There is no doubt that there is a great need for university placement in Nigeria for the millions of young Nigerians streaming out of secondary schools. The total enrolment of young Nigerians in tertiary institutions including universities, polytechnics, monotechnics, and colleges of education both private and public is not more than one million. This, in a country with a purported population of about 160 million people shows the low level of access to tertiary education. It follows therefore that there is a need for expansion of tertiary institutions in Nigeria. Virtually all the state governments now have universities and there is also a federal university in each of the states of the federation and Abuja.
After the pandora box of private universities was opened, there had been a mad rush of various sectarian organizations and individual businessmen and all kinds of do-gooders to establish universities. The result has not been uniformly good. In general, most of the sectarian universities are likely to have some quality, although no one can vouch for this, but very few of those established by individuals have any quality whatsoever. Unfortunately, this tendency is undermining the genuine efforts of those who are committed to public good like Chief Afe Babalola and Chief Ade-Ojo who by all standards have built institutions that are certainly physically imposing. The National Universities Commission (NUC) needs to be very careful in approving licenses to all and sundry in establishing universities. I know that the NUC has various criteria including money in hand, huge hectarage of land, staffing and so on and so forth but one has doubts as to whether these criteria are being enforced. The most dangerous trend that most of us in the system have noticed is that because of shortage of staff, criteria for promotion of staff across academic levels are being jettisoned to the extent that people are being promoted and even appointed professors without proper assessment in the traditionally acceptable way. Not only that, some universities rent staff and even books and equipments for the purpose of securing accreditation. Some young academics sometime teach in three or four universities at the same time all in a mad rush to make money and certainly at the expense of academic quality and integrity.
Some of the names of some on-coming universities make one to laugh because the names are so foreign that one wonders the reason for approving such names.
I have just had the opportunity of travelling to some universities in England and Scotland and noticing new trends in university education and the stupendous resources needed to realize the academic goals of the well-established universities in these countries. To be specific, the University of Glasgow was established in 1451 and over these centuries, the university has built first-class infrastructure that has enabled it to produce Nobel laureates but in spite of this, the university is still building to renew itself and this year alone, it has a budget of about N266 billion for its services. If one were to compare this with any of our so-called universities in Nigeria, one would get the picture of why no university in Nigeria can be in the first one thousand league globally. The universities in Nigeria generally are poorly funded, poorly governed and poorly staffed.
When the University of Ibadan was the only university in Nigeria, some of its products were acclaimed as one of the best in the whole commonwealth and at a time, the College of Medicine in the University of Ibadan was one of the best in the world. Those were in the halcyon days when things were done properly in Nigeria. Since the mushrooming of universities in Nigeria, things have gone to the dogs academically speaking, but what worries one is the speed and rate at which these so-called private universities are springing up. The Federal Government and even some state governments have also joined in this madness of announcing the establishment of universities apparently without thinking them through and locating them sometimes in inaccessible areas presumably in the interest of even development as if universities were roads, railways and ports. The whole situation is so confused and confusing that one worries about the future. Universities are about people, they are about the future of the country, and they should be anchored on the idea and notion of building our youths for the future of Nigeria.
In a world of knowledge industries, the preparation of the youths for the future is very critical but the way we are going about it in our country raises fundamental questions about our plans for the future. We need to do things a little differently. Of course, every section of the country’s economy is crying for development whether it is telecommunication, transportation, electricity and health but all these are predicated on availability of the right kind of manpower, this is why education is critical. So, what do we do? We need to go back to the regime of planned development as was the case after independence when we used to have five-year development plans at the state and federal levels instead of the haphazard so-called “rolling plans” that was foisted on us by the military. This was the way the old Soviet Union, India, China and the entire Eastern Europe were able to attain the technological level in which they are today. There is no miracle about it, planning is essential to development. The lack of planning in the educational sector is symptomatic and a reflection of the lack of planning in the country as a whole, licensing and building mushroom institutions and calling them universities is not the way out. There are minimum standards of university education all over the world and what we have in Nigeria is by and large a travesty of these universal standards.
