be equipped with. The question to ask is what kind of doctors does LASU expect to produce in an environment that is bereft of the right lecturers and teaching aids, or one that lacks the wherewithal to undertake research and development for medical breakthroughs? The adjunct to this is the dysfunctional system that we have created. Today, affluent and middle class families who once had sufficient confidence in Nigerian public universities and struggled to keep their children at home, now strive towards sending their children and wards to either private universities in the country (most of which have problems with accreditation for their courses) or schools overseas; in the process, costing the country billions of dollars annually that could have been spent in higher schools here. Typical examples include the likes of human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, who shouted himself hoarse during the LASU students’ protest, and “Comrade” Adams Oshiomhole, who saw to it that his daughter attended Stanford University, an Ivy League school and one of the best in the world. Meanwhile, it is the children of the lower strata of the society who now populate public universities, where ignorance is perpetuated. As draconian or brutal as this article may seem, the gospel truth is university education should not be free if we must be competitive as a nation. As this columnist has advocated in the past, more resources for the education sector must be channelled towards primary and secondary schools where proper literacy is attainted. UNESCO defines literacy as the “ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts”. Accordingly, a university education does not make one literate, it simply helps people specialise in different fields of endeavor. It is also high time we stopped deceiving the public with the twisted argument that the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo introduced free education in the old Western region. This is a falsehood that has assumed a life of its own. As the Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, pointed out during a one-on-one conversation on LASU and the wider problems of university education in Nigeria, the policy of the Awolowo administration was targeted at free primary school education because of the high level of illiteracy that existed in the 1950s and 1960s. Awolowo’s championing of free primary education, notwithstanding, there are some of us who still believe that secondary school education must also be free in order to attain higher levels of literacy in the country. Furthermore, my experience while working on a project in the last few months has shown that in Africa’s rapidly expanding economies where there is a huge infrastructure deficit, artisans or blue-collar workers such as welders, carpenters, machine technicians, electricians, masons, plumbers, automobile mechanics, crane operators, tailors and seamstresses, cooks and caterers, etc, are more likely to find jobs and set up their own small businesses that employ more people than graduates looking for white-collar jobs in the organised private sector. Coincidentally, an article titled “This Way Up”, published in the Wall Street Journal on July 19, 2014, dwelt on the same subject. It stated, “Economic mobility is alive and well for Americans who pursue technical or practical training. Welders, nurses and franchise owners are still finding careers paths into the middle class… Middle-skilled jobs needing more than high school (secondary school) but less than college (university) could make up close to half of future US jobs.” It is for the reason above, countries like Germany place considerable emphasis on providing free primary and secondary school education, and have for decades set up thousands of technical and vocational schools were special skills are acquired. Armed with these technical skills, Germans are able to get life-long jobs in the country’s industries and set out as entrepreneurs of small and medium-scale businesses that thrive. The point here is that Nigerian universities have the capacity to raise all the funding they need through tuition, endowments and grants. Through this, they are strengthened to provide conducive environments, improve their teaching faculties, and acquire teaching aids and technologies that are state-of-the-art. With more resources at their disposable, the universities would also be better conditioned to restructure their programmes to enroll more part-time students with the capacity to pay, provide scholarships for bright but indigent students (along with states and the federal government), and introduce long-distance/e-learning programmes for students beyond Nigeria’s borders. The sky is the limit for Nigerian universities and federal and state governments that are over-stretched. All that is required is to take the hard but necessary decisions to t
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 07:31:19 +0000
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