It is that time of the year again – strike season. While the US is dealing with a government shutdown occasioned by political dispute between the Republican and Democratic Parties, Nigeria is undergoing her own version, but by union strikes. The doctors, the lecturers – who may soon be joined by Oil and Gas workers and electricity workers – are on strike. I would like to focus on the ASUU strike because of its regularity, and even predictability.
It is that time of the year again – strike season. While the US is dealing with a government shutdown occasioned by political dispute between the Republican and Democratic Parties, Nigeria is undergoing her own version, but by union strikes. The doctors, the lecturers – who may soon be joined by Oil and Gas workers and electricity workers – are on strike. I would like to focus on the ASUU strike because of its regularity, and even predictability.
ASUU strikes have become so much of a yearly ritual that I have contemplated suggesting that it be part of the academic calendar. That way, the other courses and academic activities can be planned around the regular strikes and there would be fewer cases of lecturers not finishing the syllabus because of “unanticipated” strikes. But to understand the reason for the frequency of ASUU strikes, we must first understand why the lecturers are on strike. The lecturers complain that education is underfunded; the federal government is not meeting the 6% of GDP minimum requirement of the UN. This is a valid concern. The various public universities are in different stages of collapse and disrepair. The laboratories are not equipped with the appurtenances necessary to propagate empirical knowledge or to carry out groundbreaking scientific research. The student hostels are not maintained and, due to increased student population, inadequate. The public universities in Nigeria do not have the right ambience for learning. Broadband internet facilities are a fixture in any proper university abroad. Student and academic centres with high tech facilities, recreation centres, sport centres, etc are being built and upgraded in American public universities in order to attract fee-paying students and thereby supplement earnings with higher fees to make up for the drop in government funding. The funding to do this in Nigerian public universities is not available. They are not even allowed to increase fees to make up for the shortfall.
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The government has not helped matters. While telling the striking lecturers that the amount demanded is too high and the means are scarce, legislator salaries and allowances are being increased regularly. This is a common complaint the lecturers – people who do not have or need anything more than a WAEC certificate and do nothing all day but argue about how high their salaries can be set, earn more than they, the lecturers while denying them of their dues. It is a trite observation that this government does not have the will to fix the rot in public education.
However, it is a surprisingly rarely stated observation that while the lecturers begin the strikes complaining about the quality of education due to poor funding, they usually suspend their strikes after they get a commitment from the government that their salaries would be increased. They even resume the strikes to demand that the salaries withheld during the strikes be paid to them. It is apparent that the lecturers are only fighting for their pockets and not the integrity of public education. Given this situation, how are we sure we would get good returns for any increased spending on the universities?
The fact is that public tertiary education in Nigeria is in dire straits and on its way to extinction. To address this problem, we must understand the real problem; and funding is not the real problem, just a small part of it. There are many problems in the sector that even some lecturers admit to themselves privately but do not discuss publicly to avoid being victimised by ASUU. The underlying problems of university education must be discussed and addressed if there is ever going to be any hope of solving it.
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Public education is a hard nut to crack, not just in Nigeria. In the US, public universities have similar problems as in Nigeria. Academics there complain that whenever there is a problem with balancing the budget, funding to university education is the first to suffer as it is seen as a sector that can raise its own revenue by increased tuition fees. In the UK, the government has decided to target funding on fewer high performing universities; the policy has affected the performance of British universities in international college rankings. In the US, lecturers in public universities – especially in the Humanities – are not paid well, and this affects their performance. As a result, their students are not challenged by well-tailored coursework, and are not motivated to study. For the economy of scale, class-sizes are usually large and this increases the workload of the lecturers and their ability to tailor the academic work to the needs of each student. Because of the policy of the universities on getting tenure and other demotivating factors, the lecturers are more interested in research than in improved teaching methods. Due to the poor performance of students, the lecturers employ grade inflation. These are problems besetting public education in the US and many lecturers in Nigeria can identify with them. However, the lecturers in the US rarely go on strike. Their problems and proffered solutions are discussed and debated, and not limited to just funding.
There is no silver bullet that would solve the malaise in our public education system. The problems in our public universities have to be understood and addressed holistically. The problem of grade inflation, for instance, is a way the lecturers found to deal with the problem of poor academic performance of their students without actually addressing the underlying problem of poor teaching methods. A lecturer in Computer Science takes a course (say on C++ programming or Compiler Construction) and teaches this to students in his department along with a few students from Electrical/Electronics Engineering. Due to the various problems in delivering this course – lack of dedication of said lecturer to his class, absence of feedback system to measure the level of understanding of the students due to the size of the class, lack of electricity to power computers and projectors for the lecture and assignments, non-existence of said computers due to the absence of a computer lab, etc – the students do not perform well in their examinations and continuous assessment tests. To meet the regulation on the average acceptable score for students, the lecturer boosts the actual scores of each student, assigning additional marks where they do not exist. In the end, the students learn nothing but have great scores on their transcripts. A similar thing happens in American public universities. The only difference is that they lower the score required to get a C (giving students this grade for a score as low as 50%) instead of giving the students additional marks.
Lecturers want better salaries in order to be able to dedicate themselves fully to their calling, and not to be distracted by the necessity to have a “side hustle”. I agree that lecturers should be paid well. But there must be good returns for the payment. The lecturers must be qualified and show the ability to produce students that understand the course along with groundbreaking research. The lecturers must also understand that their salaries would be determined by market forces. It is just a fact of life everywhere that lecturers in the Social Sciences earn less than those in the Physical Sciences and Engineering, and lecturers of universities located in urban areas earn more than their colleagues in rural areas. It is also bothersome that the lecturers mainly fight for the salaries for those at the top, like the professors. This is why they fight for the increase of the retirement age for lecturers; they hope to be able to get to the top in their lifetimes. The problem now is they cannot recruit the best graduates to replace them as the salary for graduate assistants is not competitive with the private sector. The lucre at the top is the reason infighting is fierce when a new Vice Chancellor has to be elected, or appointed. And the top is crowded. There is significant focus on the politics of the university than on the quality of the graduates.
A problem that is unique to the Nigerian universities is parochialism in admissions and recruitment of lecturers. The admission quotas and sentimental considerations in teacher recruitment prevent our public universities from being true ivory towers and fountains of intellectualism. We all agree, at least most of us, that tribalism and small-mindedness is the bane of our development. We also know that our liberal arts universities should proffer solutions to the problems facing the society. However, the public universities have been unable to break away from the provincialism besetting society. The ethnicity of the students and lecturers is dictated by the location and I contend that this is the reason the quality of research produced by such universities would always be substandard. Unlike many, I believe our public universities begun their death match not when the military government decreased funding but when they succumbed to tribalism, especially after the Eni-Njoku/Biobaku debacle in the University of Lagos. Right now, if a promising student graduates from one of these universities and he is not from the region where the university is located, he is aware that he would is unlikely to advance in his career if he becomes a lecturer in the institution. It is very common for Nigerians who obtain masters degrees and doctorates from foreign universities, and who are interested in teaching in Nigeria, to go instead to any of the universities in their “states of origin”. This prevents any one public university to accumulate a critical mass of highly qualified lecturers in different fields; this prevents innovation in research as the best innovations are born of the interaction of highly qualified people across different disciplines.
Now, public universities are vested with a responsibility to the community in which they are located. They are expected to educate the community which in turn produces highly skilled people for local industries. For this reason, some public universities, in Nigeria as well as in other countries like the US and Canada, do have admission quotas. But unlike Nigeria, these other countries usually base the quotas on residency, not ethnicity. And they are unwilling to reduce standards for any student regardless of their educational backgrounds or ethnicity. In some universities in the US that do lower the bar for admission of African American students, there is the unresolved issue of high dropout rates among those students.
Don’t get me wrong, education in Nigeria does need funding. Funding is crucial to education; and higher education, good higher education, tends to be particularly expensive. This is a challenge for the sustainability of public university education the world over. It is a particularly difficult challenge in a low-income country like Nigeria. Our revenue from oil is not enough to fund good quality education for every student given our huge population size, and the competing needs of other sectors. For this reason, there is need for hard-nosed pragmatism in addressing the financial matters concerning education. Increased spending must be on an individual basis, based on each institution, and not across the board. Investment in any institution must be based on measurable benefit to society and financial returns. Indeed, it was Obama that justified government funding on research on mapping the human brain by saying “every dollar we spent to map the human genome has returned $140 to our economy”.
Increased government funding should be targeted at those universities that make reforms to their recruitment process, demonstrate better student performances when evaluated by independent testers and industry, and produce research that shows wise application of the little resources presently available to them. The universities should also be allowed to set their tuition fees for new entrants; higher fees would lead to a decreased demand for certificates that students get just for the sake of it. We also need to elect a government that would show more discipline in handling public money; this government would have the moral high ground in demanding discipline and performance from the universities. To enable the universities to carry out reforms internally, some of the laws that make reforms unattractive should be repealed. The admission quotas and catchment area requirements should be abolished. The federal character law should be repealed, or at least the public universities and unity schools should be exempted from its application. The private universities that they compete with are not weighed down by these laws, giving them an advantage in the ability to develop a meritocratic culture. Universities that are overstaffed would have to shed their weight in order to be slim, fit and ready for the future.
The reform of public education in Nigeria is imperative. Many of the players – the government and the lecturers – are ensconced in the current system and may find my suggestions radical. The problem plaguing our educational institutions have to do more with the unhealthy academic culture they have acquired, and I have no illusions that they would be willing to make changes. But if they do not embrace change, they would be overwhelmed by oncoming change. Private universities in the country are trying to meet the need for quality education from students and the production of highly-skilled manpower for the labour market. If the public institutions do not reform, they would likely remain nothing more than certificate-distribution centres and would soon be overtaken by private universities, just as has happened to the public secondary schools.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of SaharaReporters
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