Reviving Nigeria’s public education system 3 – Universities and other tertiary institutions

Prof Paul A. Iji

I am glad that I am able to write this rather long and concluding part of my article on the revival of Nigeria’s public education system. I had to force myself to do it in view of the current stalemate between the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the Government of Nigeria. All public university lecturers have been on strike for some months now, in response to a number of unmet demands. I thought that I could add my voice, if it will be of any use to guide both sides in the negotiations but I am more interested in the long-term survival and quality of the public universities, polytechnics and colleges of education. I am more familiar with the university sector in which I have worked for more than 33 years, 12 of these in Nigeria. 

I decided to start this article at the unholy hour of 1.00 am, not to test my personal endurance or need for torture but I thought that this kind of hour could keep me calm and focussed. I need to serve my academic constituency and Nigeria with strength and faith, as the national anthem implores us to. 

I just said that I have spent almost all of my professional life in academia. Excluding a few months, I have been in academics since I completed my National Youth Service in 1987, a rather long period of time. I know there are many senior colleagues who have been in it for longer, but I think I can count myself among those who know something about the university sector.

In fact, the only time that I experimented with getting out of academics was less than three years ago. At the time, I thought that I had had enough of it and wanted something different, particularly hoping to actualise my reason for studying agriculture – to farm in a modern way. The experiment that I refer to ended very badly. I lasted about 2 months in the Australian Commonwealth Department of Agriculture. I was a total mis-fit. Two months in, I went to have a chat with the Deputy CEO of the unit, to inform her that I wanted to quit, and she should find someone who needed to start a new career. She asked if I wanted to think about it and I said no, I had thought about it, and wanted out. She got the message and 10 days or so later, I was out, preparing to go to Africa as a free consultant and ready to start my farm. However, I ended in the Pacific but that’s another story, waiting for the right time. My farm dream has not died, despite my entanglement with academics. 

Exactly why could I not cope with life in the Department of Agriculture, or Ministry, as they call it in many countries? Simple question and simple answer: I am an academic! For those who are not academics, let me tell you about the simple mindset of an academic. A true academic believes that nothing has been finally done. Whatever we see, we always think that it can be done better. As one of my colleagues joked; if you hand over a piece of writing to an academic to look at, the first thing s/he does is to look for a red pen! We know and believe that there must be an error somewhere, even if it is written by a Professor Emeritus. Academics see EVERYTHING in life in this way, as a work in progress. 

I hope this can help to explain why academics in Nigeria must be very frustrated. In fact, some of the times when I hear what the people in government say in response to the demand of academics, I feel like weeping for Nigeria. There are many who think that academics in Nigeria are now well paid. That’s complete fallacy – they do not even earn the African average salary! I am not going to dwell on what the Government is doing wrong; there is a lot that the academic side needs to do. I have been out of Nigeria since 1999, so I can see mistakes that most of those who are sitting there cannot see although many in the system are putting forward brilliant ideas. But let me be blunt: Nigeria’s education system now needs more than tablets and injections; it needs surgery. It needs drastic changes. Change is not new to academics, so we must be ready to make or accept changes, including many unpalatable ones. It would be good for the Government to do things like they are done in other countries, but I expect the Nigerian academics to work and live like academics in other countries. I am one of you; I cannot propose medicine that will kill you, but the system has cancer (sorry to say) right now and many cancer medications are not gentle.

I do not want to do it the old way of listing the problems that have kept us down and have failed us, particularly in the past 20-30 years. I would prefer to look at solutions but it would be good to juxtapose the solutions against the problems. Actually, some solutions become very obvious once one knows the problem.

I think the number one problem against the university system, and by extension all of the tertiary sector is over-centralization. This is easy to identify. Almost everything in Nigeria has been over-centralised since the military took control of the country in 1966. The return to civilian rule in 1979-1983 and again since 1999 has done very little to dismantle the centralized system that the military imposed on the country. In the university system, they brought in a centralised enrolment system where students have to take the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). When the UTME started in its original form in 1977 (I was among those who wrote the first JME In early 1978), it was hailed as saving candidates from running around and applying to more than one institution at a time of complete manual operations. The world has since moved on, and Nigeria too has moved on. We had less than 12 universities, I believe, when UTME was introduced but now we have more than 250 public and private universities, not counting the polytechnics and colleges of education. Across the world now, it is possible to apply and enrol online. It is time for Nigeria to join this league since the infrastructure is there. Different universities ought to set their own entry requirements as is the case in many parts of the world. Even if the universities agree on the same entry requirements, they should implement them by themselves, separately. A candidate does not need to apply to too many institutions and universities can reduce application fees or build them into other fees.

The worst killer through over-centralization is personnel management. There is no country that I know now which has the same salary structure for all its universities or polytechnics or colleges of education. In South Africa’s top universities, no two staff earn the same salary! Even staff who are appointed at the same level could earn salaries at different levels. Every staff negotiates his/her salary according to potential output and it is left for the university to agree or disagree. Universities should set their individual salaries according to these principles – quality of the employee, cost of living at the location of the university and income received or generated by the university, among other factors. Simply put, a university should manage its own income even if the Government provides the major part of it. Education is a public good commodity; its value cannot and should never be quantified in dollar terms. I still cannot believe that the Nigerian Government decided to pay ALL tertiary education staff from the same centre. They can first try and make that system work for the civil servants but it should never be tried with universities or their inventive drive will simply die.

Nigerian universities do not have true autonomy. Everywhere I have worked, university staff would struggle to know who the Ministers of Education or Labour. Universities should be left to run their own show. The fact that Nigeria still believes in the credibility of Professors and uses them to run national elections shows the faith that people have in academics. Honestly, anyone who goes into academics has no intention to become rich. I know where my mates (and even juniors) who went into the banks, customs and the military are now and what they own. Do I envy them? Never. It is a choice one makes between wealth and public good service. I am yet to come across a VC who used government grants to build private housing estates unlike the rot in other sectors. The Government needs to trust the universities. I know that corruption has seeped into the tertiary education sector as Professors watch their former students revel in expensive mansions, cars, private jets, you name it. There are many academics who are simply afraid to become rich. I actually don’t know how millionaires and billionaires are able to sleep! Many academics are like me and it is another identity that one can use to tell a core academic from a businessman. The Government should task the universities to come up with ideas and gain more autonomy, and we will see wonders. I won’t call names but there are Nigerian universities that can almost sustain themselves now and can do more if they are further challenged. 

Another sign of over-centralization and lack of autonomy is rigid student management. I could not believe when a few months ago a Nigerian university (private), which is acclaimed to be progressive told me that they cannot take in students from other universities. This is quite archaic. Worldwide, universities now acknowledge prior learning and cross-credit each other’s courses, and students should not be required to repeat things that they did already in another institution. 

Without any malice, I need to talk about the appointment of the VC and Rectors. The process is archaic and not forward-looking. Most universities now open the process to the world. In many countries now, living and working all of one’s life in that country almost means that you cannot be a VC there! The reason is simple – globally, universities are striving to avoid academic inbreeding. As it is, Nigerian universities now appoint VCs only from among academics who have worked in that university. New (written and unwritten) rules are being applied, including town and state of origin. Does it not occur to Nigeria that if someone has lived and worked in the system all his/her life, s/he is not likely to have any new ideas for that particular system? Bring in someone from somewhere else and s/he is going to see the cracks that you thought were normal part of the wall! I am not asking universities to even appoint foreigners yet (although this is now the global norm), try and appoint someone from another State who has little knowledge of the university and the person is likely going to achieve more. As new people are brought in every time that a new appointment is made, the university system adds to existing ideas, to develop and move forward. With time, Nigerian institutions can reach out and bring in good academic leaders from other African countries and let them do the same, and we will see a massive improvement across the continent. But let’s fix Nigeria first.

Nigerian universities are isolated from the world network; I mean in deed, electronic networks are only a start. Our universities need to develop exchanges with other world universities. It was there in the 1980s, why not now? Bring in guest lecturers and adjunct staff so that you can learn new things, then go across and also pass your knowledge. 

Our facilities are quite poor. All through the Covid19 lockdown, hardly any public university in Nigeria could deliver online; only the private universities were functioning. Covid19 has been a wake-up signal to everyone and almost everything is going online. I can see that many webinars that are happening in the private sector in Nigeria, but the citadel of knowledge lacks these facilities. Part of the cause is underfunding, which is why I will turn my attention to that side now.

For more than 3 decades, Nigeria has run a tuition-free education. When it started in the late1970s, it was right to do it and Nigeria wallowed in oil money, with a currency that was far stronger than the American dollar or British pound. Times have changed; enrolments have gone up many many times, whichever course one looks at. We almost have a glut of graduates although the universities are only able to take in less than a third of applicants each year. There is a disconnect between job creation and training in Nigeria and the existence of an uncontrolled population, but I am not going to talk about these in this article. However, maybe I need to say that Nigerian universities tend to use the same curriculum for far too long. I visited the website of one university recently and noticed that students doing BSc Agriculture are still being overloaded with courses (units) as we were in the 1980s. There is a global trend towards more practical content and most importantly, programmes need to be reviewed, revised and discarded while new ones are developed in line with the changing market demand. No one eats a certificate, and no one should study something that does not promise a job or create a job. Well, it is time to re-introduce tuition fees. There is no need to deceive ourselves; students are being charged all kinds of fees already, be brave, charge for tuition and improve tuition quality. You cannot get something from nothing; Nigeria’s public universities are almost heading to zero investment/input, zero output and need to apply the brakes. We have quality manpower that can deliver, as they deliver all over the world. 

Tuition fees should not be introduced “with immediate effect”, one of our military legacies. Firstly, fees should be charged per unit or course is the norm across the world. A date needs to be set, and several things need to be in place, including scholarships and a loan scheme that is administered by the banks. Nigeria has a chronic history of giving out loans that are never re-paid. Let the banks administer student loans and hold on to the collateral until the loan is paid off. One sure collateral is the certificate; universities should send the original certificates to the bank from which the student secured the loan while the student only gets a copy. Students should not begin to pay back until they are earning money at a set level; we are now able to trace most income through the bank verification numbers. 

Research funding is poor. The Government’s intervention through TETFUND is commendable but other sources of funding and funding model need to be explored. The private sector needs to be involved individually and directly; only companies that invest in research grow and the largest reservoir of research manpower is in the universities. Our private sector should use this manpower, pay for it and grow.

I have to stress on the need for universities to generate their own income. Most universities have agricultural programmes. Why are they not into commercial farming and food processing? Some institutions teach business. Where is their business venture? Fashion courses – show us your garments! The medical schools are doing well, running teaching hospitals that are generally of a higher standard than the general hospitals. As universities make money, they should also invest in other areas – company shares, bonds, etc. Universities need to wean themselves off government funding, otherwise the government would eventually look down on them, and this is what has brought IPPIS on academics in Nigeria. Show them you can make your own money and earn the respect!

Perhaps, it may be time to look at public-private partnerships to run some public universities. Many private universities are doing well, even when they have less infrastructure than the public universities. Perhaps, let’s give a few public universities to them to manage and assess the result. We can start with one university per geo-political region and grow from there. Nigeria has made an investment in tertiary education, let’s grow it.

Finally, I think it is time for the Government to call in some expert consultants to look at our education system, particularly the tertiary sector. As I said above, when one is living in a system, s/he fails to see the problems. There are experts around the world who can come in and proffer excellent, workable solutions to the problems plaguing the education system in Nigeria. If the Government chooses to use this option, I plead that they implement the recommendations. There are so many recommendations into too many things that are simply put away.

I promised myself that I would be kind to my constituency in Nigeria and to the Government in this article. As the clock strikes 2.30 am, I think that I have kept to my promise. I urge my readers not to take anything in this article personal; it is only my personal reflection. Feel free to use the grain and try to process the chaff into something useful, as we do in modern agriculture. I wish our tertiary education sector all the best. A decentralised Nigeria would save Nigeria. It is how all federations work.

Prof Paul A. Iji – Dean, College of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Fiji National University; Author of Writing and publishing your research (hard and Kindle editions) and A guide for young Africans growing up overseas. CreateSpace/Amazon. The views expressed here are those of the Author and do not reflect the views of his employers. Please feel free to share.