Tag: Academic

I recall my father’s house with raffia palm thatched roof. During the rainy season it used to have one or two small leaking spots here and there; but as time went on, the leaking spots grew in number and size because they were left unattended to. The corruption in Nigeria is akin to the tiny hole on the roof of my father’s thatched house, which reared its ugly head more noticeably in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Each military regime that came up about that time and beyond surreptitiously used corruption as an excuse for the takeover.  Probes were conducted and some highly placed individuals in ministries and agencies identified as corrupt were either retired or dismissed as the case may be. In some cases, the entire establishments were reorganized and the top management replaced.  In some others the names of the establishments were changed as in the case of ECN that was changed to NEPA, PHCN, and finally to DISCO. Those who were left in the system continued from where their predecessors stopped, particularly after the dust of retirement had cleared. The funny aspect of this fight against corruption is that everybody is deemed corrupt “except” the “commanding officer” in-charge of the war on corruption. The commanding officer may in turn, be accused of corruption when he had left the scene, and not while he is still in command.  What also baffles me about this crusade on corruption is that all government agencies have been raided except the universities, our Ivory Towers.  This may be because university workers have no such huge amounts of money to embezzle, or that people think that corruption is only about embezzling government fund.

Let us digress a little and consider the life of termites where everyone has a responsibility. There are the leaders, soldiers, builders, and food procurers among them. In order to eliminate these ants, you have to eliminate the queen mother. The same applies to corruption; to tackle corruption headlong, we have to identify and eliminate the breeder of corruption.  There are two sources where these corrupt individuals are bred.  These two sources appear different but complementary and perform the same function. They are the family and the university; these two carry out the function of moulding the character and teaching our youth.  It is worrisome to note that high profile corruption in Nigeria is high among the highly educated government officials.  And there are hardly any of these corrupt elites that did not pass through university education.

It is in the university that I would like the government to focus her energy on the fight against corruption for it is at this level that our children, the future elites appear to learn the act of corruption. You cannot give what you do not have, corrupt lecturers produce corrupt graduates. Wait a minute, if you are itching to hear how much a lecturer embezzles in a session, forget it.  And asking the soldiers of corruption to declare “operation crocodile smiles” against financial corruption among university lecturers is like trying to kill a menacing mosquito with a cricket bat.  The real danger in the university which I would like the government to tackle is academic corruption; this is more deadly than financial corruption. There is now unwarranted and baseless depravity in our universities.  In recent times, if you glance through the national dailies, you discover that most of those accused of financial corruption are graduates of our universities and mainly those around 60 years of age at the time the offence was committed.  The question is what has the university got to do with corruption?

Let me take us down the memory lane.  Since 1980s after the Udoji national salary review committee, the university lecturer was placed under the Unified Salary Structure (USS). This brought down the salary of university lecturers relative to other public servants.  Then the lectureship job became financially unattractive, uninteresting and unrewarding.  As a result of this, strikes became the option for lecturers to regain their place in the society. Between late 1980s and 1990s there was mass exodus of well-qualified, morally upright and hardworking university lecturers because of the ugly trend.  Some lecturers left the shores of Nigeria never to return; some joined the private sector; others sought more “juicy” public service appointments.  To make matters worse, it was impossible to find replacement for the calibre of lecturers who checked out.  But those lecturers who, out of patriotism, stayed back in the system were overworked and underpaid. At that time some lecturers took to subsistence farming, some became part-time taxi drivers to augment their income.  It was so bad then that an unmarried male lecturer could not win a girl’s hand in marriage; as many young ladies wished to marry persons in any profession except lecturing. Moreover, many talented and promising young graduates shunned teaching career.  It therefore became the vogue to accept all manner of graduates who wished to join academics.  It was like in a war situation when any available able bodied bloody civilian was conscripted into the army; hurriedly trained and pushed into the war front only to be killed at his first operation.

Having painted this scenario, one can see from where water entered the broad-leaved pumpkin, as the Ibos will say. The lecturers were in a terrible financial situation.  It is better imagined than lived.  Those who could not resist the temptation and bear the hardship and some of the newly hired mercenaries descended on the students under their care like a hawk will pounce on a chick, or became agents of the academically corrupt older ones.  In order to augment salaries, sale of hurriedly assembled pamphlets called books and hand-outs, and sale of grades surfaced in the universities. Some unscrupulous lecturers made the purchase of hand-outs and books a condition for passing a course.  In some cases, pass in a course was financially graded; female students either paid in kind or cash depending on the level of moral decay of the lecturer. There are instances where those who failed were passed depending on the place of origin of the students. Money for hand back for ground became the dictum.  Most lecturers were no longer, morally speaking, role models for the students. They no longer acted as good parents to these students; but became teachers of corrupt practices by turning them into research materials for monetary or sexual benefits.  Some students became the agents of the lecturers who do not want to be detected.  We can now see the relationship between corruption among our educated elites and the moral decay of some lecturers in our universities.  To be fair to all, not all lecturers are guilty as depicted; many still maintain their integrity.  However, those innocent ones say nothing and do nothing.  What makes the evil to thrive is that the majority of the upright lecturers remain quiet in the face of this great decadence.  There is a conspiracy of silence in our universities and this makes academic corruption to persist.  This silence may be because those academics who are still morally upright are cajoled, blackmailed, alienated, treated as outcasts, and even have their life hanging in the balance.  They do not have other option than to keep quiet. Others presume that since the society is already bad there is nothing one man can do; or that even if you report the offenders that the university administration will do nothing, since most of these corrupt lecturers win the heart of the administration.

There are other instances where the lecturers through academic corruption unknowingly teach the students corruption practices. In the first place, there are lecturers who will not teach the courses allocated to them until towards the end of the semester.  Such lecturers only appear two or three times, tell stories and they are done.  But some students like them so long as every student eventually passes. The second group comprises those who arbitrarily allocate marks to course work they did not conduct (tests, quizzes, seminar papers, etc.). Even when examinations are conducted, marks are still awarded arbitrarily without actually grading the examination scripts with well-structured marking schemes. The category of lecturers usually has agents who collect money for them in place of class assignments.  Our students observe these fraudulent practices among the lecturers; but are happy because every student normally passes the examination; only few unfortunate ones will fail in pretence that the course was graded. The third category, though very few in number, is made up of those who see the female students as ‘bush meat’ and demand sexual gratification from them for a pass. The worse aspect of this is that those who fail to comply are seriously victimized. Such lecturers wriggle out of the problem, if caught using his high profile connections. Some lecturers even go to the extent of helping the students to rewrite an examination that has already taken place. Are we not in these ways showing our students that corruption pays?  Won’t the students imitate their lecturers when they graduate and find themselves in positions of authority?

The last group is made of lecturers who turn the other way while invigilating examinations, allowing students who wish to commit all forms of examination malpractices a free hand to do so.  Many of us are in this group either due to laziness or to appear popular among the students.

The impact of academic corruption in the society should not be overlooked. In Nigeria today, those who graduated using fast lanes easily get ‘juicy’ positions in the society.  When our students are exposed to all manner of academic corruptions, they tend to replicate them when they find themselves in official positions of authority, especially in government.  Lecturers should be forced, if possible, to live the ethics of their profession or be flushed out of the system.  The negative impacts some of these corrupt lecturers have on our students is unimaginable.

• Prof Okafor is of the Department of Statistics, University of Nigeria, Nsukka