GOVERNMENTS have been talking to ASUU for more than thirty years and yet they have not been able to find a satisfactory common ground, probably because those talks have lacked the sincerity which could have led them to find an agreement that would have removed all doubts and settled the thorny issue of rescuing our university system from the progressive decay into which it has fallen; and into which it is sinking ever deeper and faster.
It has become clear in the recent past that we are now only going through the motions of producing graduates who know that their finest hour comes up at the increasingly wildly celebrated occasion of the graduation ceremony where their degrees are conferred on them. Everything coming after that is a progressive anti-climax as they struggle without success to get a job which is commensurate with the promise of the degree with which they were decorated upon graduation. It then begs the question as to why millions of Nigerians are still hell bent on going on to university after the acquisition of the secondary school certificate. As I alluded in my first article on the subject of ASUU, there is no other option open to the secondary school graduate in Nigeria but to deepen their irrelevance further by going on to the university for the sake of bagging a degree. Knowing the determination of Nigerians to attend a university by all means necessary, the government finds it politically expedient to facilitate the provision of university places at the expense of quality. This is why the Federal governments which have been struggling to make adequate provision for their universities suddenly added a dozen and more universities to their overloaded portfolio virtually overnight and in doing so attempted to satisfy the yearning of many communities to have university students in their midst. This is so that they could have the opportunity of fleecing them by way of providing shockingly inadequate rented accommodation to their captive student guests.
It is clear that the people of Nigeria are in love with university degrees and when they have failed to acquire what was described as the Golden Fleece, in reference to Jason and the Argonauts, they will stop at nothing to make sure that their children become university graduates. This could be an admirable trait but it has been pushed beyond the limits of acceptability. About forty years ago, the government of the day made visible efforts to encourage technical education and most people have now forgotten that after JSS III, secondary school students were to be separated into two groups; those who were to go on to study academic subjects on the one hand and those who were to be channelled towards the acquisition of technical skills on the other. In order to facilitate this arrangement, many young men and women were awarded government scholarships to several European countries to learn how to teach technical subjects in the new curriculum which was designed to boost the acquisition of technical skills among Nigerian youths. In addition orders were placed for the delivery of the items of equipment with which to impart technical skills to those who were found to have an aptitude for technical subjects. In the first place, many of those who were sent abroad on generous scholarships betrayed the trust reposed in them by refusing to return home after their training and given the time lag between now and then, many, if not most of those absconders are aging quietly after a fruitful career in the comfortable embrace of European comforts. In any case, the equipment ordered for their use were duly delivered but nobody was interested in using them and most of them were not even unpacked from the crates in which they were delivered and have since been allowed to rot quietly. Nigerians have made it clear that it is university education or nothing even when they have little aptitude for the subjects taught in universities. In the meantime, even those tertiary institutions, the polytechnics and technical colleges which have established a solid reputation for the teaching of technical subjects have been converted into degree awarding universities in the midst of the sterile argument about the superiority of university degrees to the Higher National Diploma which is awarded to the graduates of technical colleges. This situation has been enthusiastically supported by politicians who want to be seen to be sympathetic to the yearning of their electorates. The same thing is true of Teacher training institutions which have become irrelevant in the face of the inordinate clamour for university degrees and institutions which for many years have awarded the NCE to aspiring teachers. These institutions are disappearing as their premises, if nothing else, are undergoing a painful conversion to universities. There is therefore a convergence of interest between the people of Nigeria and their government and under that circumstance no responsible government will ignore the wishes of the people no matter even if they are misguided.
Given the ingrained instincts of politicians to satisfy the demands of the electorate, it is clear that government has a healthy interest in providing more university places especially as she has little or no obligation to give any financial backing to the universities which they have created. One of the roots of the problem afflicting our universities at this time is that of overcrowding. Institutions which were designed to cope with three thousand students now have ten times that number and they are still expected to carry on their functions efficiently. And it is not only in the matter of infrastructure that our universities are suffering as the same shortage extends to lecturers and university administrators who are blithely expected to cope with a load of work which is too heavy to be sustainable. This is why lecturers are clamouring to be paid excess workload payments. This clamour has become eminently justifiable in the face of government policy not to replace lecturers who leave the system for any reason. Lecturers are continuously leaving our universities and since they are not being replaced, the load on those left to run our universities is now crushing.
There is need over time to decongest our universities drastically by raising the quality of those who are deemed worthy of a place within their hallowed precincts. It is tragically laughable that candidates who score as low as 120 marks in JAMB are admitted to some of our universities as well as those who need two sittings in their O levels to assemble five credits. Such people are clearly not fit to derive any benefits from the courses of study to which they are exposed in the university. University education is not a mass participation event if only because the process of teaching those whose intellect has not been developed sufficiently to cope with their studies are a great burden on their teachers. Nigerian lecturers are already burdened with a heavy work load and to add the weight of unqualified students to that load takes the situation close to what can be described as cruel and unnatural punishment not even sanctioned for guilty felons but I doubt that ASUU has made this point sufficiently strongly in the process of negotiations with government.
There are too many students being taught in our various universities by too few lecturers and the time has come to remedy this situation. About ten years ago, government conceived and began to implement an ill thought out scheme to send the fittest products of our universities to world renowned universities to undergo postgraduate studies. A large sum of money was set aside for the purpose of running this programme. Ten years later, I wonder how many of those bright scholars have returned to serve within the Nigerian university system. The huge amount of money which was flushed down the toilet in the reckless manner of the administrators of this project would have been used to train a few hundred, if not a couple of thousand graduates right here in Nigeria. There is no doubt that there is an acute shortage of people qualified to be university lecturers in this country and this is something that needs to be addressed right away by the utilisation of universities with a vastly expanded capacity to train students at the postgraduate level. The first generation universities and a few other universities around the country are eminently capable of carrying out this function and should be charged with that responsibility principally because they have the staff who can drive this project. It is however important that this is done quickly before those experienced members of staff retire from the services of the university and are lost forever to the system. As it is, there is no systematic process by which old academics are being replaced and this will invariably lead to the complete breakdown of the system.
ASUU and government have been talking to each other for decades, they have signed one agreement after the other but nothing has come out of these exercises, our universities have become moribund and there is no solution in sight. It is time to review the situation before us before we go further in the struggle to rescue her university system. Government must appreciate that universities cost a great deal of money to run and establishing universities by fiat is at best naïve and may even be described as criminal as on the long run such hurriedly established universities become a drain on scarce resources and the graduates produced are just as ignorant when they leave as when they matriculated and may even be worse. Somebody must be paying some money to the education of university students. Every single student consumes resources which must be paid for in full to maintain the university. It does not matter who pays for this but it must be paid. Some of a socialistic persuasion may immediately jump to the conclusion that this sum of money must be paid by government and government itself has been singing the Free education mantra for so long that she has begun to believe her own fraudulent narrative. Free education is a totally socialistic agenda but we practise a rather virulent form of capitalism in which everything is acquired on the basis of cash and carry. The point has to be made that government must pay a certain sum of money to maintain the studentship of each undergraduate but there must be a realisation that government may not be able to cover all the expenses incurred by each student in which case the student has to pay the difference in the sums to the university as school fees which will be spent and scrupulously accounted for by university authorities.
It should be obvious by now that the problems with our universities cannot be solved by ASUU and government as their causes extend outside the universities. For example how can we address the quality of the students entering our universities without talking about the state of education in our secondary and even primary schools? Or even address the situation of our economy which cannot absorb the products of our universities. The least that the government should do at this time is to placate the lecturers by fulfilling the articles of the agreement freely entered with ASUU in 2009, even if it is only what a body with a modicum of integrity would do. Thereafter, meaningful dialogue about how to resuscitate our comatose university system can commence.