Salutary news

Editorial

Despite that Nigeria is not one of African countries with the 10 highest rate of literacy, its citizens in diaspora seem to be doing very well in academia and higher education administration. Leeds Trinity University in Horsforth in the United Kingdom has appointed a Nigerian professor, Charles Egbu, as its vice-chancellor, after a national search.

Egbu’s appointment to lead the public university is to commence on November 1. The Anambra State-born academic did his undergraduate education at the Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan University) where he obtained First Class Honours in Quantity Surveying, after which he did his doctorate at the University of Salford, near Leeds. He has 25 years teaching, research, and management experience. During this period, he has written 12 books and over 300 journal articles. Egbu as Professor of Project Management and Strategic Management in Construction has worked in several universities during which he served as Dean of School of the Built Environment and Architecture at London South Bank University, and as Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of East London. He is currently President of the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) and Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce.

We congratulate Nigerians in diaspora in the UK and the USA for doing Nigeria proud in the last two weeks, during which Prof Egbu got appointed as Vice-Chancellor of Leeds Trinity University while Prof Benjamin Akande, an economist trained at The University of Oklahoma, assumed duty as President of the 142-year old Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, in the United States on July 1.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s congratulatory message to Prof. Egbu: “With wide experience as Pro-Chancellor at the University of East London, Dean of the School of Built Environment and Architecture at London South Bank University, and stints at University of Salford, University College London, Glasgow Caledonian University, Leeds Beckett University, among others, I have no doubt that you will acquit yourself creditably once again in this new assignment,” is instructive, particularly as the message reaffirms recognition by the Federal Government, of the role of excellent education in national and global development.

The salutary news of Nigerians making waves in academia in the UK and the USA, the world’s two major centres of knowledge production, restates the need by Nigerian government to make good its promise to lift the standard and quality of education in Africa’s most populous country to the level it was before the 1980s, when Nigerians received invitations  to join many foreign countries in their development efforts across Africa.

While it may sound paradoxical that Nigeria, with one of the highest rates of illiteracy in the world, also has citizens who are heading ranked universities in highly advanced countries, the situation demonstrates that Nigerians can bloom if given an enabling social and cognitive environment.

Some lessons can be derived from the pattern of appointments of Egbu and Akande as presidents of UK and U.S. universities, respectively, especially about the importance of academic freedom and university autonomy, to teaching, research, and management of academic institutions. These two Nigerians received their appointments after a process of national and international search, without consideration for ethnic credentials or for access of candidates to political godfathers.

There is no better time to urge our governments, from the federal down to the local level, to renew their commitment to improve the quality of education in the country, to further prepare Nigerians for effective participation in an increasingly competitive knowledge society of the 21st century.