The Citadel of Tertiary Education in Nigeria According to Webometrics, a respected authority...
The Citadel of Tertiary Education in Nigeria
According to Webometrics, a
respected authority in the ranking of universities globally, no Nigerian
university is in the top 1,000 in the world. In fact, the highest ranked
Nigerian university, the University of Ibadan, is placed 1,258 globally and
number 18 on the continent of Africa, far behind universities from South
Africa, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya and Uganda. This is not a compliment for a country
touted as the giant of Africa and the enormous resources it has been endowed
with. To say the Nigerian education sector is suffering and gasping for breath
is saying the obvious. The recent outbreak of COVID-19 really exposed how
terrible the situation in the sector is. While many countries found means of
averting a total shut down of the sector, Nigeria is still groping in the dark.
The primary and secondary levels are a bit better off in one aspect – they
don’t experience incessant strikes that plague the higher education sector.
Inadequate funding
While the United Nations Educational Scientific and
Cultural Organization, UNESCO, recommended that between 16-25 per cent of the
budgets of developing nations like Nigeria be devoted to education, federal
allocations to education in Nigeria rarely go beyond 6 per cent, a far cry from
internationally recommended standard. In the 2021 Budget proposal dropped last
week by President Muhammadu Buhari at the National Assembly, a mere N197
billion was earmarked for education out of a budget estimate of over N13
trillion. The breakdown shows that education generally would get N127 billion
and the Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC, would get N70 billion. With
such paltry sum, how would facilities and other things be provided in the
universities?
About to face the realities of university life
Corruption in the system
Corruption is not only a monster, it is becoming the norm and part of the culture in this part of the world. Despite the fact that meagre resources are allocated to the sector, they are mostly not judiciously used. It was in the bid to stem the tide that the government introduced the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System, IPPIS, but it is like creating a bigger monster while trying to tame a small one. Not minding university workers’ reservations that the platform does not take into account the peculiarities of the university system, the hiccups trailing it are too many. Workers cannot say this is what they earn as salaries. A worker may be paid N5 this month and get N2 as salary the next month. Mismanagement of scarce resources is at unimaginable level.
Brain drain
In the 1960s to early 1980s, a number of foreigners
were in the nation’s universities as teachers and students, now the story is
different. Recently, the Minister of State for Education, Chief Chukwuemeka
Nwajiuba, said the bulk of government’s finance in education is used to pay
about 10,200 lecturers in federal universities. Is the figure even adequate for
the universities? Because of dearth of teachers, a number of courses have been
cancelled or not accredited. The few lecturers available are always transiting
between their primary places of assignment and some private universities where
they work part time. For foreign students, Nigeria is no longer a player in
that market that generates over $200 billion annually. Who will send his ward
to a place where the academic calendar is never stable.
Incessant strikes
With the gradual reopening of the education sector after nearly six months of closure due to the outbreak of COVID-19, students in tertiary institutions in Nigeria, especially those owned by the Federal Government, may still spend some time at home doing nothing, no thanks to ongoing strike and threats of strike by different staff unions. Strike is a great hindrance militating against the provision of unhindered quality higher education in the country. For instance, the ongoing strike by ASUU would have been on for 215 days by October 15, 2020, but the closure of schools because of COVID-19 has not made its impact felt as expected. The strike is the longest in the history of the union. Already, the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities, SSANU, and the Non-Academic Staff Union of Universities, NASU, are on a 14-day warning strike. They also said they would commence an indefinite one if their demands are not met. This is just as the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics, ASUP, and the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Polytechnics, SSANIP, have also issued strike notices.
Uncertainty of Resumption
Solutions
to problems
According to the National Secretary of the Nigeria
Union of Teachers, NUT, Mike Ene, it is just a matter of priority. “From cradle
to death, life is full of struggles and if you structure your life, you will find
out that in the face of scarce resources, some ambitions are better forgotten.
That will lead to giving priority to some areas. If we want the best for
ourselves and country, education is a top priority. “No nation can rise above
the level of its education and if we don’t want to be left behind, we must
begin to fix the sector, as the future of the country is at stake,” Ene opined.
For the National President of ASUU, Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi, government and its
policies on education are to blame. “ Look at the amount allocated to education
in next year’s budget, as usual, it is below expectations. For years now, the
government has not allocated more than 6 percent of the budget to education and
that doesn’t show us as a serious nation. Even the slight increase in the
figure pales to nothing when you consider the value of the naira. “What the
government seems not to understand is that if adequate funding is given to the
sector and attention focused on it, it can be a great source of revenue to the
country. Foreign students would come and pay in foreign exchange and that is
what can be used to finance the education of locals. That is what other nations
do when they attract foreign students. “ On strikes, government is fond of
making promises it cannot fulfil. They will promise something now and renege on
it. Everything boils down to lack of seriousness and we are just toying with
our future,” he said.
The South-West Coordinator of the National Association of Nigerian Students,
Kappo Samuel Olawale, urged the government to be serious about education and
called on the workers to be considerate too. “The government should do the
needful by giving the necessary attention and support for the sector. We must
know that our youths are going to compete in the global market and whatever we
did not inculcate in them, they cannot show it. “ As students, we are appealing
to workers in the sector to also be considerate and be ready to make sacrifices
and shift ground where necessary. Corporate bodies too should help fix the sector.
Interventionist agencies such as TETFUND must be supported to discharge their
obligations” he noted. A parent, Johnson Adeleke, said it is unacceptable for
the nation’s leaders to live in affluence and send their wards to foreign
universities, while local ones are bleeding to death. “ Let political office
holders help the nation by reducing their salaries and allowances. If we commit
half of what is spent on them on education, we will be having a better story.
Gone are the days when our universities can rate better than some foreign ones,
now the reverse is the case,” he said.
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