Nigerian Universities

Nigerian Universities: Hedgehog Shells?

Abdullah Musa

I am currently attending a part-time language appreciation course at a Nigerian University. The spur for writing this article stems from my experience while attending the lectures. For a start let me mention that about two-hundred plus candidates registered for the course. Most paid the fees amounting to over ten thousand Naira. When we started the course at one of the campuses, the lecture rooms were really deplorable. There were many broken chairs, and worse, this particular university felt that sanitation can be taught, made a propaganda stunt by various governments, but never to be implemented within university walls. The chairs were always covered with dust, the floor looking like that of the garden: dead tree leaves and waste paper served as the unpleasant-looking carpet.

For a course supposed to last for nine months, more than three months were spent as PAID strike. I said paid strike because I am sure the university authority had to pay the lecturers their normal monthly paychecks, while on our part, we as private individuals paid from the sweat of our labor for a nine-month training while we got short-changed to six months or less. And at the end of the day, a kind of paper, (can you call it certificate?) will be given out testifying that you passed through so and so, and acquired such and such.

The promise made to us was that after the prescribed period, participants were expected to have working knowledge of the language being taught. Two months to the ‘end’ of the program, the coordinator testified that we would not be equipped to fit into a Diploma course for the same language. (it was a another promise broken, for we were told on enrolment that our nine months exposure would give us a thorough grounding to enable us fit into the diploma program.)

Two things stand out to me as areas for attention in Nigeria’s educational system: one is the question of disruption of academic calendar, and the other is the inability of service providers to accord dignity to man, particularly black man.

While I was growing up in village, the means of transportation was by commercial trucks: from rural areas to towns and cities. Goods, animals, poultry, and human beings were all packed together without discrimination. It was simply a question of lack of choice. This was in the sixties. Forty years on, Blackman is still without dignity. Commercial buses, taxis and even achaba operators would carry more than the authorized number of passengers. The people accept it, their governments all the more indifferent.

Today while we live in squalor, governments would spend billions in areas pleasing to them and their cronies, while we live in stinking hell-like houses because we simply have neither choice nor voice. When young men and women enroll into our higher institutions, they do so not because they desire knowledge, but because they desire certificates. This the lecturers and the university authorities know, and on this they capitalize. They may curtail the academic year by spurious strikes, and yet the students will pass out, with groveling colors of course.

Indignity is the hallmark of the black person. The condition of the lecture rooms, the conditions of the hostels, and uwa uba, the lack of electric power may all have to do with the mindset that those with authorities come to have: the led must be trampled upon. While we were receiving lessons in the language course, the lecturer lifted his head to see a nest of a bird atop a ceiling fan! He drew our attention that because the power failure had become permanent, a bird found it convenient to create a nest on an instrument whose very nature dictates speedy motion, in order to cool the environment. The university in question may not necessarily be in charge of PHCN, but is it not the products of such university that went out to mess up the conditions of living of the people?

Forgive me for sounding monotonous. My experience with the country side is what made me caption my article as you see it. While going about in the farms in those days, it was usual to cite a hedgehog just in front of one. Yelling with the excitement of the young, we would rush in order to hopefully catch it. To our dismay, we would find that it was only a shell, the whole content being expertly removed. There is a folklore surrounding the relationship between a falcon and a hedgehog.

The import of our reference being that the universities are simply a shell of what they were, or even more appropriate, what they ought to be. Looking from outside, with all the new edifices going up, you would think here is a centre of excellence. When you go in, you find a centre of deception and more damaging, human degradation.

We go nowhere in our developmental thrust in so far as we don’t start by according dignity to black men. That dignity starts with the setting up of standards; standards which must be religiously upheld. Is there dignity to black woman when she is either forced by circumstance or by being victim of her own idiocy, to ride a motorcycle in close proximity to stinking youth, just because she has to move from point A to point B?

There are so many forms of indignities that we suffer. But the indignity that the Secretary to the Federal Government seems worthy of giving attention to, is that of a Minister being driven to the airport by his own driver, instead of one on Government’s direct payroll! There is no indignity in learning science without laboratory; without experiments in Physics, for want of power; with losing lives in pothole-ridden roads; or even with youths hawking petrol by the road sides, bringing deaths and destruction to the unfortunate from time to time.

If it were possible to run the universities as they should be run, there might be hope that the products may change society for the better. Whoever is dehumanized in the course of his or her life, would ultimately dehumanize others once he or she gains ascendancy. When you pass through university as half baked product, you would hardly graduate to be one who would fund education the hilt. You would come to the realization that the funds meant for the universities when you were in them, were siphoned off by those who run the system. Now that you are amongst those who run the system, why should you do otherwise?

My solution is an exercise in futility because those who govern are those who have no regards for the governed. Most of them believe in the supremacy of the leader, as “brain worker” in the mould of the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm. Would one then waste time to address one who is incapable of thinking beyond the promptings of his personal welfare? Racial pride is a times necessary for the achievement of worldly excellence. The average black leader does not belong to his people. Their squalor, their misery, do not touch his conscience; neither does he gauge his performance or achievement in terms of how many he has moved from penury to abundance. He is an inheritor of the colonial legacy: the white, and ‘successor-white’, being more equal than the pure black!

So when one writes, it is with intention that whoever decides to be different should come to know that there are others like him who are also positively different. The Muslims’ Qur’an says that human life is made up of days being alternated between people: meaning if today it is them who are calling the shots, tomorrow it is us, or others similar to us.

No matter who is going to scream; no matter who is going to strike; no matter who is going to be fooled into burning university properties, when in a position of authority I would either privatize the universities, or give out it their management to international consortium. All the hues and cry about culture, about sovereignty, about the rights of Nigerians to run their own varsities will fall on deaf ears. They have not and they cannot ever run their own universities. We are a people with no self esteem. We do not gauge ourselves and compare our actions to those of others. We operate in kind of closet. Our baseless quarrels, spurred by meaningless ethnic prejudices are ruinous, and can only lead to the type of disaster in which we are in now.

The faculty, the management, the student body will all be internationalized. That is the only sure safeguard against our own lunacy. I recognize that more than half of Nigerian population is poor. This sane management will give a costing of how much the training of a particular student will cost, and I will pay for all the students that I will sponsor; and all state governments will also pay that amount.

This sane management will also give me a budget of necessary infrastructural development needed to make the universities to international standards. I may use the proceeds of privatization to finance these. In any university, the total number of indigenous staff may not be more than 50%, while the management component should not be more than 10%. The university system is a service industry. We cannot afford to leave it in the hands of cultists, religious bigots and the likes, to keep on producing future bad eggs for the society. The sad story of ABU is simply that it has become a tool in the hands of those who always see politics as war of attrition. When they cause one of disturbance or the other, it may be with intent to reap one gain or the other in either Kaduna State, or in Abuja. ABU has thus been converted from centre of learning, to a tool of blackmail.

One significant feature of the universities will be the science bias. I will make 90% of them purely for scientific studies, while purely humanity-related ones will be very few; and if I control the federal government, I would leave the funding of such to states and local governments. In the new universities, strikes will not be tolerated, because the local content will be very few. We will not be entrusted with management of our own affairs till we show the requisite sanity needed to run a society set for industrialization. After some years, you will not hear of voodoo merchants like Adedibu and co.

Who knows, we might even need a new immigration policy if Nigeria is to survive and be great. A sprinkle of one million-member, foreign, scientific community, will do wonders to our economy.

Are you angered? I hope so. Give us your alternative view, for the current position stinks. And if you feel comfortable with the current set up, then you are one of them.