Category: Niyi Akinnaso

 Niyi Akinnaso

As the novelist William Gibson once said, “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” The same can be said of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, typified by new ways in which the technologies and infrastructure of the Third Industrial Revolution are becoming embedded within societies and various sectors of social life.

One of the major offshoots of the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions is the evolution of robust online platforms, better known as Learning Management Systems, which allow for the digitalization of knowledge and its simultaneous transmission via text, voice, and video over space and time.

However, as Gibson once mused about the future, while it is no longer hype to tout the digitalization of knowledge made possible by online platforms, it remains an elusive goal for many universities in Africa, Nigeria inclusive.

That is, however, not the case for Elizade University in Ilara-Mokin, Ondo state, where all courses offered by the university went fully online, following the shutdown of primary, secondary, and higher education by the Federal Government as part of the measures to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

True, the Federal Ministry of Education would like all Nigerian universities to offer their courses online during the period of the shutdown, only a few, mostly private, universities have been able to do so. Besides EU, others include Covenant University, Ota; Bowen University, Iwo; American University of Nigeria, Yola; and Nile University, Abuja.

Long before the advent of COVID-19, each of these institutions has integrated one online learning system or the other into its teaching and learning practices. For example, Covenant has been using the Moodle system for quite some time, while EU has long been using iLearn to upload course outlines and lectures, which students can access from anywhere at anytime. It was, therefore, easy for these institutions to augment the relevant system in order to put all its courses online.

At EU, a combination of iLearn and Google Suite for Education was deployed. In particular, Google Meet supports virtual classrooms and meetings, enabling teaching, learning, and working from anywhere with video capabilities. Each faculty, staff, and student of Elizade University has an e-mail account mapped with the University account, and these accounts have been designed for every faculty and student to initiate and participate in the on-line classes.

This platform allows faculty to set up their classes and invite the students via e-mail which is sent to the students to ‘meet’ the lecturer for the class online. This is accompanied by video access, giving room for the lecturer and the students to see and interact. However, the student can choose to pause the video and make do with the audio only.

EU’s online success is made possible by the robust IP Network backbone, a modern Tier 3 Data Center, an STM1 MPLS backhaul Broadband internet pipe, and 24/7 power supply in which the University’s Founder, Chief Michael Ade.Ojo, OON, had invested from the beginning and which he continues to augment as recommended by the University’s ICT team. The present system allows for the seamless delivery of online teaching  and learning.

This is not to say that all has been well with EU’s online learning nor has the university been able to optimize cutting-edge resources for the purpose.  For example, some students have found it difficult to log in all of the time due largely to one or more of the mitigating factors discussed below. Nevertheless, with the culture of online learning being developed in the university, a good template has been set for transiting into a robust system, such as Blackboard or edX. Fortunately, the university is already exploring the possibility of transiting to Blackboard.

The beauty and versatility of Blackboard is demonstrated by the Blackboard App, available on IOS and Android mobile devices. It is designed especially for students to view content and participate in courses,  via text, voice, and video simultaneously, even without the hassle of a computer or tablet and the attendant power supply problem. As a result, students can learn from anywhere, without having to carry along a bulky computer or tablet.

Without a doubt, it has not been smooth for online learning in Nigeria, because there are far too many mitigating factors: How robust is the university’s ICT infrastructure? Does it have a top-end Learning Management System? Do the students own computers or tablets? Have faculty and students been properly trained on how to use and navigate the system? How adequate and regular is power supply? How robust and steady is Internet connectivity? What is the situation with the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities-are they on strike or at work?

It is not clear how many of these questions were raised and thoroughly answered before the Federal Ministry Education mandated the universities to offer their courses online during the COVID-19 shutdown. It is equally unclear why the Vice-Chancellors agreed to comply, knowing full well the numerous mitigating factors, some of which the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, Professor Idowu Olayinka, recently communicated to the university community.

To be sure, school closure is needed to contain the spread of COVID-19. It is equally pedagogically agreed that students tend to forget 30-70 percent of what they learned, if there is no opportunity for reinforcement for a long period of time. Nevertheless, it is disingenuous of the government to appear to be solving this pedagogical problem by mandating online learning in the universities in which it has not properly invested. It is even doubly disingenuous when the government has failed repeatedly to resolve the industrial dispute between it and ASUU.

This, of course, does not absolve ASUU from culpability at this critical period, when its members should have put their intellectual capital on display in solving numerous problems associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here again lies in the advantage of private universities and why they have been able to rise to the challenge of continuing to educate their students during the nation-wide shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission indicated in his convocation lecture at Elizade University’s first convocation ceremony in 2017, the future of university education in Nigeria may well lie with private universities like Elizade University.

Niyi Akinnaso

There is a very large group of Nigerians, who live on daily wages. Think of traders, day labourers, and the large group of artisans, including carpenters, bricklayers, tilers, electricians, welders, mechanics, vulcanizers, “rewires” as well as taxi, kabukabu, okada, and tricycle drivers. These are among the daily paid workers across the country, who live daily on what they earn each day, and that’s only when they are lucky to be engaged.

Long before the advent of COVID-19, the national economy had taken a downturn and power supply, on which most of them depend for their work, has been inadequate. As a result, many artisans had been suffering from low patronage. This explains why Nigeria recently became the poverty capital of the world.

Today, the lockdown in most states in response to the Federal Government’s directives on COVID-19 has put virtually all these artisans out of work. To complicate their plight, they are not covered by the Federal Government’s palliatives or the individual states’ social protection programmes. At the end of the day, therefore, neither the Federal nor the state government’s COVID-19 financial or material assistance reaches them.

This discovery hit me hard recently with an increase in the number of artisans, asking me for financial assistance to see them through the lockdown period. This led me to ask several questions:

How many artisans and daily paid workers are in each state? I doubt if any state has reliable statistics. As a result, it is difficult for any state to plan any measure of intervention for them. Yet, these statistics are not all that difficult to collect. For one thing, most of them have unions or associations in each town or city. The Ministry of Planning and Budget could easily aggregate these data by working through the associations as well as ward and Local Government Chairpersons.

Why do these artisans need assistance now? First, many of them have families, like the elite. They pay have to feed their families and educate their children. Some even have the elderly to care for. In other words, they often have as much responsibility as the elite members of society, at least at the domestic level. If they can suspend expenditure in some areas, feeding cannot be one of them. They and their family members must eat.

Second, neglecting them is a major security risk. The likelihood is very high that some of them might join area boys and other jobless individuals on risky, if not criminal, activities, such as the ones being witnessed in Lagos and Ogun states recently. To be sure, many of them are honest, hardworking people, some of them even deeply religious. Nevertheless, hunger is a passport to temptation, and it must be avoided.

What can be done? At the Presidential Task Force briefing on COVID-19 yesterday, Tuesday, April 14, 2020, the Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, made a suggestion, which, unknown to him, has been my guiding philosophy, more so in the last two weeks. He suggested basically that those who have should share with those who don’t in these trying times. Among those in need in these trying times are those wage earners, who are cut off from their means of livelihood by the lockdown, curfews, and other restrictions.

The above notwithstanding, however, it is important also to stress the need for public education about the COVID-19 pandemic. It is dangerous to assume that those who congregate in markets and roam the streets, without wearing masks or maintaining the required physical distance from others, understand the danger posed by the deadly coronavirus.

The elite may think that they are safe now, by observing the necessary restrictions and the attendant hygiene measures. What they forget is that mechanics, electricians, carpenters, and other artisans, who may work for them in the near future, may be the ones to infect them, when community spread of the virus kicks in on a wide scale. That’s why they need to educate the artisans in their network, keep them off the street, and assist them the best way they can during the lockdown.

Such assistance should not be limited to money and food. They also need the equipment to defend themselves against the coronavirus infection, such as masks, sanitizers, and hand-washing soaps. These are things many of them cannot afford to purchase at this time.

Equally important is the role of state governments in public education and assistance. It is not enough for the government to announce tough measures. It is even more important to educate the public as to why those measures are being taken.

The concept of “the vulnerable” being used in distributing palliatives needs to be widened to include artisans and other daily wage earners. These are people whose vulnerability could be temporary but nonetheless need state assistance to weather the storm of the lockdown. Otherwise, they may become ardent critics of the government and remain so through the next round of elections. State governments with formidable opposition should be very careful in handling this group of citizens as their criticisms may amplify existing negative narratives.

In order to make public education meaningful, federal and state governments should also be transparent. For example, the Federal Government has opened itself to unnecessary criticism by masking recipients of the palliatives by a nebulous register. Apparently, each state has this register, but the citizens do not know how it was compiled. The insinuation, therefore, is that non-party members are excluded.

Finally, as transparent as the Federal Government has been on COVID-19 infections, thanks to the invaluable work of the Presidential Task Force, headed by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha, the secrecy surrounding the treatment status of the President’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, is unsettling. It took days before there was clarity on his test result. Since he has opted for private treatment, we have heard nothing about his status.

True, he made it clear that he was going to get treated on his own private funds. But that does not remove his public status as the Chief of Staff to the President. I just hope he knows that there are those who wish him well and would, therefore, be glad to know that he is making progress.

 

 

Niyi Akinnaso

Since my last article on the postponement of the 51st convocation of the University of Lagos (UNILAG Convocation: Between Council and Management, The Nation, March 25, 2020), some important clarifications have emerged. First, it was not the Pro Chancellor and Chairman of Council, Dr. Wale Babalakin, per se, who ordered the postponement of the event. Rather, it was the National Universities Commission on the order of the Minister of Education. However, it cannot be denied that the action was in reaction to the complaint lodged by the Council Chairman on the lack of sufficient information to Council about the convocation.

True, as pointed out last week, the University Act empowers the Senate to make necessary preparations for the award of degrees, but Section 8 (2) makes it clear that “it  shall in particular be the function of the senate to make provision  for- … (d) the  making of  recommendations  to the  Council with respect to the award to any person of an honorary fellowship or honorary degree or the title of professor emeritus”.

The implication is clear: The Council must approve the list of honorees as part of its overseer function of “general control and superintendence of the policy, finances and property of the University, including its public relations” (Section 7(1) of the University Act). However, convocation re

This leads to the second clarification. It is now apparent from the timeline of events that, for a full week during advance preparations for the convocation, the Vice Chancellor, Professor Toyin Ogundipe, acted without recourse to Council or its Chairman, especially between February 24, 2020, when invitation letters were sent out, and March 2, 2020, when he responded in writing to the Chairman’s memo of February 28 in which the Chairman outlined his misgivings about the preparations for the convocation, particularly the lack of necessary information to Council about the recipients of honorary degrees, the convocation programme, and the invitation to participants, all of which were already public knowledge.

It stands to reason that the Chairman should never have learned about this information from the pages of newspapers. It would appear that the VC sat on the Chairman’s memo over the weekend and only wrote a response on March 2, 2020, the same day he (VC) held a press conference announcing the convocation details to the world.

On the same day, not having heard from the VC, the Council Chairman conveyed his misgivings to the Minister of Education, attaching his February 28th memo to the VC. Special meetings of Council followed on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of March, 2020, at which the NUC’s letter of postponement was discussed among other things. Not even a delegation of the University Senate could convince the Council to reverse the postponement as the Chairman insisted that he was not responsible for it in the first place.

Furthermore, other issues were raised at the 3-day special meeting of Council, some focusing on the finances of the university. In particular, the Council was miffed by the discovery of a large pot of money that was never brought to its attention. The funds included grants from TETFund and money kept for capital projects from funds generated by arms of the university, including the Post Graduate School and the Distance Learning Institute.

Various documents and opinions about UNILAG has since been making the rounds. Some seek to defend the Chairman’s position, while others seek to support the VC. This division is also evident in the reactions to my March 25th article on the postponement of the convocation. Worse still, the division mirrors the fractionalization of both the university community and the Governing Council. The Council is as split as the university community is on the apparent dispute between Council and Management.

For various reasons, it is unclear at this point how a meeting point could be reached between the Chairman of Council and the VC. As previously speculated, it is now clear that the “underlying issues” behind the Chairman’s action and the VC’s recalcitrance are varied and complex, leading to a build up of animosity and recurrent miscommunication between them.

It would appear that both have different interpretations of certain procedures, leading to different expectations. On the one hand, as a senior lawyer, Babalakin, as Chairman, puts the University Act over existing conventions. On the other hand, Ogundipe, as VC, respects the conventions that have been in existence since he joined the university about 30 years ago. Much more than that, however, they seem to have differing interpretations of specific aspects of the University Act, for example, as they relate to convocation ceremonies and university finances.

Moreover, the boundary is unclear between the role of Council as the body in charge of “general control and superintendence of the policy, finances  and property of the University” (University Act, Section 7(1)) and that of the VC as “the  Chief Executive and Academic Officer of the University” in charge of “directing the activities of the University” (Section 9(2)). Each actor has been interpreting the law relevant to his own function almost to the exclusion of the other, and there appears to be no meeting point.

This situation is further complicated by the reported loyalty of the Registrar to the Chairman of Council, instead of the VC, as required by the university regulations, which state, among other things, that the “Registrar shall be the chief administrative officer of the University and shall be responsible to the VC for the day-to-day administrative work of the University” (Section 5(1)).

The stalemate following the postponement of the university’s 51st convocation requires immediate intervention, especially now that communication between the Chairman of Council and the VC has been reduced to writing. In a normal Chairman-VC relationship, writing should be a supplementary, rather than primary, mode of communication, especially as deadlines approach for important tasks, such as a convocation.

From all indications, however, interventions by various individuals and groups have reportedly failed. It seems that the only option available is for the Federal Government to send a Visitation Panel to the university as soon as possible. According to the university’s records, such a panel is long overdue, the last one being about 10 years ago. The Federal Ministry of Education and the National Universities Commission must work assiduously to make this possible in no distant time in order to bring peace to the University of Lagos.

Niyi Akinnaso

There are two important rituals in the life of university students: The ritual of matriculation and the ritual of convocation. The former formally admits students into university and initiates them into university life and cultural practices, while the latter functions both as the ritual of graduation and as initiation into the world of work. They are occasions for family and friends to celebrate with the students. This is especially true of the ritual of convocation, which is often accompanied by pomp and pageantry within and beyond the university.

The psychological trauma on stakeholders can only be imagined, if a planned convocation were suddenly cancelled within days of the ceremony. Everyone is disappointed, including those involved in the preparations; students, who have been looking forward to the event; and their parents and well wishers, who are ready to party with them. Graduands and their parents are suddenly derailed from their plans, which may have included purchase of airplane tickets, advance payments to caterers, hotel and hall reservations, and so on.

There is yet another reason to keep UNILAG’s 51st convocation ceremonies on track. The 50th convocation ceremony before it was postponed to avoid possible disruption by the university unions on strike at that time.

None of the above considerations seemed to have mattered to those who postponed the university’s well-planned and nationally advertised 51st convocation, scheduled for March 9-12, 2020. The arrangements were cancelled on Thursday, March 5, 2020 on the allegation by the Chairman of the Governing Council, Dr. Wale Babalakin, SAN, that the Council was not duly carried along. The claim is the stuff of investigative journalism, and what investigators found isn’t pretty.

Minutes of Council meetings are said to indicate that the budget and date of the convocation as well as the convocation lecturer and the list of honorary graduands were discussed by the Council. Babalakin is however, right that he was not fully aware of some of the details of the arrangements, such as the final change in the convocation lecturer by the Senate (because the last Council meeting preceded that of the Senate); the contents of the invitation letter sent to invitees; and the programme of the convocation ceremony. He duly complained to the VC in his letter of February 28, 2020.

In truth, these excuses are not sufficient reasons for postponing the convocation. According to established university practice, convocations are academic rituals. As such, their arrangements fall squarely on the university senate, the convocation committee, and the university management. The VC and the Registrar are central to these arrangements.

The convocation ceremony itself is chaired by the Chancellor of the University and the lead actor during the ceremony is the University Registrar, who controls turn-taking at the ceremony. There are laid down procedures for convocation rituals and the dates of their performances are normally stated on the university calendar. Moreover, there are standing templates for the invitation and convocation programme, about which Babalakin cannot claim ignorance.

The above notwithstanding, courtesy demands that the Council Chairman be carried along. This should not have been difficult for the VC to do since he is the Chairman of Senate. It simply would have been the case of one Chairman informing another! Alternatively, the Registrar, in consultation with the VC, could have informed the Chairman of Council of the final arrangements for the convocation. After all, the Registrar is statutorily the Secretary to both Council and Senate. There are far too many avenues for communication these days that no one, who should know, should be kept in the dark. If you don’t like the face of the other person, send an email and attach necessary documents. It is all a matter of courtesy.

These lapses assume significance because the triangular relationships among the Council Chairman, the VC, and the Registrar are not as smooth as they should be. The communication line appears broken between the Council Chairman and the VC, on the one hand, and between the VC and the Registrar, on the other hand.

The fallout includes the alleged exclusion of the VC in preparing the agenda for Council meetings and the non-inclusion of his quarterly situation report on the agenda. Yet the VC is the Chief Executive Officer of the university, who is in a position to know virtually everything on campus, either by himself or through appropriate surrogates or delegates, including his Deputies, the Registrar, Deans, Directors, and Heads of Departments. The Chairman of Council needs the VC’s cooperation just as the VC needs his and that of the Registrar for the smooth running of university affairs.

Babalakin is culpable for the postponement of the convocation to the extent that he did not act his position well in two ways. First, he over-reacted to non-substantive, internal matters, such as, I didn’t know about this and I didn’t know about that. If he was not satisfied with the VC’s March 2 response to his memo of February 28, the postponement of the convocation was not the appropriate reaction, just as the local branch of the Academic Staff Union of Universities went overboard in declaring the Babalakin persona non grata. Neither action bodes well for the university’s image.

Second, Babalakin erred in referring the matter to the Minister of Education, who, without investigation, ordered the National Universities Commission to postpone the event. With the incursions of the NUC and the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board on university autonomy, Babalakin’s action has further diminished whatever is left of university autonomy by draggiing the Ministry of Education into the fray.

Unless there are other underlying issues, it would appear that the festering misunderstanding among the trio of the Council Chairman, the VC, and the Registrar underlies Babalakin’s actions. It is like the case of a couple in perpetual dispute. Every action by the other spouse is mapped onto the festering feud.

This situation has to be rectified immediately by the appropriate bodies, especially the Alumni Association to which both the Chairman of Council and the VC also belong. This is necessary in order to avoid further dent on the UNILAG brand. In this age of competitive admission offers, university jobs, industrial relations, and world ranking, image has become a critical factor in decision-making.

The burden is on Babalakin as Council Chairman, to leave behind an enviable, rather than a detestable, image for UNILAG, his alma mater.

Niyi Akinnaso

Only those who think that continuity and change are incompatible will cry over the recent changes in certain education policies in the State of Osun. To see the changes as anything beyond the necessity of responding to the yearnings of the people is to marry them onto some pre-existing differences. The same template applies to those who may want to gloat over the changes. In the final analysis, they are what they are-stakeholder-driven modifications to a broad range of policies affecting primary and secondary education.

True, the ultimate decision to implement the changes rests with Governor Gboyega Oyetola, but everyone knows that to ignore the yearnings for change in those policies is to lose political capital. Unlike his predecessor, Rauf Aregbesola, who spent other forms of capital, especially social capital, such as dancing and politicking with the people, Oyetola has mainly the political capital of his office to spend, and he has to spend  it very carefully. If nothing else, the geopolitics of his election warrants caution.

The naked truth about Aregbesola’s education policies is that they were initially preferred to the pre-existing rot in the sector. This was especially true of the novel model high schools, free school uniforms, free school feeding, the Opon Imo tablet, payment of WAEC fees for final year students, and the mesmerizing calisthenic displays. However, as the policies took shape, criticisms crept in. This was especially true of school mixing, renaming, and reclassification as well as the size of the model schools. The unusualness of some of the policies became more and more irksome.

Nevertheless, in several opinion polls, Aregbesola’s popularity soared by the end of his first term due to a combination of his social capital, his social protection programmes, and the overall response to his development projects across the state.

However, complications began to set in as the state fell into cash deficit due to a dip in oil prices, which negatively affected the state’s federal allocations. It was a combination of savings, borrowings, and sheer ingenuity that carried him through the second term.

As the 2018 election cycle set in, the criticisms of the education policies were once again amplified by the opposition parties, especially by the candidate of the Social Democratic Party, former Senator Iyiola Omisore, who denigrated the education policies in their entirety.

As is usually the case in a democracy, citizens often take advantage of democratic transitions to seek change. It is, therefore, not surprising that various stakeholders in the education sector would seek change to the education policies about which they had expressed misgivings, leading to the developments discussed last week on this column (see Continuity and change in Osun’s education policies, The Nation, March 12, 2020).

The changes notwithstanding, Aregbesola’s legacies in Osun endure and are being perpetuated by the present administration. This is not surprising for several reasons. First, Aregbesola was the first governor to successfully complete two terms of office in the history of the state. He had time to stamp his achievements on the state not only in the education sector, where the model schools, Opon Imo, and Omoluabi ethos have become emblematic and enduring, but also in other sectors, including infrastructure, health, social protection, and the governance template inherited by the succeeding administration.

Second, he brought into the politics of the state and left behind the core of political office holders in the administration that succeeded him. The present political officeholders, who also served on his cabinet, include the Governor himself; the Chief of Staff; and the Commissioners for Finance; Works; Health; and Economic Planning, Budget and Development. Indeed, a number of the other cabinet members also served in Aregbesola’s administration in one capacity or the other.

No wonder then that, despite strident criticisms by the opposition, the Opon Imo tablet, one of the signature projects of the Aregbesola administration endures. Furthermore, the present administration has commenced the remodelling of various schools across the state in order to stand them in good stead against the model schools, thereby further enhancing the value of Aregbesola’s investment in education.

The infrastructure projects being pursued by the present administration are largely continuations of existing or earmarked projects. Accordingly, the present administration has expended close to 4 billion Naira of its meagre resources to continue uncompleted projects, such as Osogbo-Ila Odo, Gbonga-Akoda, and the Osogbo ring road, locally nick-named Baba Ona. At the same time, work is ongoing, or completed on earmarked roads in Ede and Ejigbo, among others.

Similarly, the ongoing construction or remodelling of Primary Health Centres across the state are earmarked projects for which funds only became available at the inception of the new administration.

Furthermore, the discontinued airport project, on which a lot has been expended, is being revived, rather than completely abandoned.

The continuation of the above-named projects serve two related purposes. By focusing on projects uncompleted or earmarked by the Aregbesola administration, Oyetola is signalling the celebration of his former boss’s legacies, while, at the same time, fulfilling his campaign promise of continuity.

This may sound trite when placed against the time-honoured assumption that government should be a continuum. It is, however, very significant when viewed against the general practice in this country, by which new governors abandon their predecessor’s projects and embark afresh on their own new ones as indications of unique achievements. Such unnecessary braggadocios are antithetical to the spirit of democratic governance, where institutions are supposed to endure and projects are meant to be sustained by succeeding administrations.

To be sure, Aregbesola’s ardent critics have been drinking from the pool of these changes, spitting their mouthful on everybody’s face. He sure deserves some of the criticisms particularly for not securing sufficient stakeholder input at the beginning and for not heeding their objections when they were loudest. For policies as broad and far-reaching as those he established in education, a bottom-up approach and cut-to-size projects are the best ways to guarantee acceptance, manageability, and sustainability.

However, when placed against the totality of Aregbesola’s overall legacies in the state, it is clear that those who now seek to throw the baby with the bathwater are either mischievous or ignorant of the overall picture.

By Niyi Akinnaso

If my party believes there are areas which I ought not to have done or which I would have done differently, the party will adequately inform IleriOluwa, and he would do so. So, expect him to do things differently.

• Former Governor Rauf Aregbesola, now Federal Minister of Interior, during the 2018 governorship campaign in support of the present Governor, Gboyega Oyetola

If it is the yearning of the majority of the people that we should reconsider any policy … we would look at it.

• Governor Gboyega Oyetola (then APC governorship candidate), responding to the question during the governorship debate in 2018 as to whether he would scrap common school uniform, if he became the Governor.

About two weeks ago, a review committee suggested changes to several education policies in the State of Osun. The changes affect school uniforms; the reclassification, mixing, merging, and renaming of schools; the management of the Model High Schools; early childhood educaton; and the structure of the Ministry of Education. It is important to place these changes within the appropriate historical and political contexts.

As indicated in the opening quotes, both the immediate past Governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, currently the Federal Minister of Interior, and the present Governor, Gboyega Oyetola, anticipated these changes. A major reason for this anticipation is that these policies were being criticized even as they were being implemented. For example, alumni associations of several secondary schools opposed the renaming, mixing, or merging of their schools.

Neither the past nor the present administration was oblivious to these criticisms. After all, the core of the Oyetola administration today is a carry-over from the immediate past Aregbesola administration. This includes the Oyetola himself, who was then the Chief of Staff; the present Chief of Staff, who was then the Director General of the Office of Economic Development and Partnerships. In addition, the Commissioners for Finance, Health as well as Budget and Economic Planning, all retained their former portfolios.

The question, then, is: Why these changes now, when the present administration is a continuation of the previous one?

As indicated above, the agitation for change preceded the present administration and endured during the governorship campaign, when the voters knew that a new administration was coming on board. It was this agitation that led ace Political Reporter, Seun Okinbaloye, to pose the above question to Oyetola during the governorship debate.

Oyetola’s response notwithstanding, he did not just wake up one morning to change the policies. He went about it methodically, employing a bottom-up approach. First, shortly after becoming governor, he embarked on a Thank-You tour across the state. As it is to be expected, the people seized the opportunity to make several demands, including changes to several education policies.

Not done, Oyetola invited the UK’s Department for International Development to conduct a Citizens Needs Assessment for the state. I attended the presentation of the findings and also read the full report. In local government after local government, the citizens agitated for one change or the other in the education policies.

Armed with these data, the Ministry of Education interviewed various stakeholders on their reactions. According to its report of these interviews, there were overwhelming requests for a thorough review of the education policies.

It was at this point that the Governor set up an internal committee, headed by the Deputy Governor, to review all requests for change in the education policies. It was this committee that distilled the various requests to eleven critical ones. The Governor subsequently presented the eleven requests to a Technical Committee for its recommendations.

The Committee recommended changes across the board, save for the Opon Imo tablet. The Committee recommended retooling the tablet for cost effectiveness. It further recommended the cooperation of critical stakeholders, especially parents and teachers; streamlining production and distribution; and exploring an alternative power source, such as solar energy.

The Committee noted several problems with the educations policies. One, the common school uniform for all schools made it difficult to identify pupils or students with particular schools, especially where there were security breaches.

Two, the merging, mixing, and renaming of schools irked many alumni associations, whose members could no longer identify with their old schools. In a number of cases, some renamed or mixed schools retained their old names in the records of the West African Examinations Council. There were cases of boys whose WAEC certificates placed them in Girls Schools, leading to suspicion of fraud.

Three, the reclassification of grades into a 4-year Elementary, 5-year Middle, 3-year High, and 4-year Higher education system is viewed as a violation of the National Policy of Education, which adopts a 6-3-3-4 system. One of the disadvantages posed by this violation is the reported refusal by UNICEF to release certain education funds to the state because of the departure from the national norm.

Four, the suspension of Early Childhood Care Development Education led to grave consequences, including stoppage of grants from the Federal Government and UNICEF for this education tier.

Two critical questions emerge: First, why did Aregbesola change from the status quo to which the State is now seeking to return? Two major reasons: One, educational achievement was very low when he came on board in 2010, requiring immediate intervention. Two, many of the changes made were driven by the dual need to generate income and provide employment and training for Osun youths. For example, the construction of Model Schools provided immediate employment for construction workers, while the Garment Factory provided both employment and training. Similarly, school feeding provided employment for caterers and nutrition for school kids in the vulnerable 6-9 age grade.

However, the challenge for Aregbesola was not limited to criticisms of the new policies. Improvement in educational outcome lagged behind the huge investment in the sector.

This leads to the second critical question as to whether return to the status quo will lead to improvement in educational outcome. This remains to be seen. Clearly, the pressure is now on Oyetola to move beyond structure to content and process, by investing in curricular reform, teacher recruitment, capacity building, ICT training, library and laboratory equipment, and more effective instructional delivery methods.

A major lesson from these developments is the need for governments to base policies on citizens’ needs and demands rather than on what is considered by politicians to be beneficial to the people, no matter how well intentioned.

 

By Niyi Akinnaso

At a time when countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia are paying more and more attention to university education through infrastructural development, digital learning management systems, targeted funding, breakthrough research, and faculty and student exchange programmes, African countries are squabbling over political positions, with their elite being consumed in power struggle and primitive accumulation, while only paying lip service to university education. Universities are mushrooming all over the place, alright; but most of them are lame at birth, while older ones are wallowing in crumbled and still crumbling basic infrastructure and facilities.

Over there, the focus is on giving the best education to the few as university students are being prepared for global competitiveness. Down here, the focus is on giving the worst education to the most university students, as they are being prepared for local markets, which have much fewer jobs than the number of graduates being produced. The few available jobs are offered to more prepared graduates (mostly children of the African elite) trained in the advanced countries or in elite local private universities.

The situation could not have been worse for Nigeria than now, when the major indicators of quality university education are at their lowest levels, leading to the production of poor quality graduates, who are being advised by the government to go to the farm in the absence of job opportunities. Those who don’t want to go to the farm take to various forms of crime.

Nigerian universities lack four major indicators of quality education, accounting for the present sorry state of the sector. First, while the world’s top universities operate with sizable budgets, Nigerian universities lack adequate and regular funding, not just to pay staff salaries but also to fund research and provide cutting-edge facilities for teaching and learning. Save for a few private universities into which their proprietors pumped huge resources, often for take-off, Nigerian university campuses and research facilities leave much to be desired.

Federal and state governments have consistently starved the education sector of funds, with the Federal Government allocating less than 10 per cent of the national budget to education, while states average below 15 per cent. It is quite understandable then why public universities in the nation experience very deep cuts to their budgets. Even the slashed budgets are never paid in full or on time.  As a result, the universities have stagnated, save for the occasional intervention of TETFund and other government parastatals.

Second, good quality universities feature world class teachers, researchers, and students, who invest in one another through stimulating lectures, seminars, workshops, conferences, research, and other academic activities. True, Nigerian premier universities started out this way, but Nigerian universities today suffer from poor quality teaching, reflecting the low quality of lecturers, substandard research output, and unqualified students.

To be sure, there are exceptions here and there, but the general national outlook is discouraging. You have universities where majority of lecturers either lack a doctorate degree or have not attained Senior Lecturer rank; where university teachers make it to the top by publishing in obscure journals in India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and other obscure places; and where unqualified students are admitted and matriculated.

In 2017, a document credited to the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board indicated that at least 23 of the nation’s 168 universities at that time have adopted an admission cut-off of 120 out of a total of 400 points, that is, 30 per cent of the pass mark. It has by now become clear that the decision to lower the admission cut-off was made by the Vice Chancellors, a decision vigorously defended by JAMB as being better than allowing universities to admit students under the table, without even taking the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination at all or encouraging them to go to universities in some other African countries, where the standard may be worse than that of Nigerian universities.

Equally substandard is the prevailing pedagogical practice in the universities. Rather than see themselves as facilitators and employ a modern learning management system, most Nigerian lecturers still see their role as that of a traditional teacher who stands in front of the class and talks till time is up.

Third, Nigerian universities have a management deficit. This is due partly to the politicization of the appointment of key managers of university affairs. The situation is further complicated by the parochialization of the recruitment of academic and administrative staff. The result in most cases is square pegs in round holes.

This is not to excuse the militancy of university unions, which leads to the fourth major problem with university education in Nigeria today. Recurrent strikes by various university unions are often responses either to government’s failure to honour its financial obligations or to poor governance in the universities. Yet, recurrent strikes by the unions could only complicate the declining standard and credibility of Nigerian universities, while also putting the students’ learning experience at risk.

It will be futile to expect a simplistic solution to the problems facing university education in Nigeria today. Nevertheless, to the extent that poor funding seems to be primary, it is high time federal and state government executives got together to jointly empower public universities to increase tuition and related fees.

The ultimate goal is to reduce the gap in tuition between private and public universities in order to reduce the facilities gap between the two types of universities as well as provide a level playing field for admission seekers. At the same time, universities should explore additional ways of increasing their Internally Generated Revenue.

This has become necessary because it is now abundantly clear that neither federal nor state governments could cope with the financial demands of public universities. Even in the United States, state government subventions have long been overtaken by tuition revenues as the universities kept increasing tuition and related fees to make for repeated shortfalls in government subventions.

To be sure, there will be parents who may not be able to afford an increase in tuition. The government could assist such parents with one form of financial assistance or the other. In the final analysis, it is better for the government to focus on Universal Basic Education than to continue with the illusion of affordable university education.

 

 

 

 

Niyi Akinnaso

 

NOW the US Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome … I know that many of my supporters are disappointed. I am too. But our disappointment must be overcome by our love of country … This is America. Just as we fight hard when the stakes are high, we close ranks and come together when the contest is done.

-Former Vice President Al Gore, in his concession speech, following the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the manual recount of votes in selected counties in the state of Florida during the 2000 presidential election.

AS I reflected on the Supreme Court judgements on the Imo and Bayelsa governorship election cases and the reactions of major actors in the Peoples Democratic Party and the All Progressives Congress to the judgements, my mind went straight to the impact of the absurdist actions of the political class and the judiciary on Nigeria’s ailing democracy.

The repeated assaults on the country’s democracy by politicians and judges since its rebirth in 1999 cannot but invoke the punishment meted on Sisyphus by the gods for his mischievous exploits. Sisyphus was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a rock up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. No wonder then that Albert Camus saw in the plight of Sisyphus a vehicle for explaining the futility of our existence in a world devoid of truths and values.

The plight of mischievous Sisyphus is analogous to the behaviours of politicians and judges in the Nigerian political sphere in which failure and futility are pervasive, endemic, and enduring across all institutions, as I observed over ten years ago (see Nigerian politicians, Ekiti, and the Myth of Sisyphus, The Punch, May 7, 2009). With judges and politicians behaving badly in the recent Imo and Bayelsa governorship cases, it is clear that the situation has worsened rather than abated.

There was no extent the aggrieved politicians did not go to signal their disagreement with the judgement of the Supreme Court. Although the Supreme Court judgements in both cases appear to be justified in the eyes of the law, the optics are bad in the perception of the partisan public. The readiness of the Court to review the cases is viewed as admission of culpability, thus aggravating the bad optics.

Observing that there is nothing final in the Supreme Court’s judgement after all, the Peoples Democratic Party quickly mocked the Court, by requesting a review of its earlier decision on the presidential election and other previous cases unfavourable to the party.

It is all too easy to dismiss the American example in the opening quote. After all, the Americans have been at it for over two centuries. But then, Al Gore delved into history for precedents: “Almost a century and a half ago”, he said in 2000, “Senator Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, ‘Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you’.”

Gore did not agree with the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision against him, but he accepted it and offered to assist Bush, who won the Electoral College by only 5 votes, while Gore won the popular votes by 543,895 votes! Poor Gore accepted the nature of their electoral system and the finality of the Supreme Court judgement.

Unfortunately, in our case, neither the electoral system nor the Supreme Court judgement is viewed as beyond reproach. The critical question to ask is: What is it in the nature of our political culture and judicial system that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to do the right thing and behave appropriately?

To start with, political parties do not exist in Nigeria in the form in which they are supposed to operate in a democracy. Rather than provide an ideological base for shared views about the role of government in a democracy, Nigerian political parties exist only as vehicles for grabbing power. As such, the door is wide open for those who can afford it to purchase power as we have witnessed in election after election.

As a result, Nigerian political parties fail repeatedly to perform one of their crucial functions, namely, to provide strong pillars upon which to build our democracy, by successfully screening candidates for elective and appointive offices. This failure is evident in the Bayelsa case, where an otherwise unqualified candidate, whose name changed with every certificate he tendered, was chosen as the Deputy Governor. Given the burden on political parties to nominate candidates for election, it was the political party that lost in the Bayelsa case. The failure of political parties to function as the guardrail of democracy in this respect cannot but open the door for the courts to intervene.

According to the Independent National Electoral Commission, the courts intervened in over 1,600 cases, following the 2019 general elections alone, including the Imo, Bayelsa, and Zamfara cases under discussion. In addition to putting undue burden on the courts, the unprecedented number of cases opened a floodgate of abuse, thereby creating room for further weakening the judiciary.

Another critical factor that has shaped Nigeria’s political culture is corruption, which is as pervasive in the electoral and judicial systems as it is in the wider society. This is so because there really is no system of value anymore to provide a reference point for behaviour. In a society where the educational, economic, political, and infrastructural systems have virtually collapsed, it has become everyone onto himself or herself.

The lack of adequate power supply and the attendant collapse of industries and manufacturing plants have led to high unemployment, leaving politics as the only lucrative job in town. In seizing the opportunity, Nigerian politicians are prepared to throw caution to the winds in the quest for power. This explains why they often blow their tops whenever they lose at the polls or in court.

What they often forget is that they are destroying not only the democratic institutions they are supposed to nurture, protect, and preserve, but also the judicial system they scandalize now and again. At the same time, lawyers and judges have a crucial role to play in upholding the rule of law rather than the lure of money. That’s the only way to preserve the sanctity and finality of Supreme Court judgements.