The 2017 list of Nigerian universities approved and released by the National Universities Commission, NUC, shows that Nigeria has 152 universities distributed as follows: federal universities, 40; state universities, 44; private universities 68. Since the commission released those details, more universities must have been approved by the executive council of the federation, thus shooting up the numbers which makes this list not accurate.
Anyone looking at these numbers would be proud to be a Nigerian. Our country is not, God be praised, big for nothing. It has put its wealth where its heart is – universities wise. It has more state universities than the universities in all the countries in the West African sub-region combined.
In sheer numbers, our country has eclipsed all African countries in the establishment of universities. It means, obviously, that Nigeria turns out more university graduates every year than do all African countries north and south of the Sahara put together. Makes happy in this crazy season of tear down Nigeria.
Unfortunately, the numbers do not tell the full facts about university education in our country. The facts of our situation are less impressive. And it is a source of cold shame, not of warm pride.
Take case number one. The university teachers, under the aegis of their union, ASUU, are back in the trenches, fighting an old battle over their welfare, poor staffing and a learning and teaching environment that is anything but conducive to teaching, research and learning. They labour under difficult conditions.
Of the 152 universities, only a handful, according to experts, do really qualify to be the citadels of learning. It is no secret that when the commission visits the universities to accredit courses, the university authorities hire and handsomely pay qualified men and women from overseas universities to present themselves as staff of the universities. They leave when the commission leaves. Objective achieved.
ASUU has been fighting this battle for as long as anyone could remember. But like the battle against corruption, the more you expend the ammunition in the battle, the greater the resilience of the problem. I have pointed out in this column and elsewhere more times than I can remember, that no one needs telling that education holds the key to our national – as indeed, it does in other countries. We cannot fix education without determining its real place and purpose in our development process. Is the aim of our education to turn our universities into degree mills and produce a good number of certificated young men and women who are so half-baked educationally that they are neither useful to themselves nor to the country? Or is to produce educated young men and women who are capable of driving our development as a nation?
These questions are simple but addressing them is not simple. We have not shown the courage to admit that our education is in serious crisis. Instead, we choose to pretend that all is well. We are jolted out of this ill-advised complacency only when the university teachers, the men and women who are saddled with the burden of teaching and researching in a difficult environment, drop their chalks and stay home, leaving their students to an uncertain fate.
When the blight of brain drain hit the country in the eighties, the first group of Nigerians to drain the country of their brains were the university professors and lecturers. You can find Nigerian professors and senior lecturers in many African countries today when our universities are in crying need of these people.
But leaving was not their choice. Their relocation was forced on them by the crisis in our educational system compounded by the absence of the political will to arrest the dangerous drift and keep our brainy university teachers, most of whom were anxious to make their professional contributions to the forward movement of our nation, right here at home.
No matter how much we may pretend about this, the crisis in this vital sector, the pivot of modern development, cannot resolve itself. We must commit to resolving it. It goes beyond getting the lecturers back to the classrooms. The resolution of the current government-ASUU face-off cannot address the crisis in our educational system by merely persuading or even threatening the lecturers to resume work.
The ASUU strike, sad though it is, is a cruel reminder once more that this country has more or less lost it. If we are serious about addressing the multi-faceted problems facing our educational system from the primary school to the university, we should declare a national emergency in the educational sector and commit ourselves to finding meaningful and pragmatic solutions to the problems that our educational institutions face.
The first step here is to place a moratorium on the licensing of more universities – federal, state and private – until we know where we are, where we want to be and how we intend to get there in terms of our educational development.
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