In the past weeks, news media have been awash with the letter former President Olusegun Obasanjo wrote to President Goodluck Jonathan. Hardly any day passes without reference to the content of the controversial letter. After digesting the content of OBJ’s letter, Jonathan replied, addressing some of the issues raised by the former president.
My major concern here is not about the letter or its content, but on research, as the title of my piece portends. I had to stand this concluding part down because of the more crucial issue of the faceoff between the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the Federal Government on the state of our varsities; thankfully, the issues have been resolved, at least for now.
I concluded the first part with these words: “Years of sowing mediocrity later manifested in dearth of quality research and scholarship as we started reaping the ‘reward’ through flawed leadership in almost every facet of our national life.” I had no idea then that the issue of controversial letters would give this article more potency. Why am I saying this?
As a communicator, I have closely observed the way we do things here without weighing them on the scale of time – as far as we are concerned, the past does not matter. How many of the president handlers – I wonder – knew that on September 25, 2005 Chief Orji Uzor Kalu, former ‘firebrand’ governor of Abia State, once wrote an angry letter to Obasanjo? As a writer and historian, I recollected that the letter was published in some newspapers – as the present letters were. It is instructive to note that to date no response came from the former president or his aid; I however stand to be corrected if there was a response.
The charges Kalu levelled against the former president included a call for him to explain why he revoked the contract for the building of the National Stadium in Abuja, which was approved to be built along with a five-star hotel attached among other allegations. The paucity of researchers in the presidency and the response shows clearly where we are today.
In 1975, Eugene Garfield, founder of the Institute for Scientific Information came out with the Impact Factor (IF) module; the IF of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in a journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the importance of a journal within specified fields. Journals with higher impact factors are deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. Since 1975, IF are calculated yearly for journals that are indexed in the Journal Citation Reports. Although high impact factored publications are hard to obtain, they are the closest objective means to access the productivity and promotion of researchers globally.
As the citadel of advanced learning, research plays a fundamental role in the university system, in fact it is its lifeblood as lecturers are promoted by meeting research requirements. It is however worrisome that some Nigerian Universities have carried on to promote lecturers – sometime up to the cadre of professors – without serious consideration to this important global measure of scholarship. In some of these varsities, promotion had been based on the volume and quantity of printed articles mostly in local journals often reviewed by associates of the author. Are some of the researches published in these local journals relevant to the nation? This question is apt because it appears lecturers are only interested in having their ‘papers’ published oblivious of whether it makes an impact on the society or not.
There is therefore a correlation between low quality education and the productivity of University graduates. The attenuation of quality invariably implies low quality graduates who cannot contribute substantially to the productivity of the economy. Today, millions of graduates in Nigeria are not employable because they lack employable skills and talents needed for a dynamic economy in the 21st century. As the graduate unemployment index soars, the indication is that the state of university education is worsening. This ugly trend is worsened by the fact that Nigeria has not defined her position in a fast globalising economy.
If we have to play on the global scene therefore, we have to conform to global standards because barriers have been broken down and one standard applies to the world. For instance, indices used in assessing the best Universities in the world include: teaching strength and research; international reputation; teacher/student ratio; research impact which is calculated by measuring citations in bolometric indices per faculty member – that is a measure of articles published in international journals by Lecturers of the Universities -, and the proportion and percentage of international Students and international Staff on the Undergraduates and academic Staff roster of the Universities. How many of our varsities can boast of meeting these requirements?
I will now try to situate where the problem lies. Innovations come from research that is why advanced economies spent money on research. But Nigeria spends a pitiable 0.1 per cent on research and development. Federal Universities spend about 1.3 per cent of their budgets on research. The implication is that technological breakthrough or development for that matter cannot happen without engaging in basic applied research.
In advanced and serious economies also, most research is funded by the private sector; as such research results may be commercialised for profit maximization. It is little wonder then that it constitutes a veritable catalyst for economic development and advancement, but we have unfortunately neglected this critical aspect of quality education. Today, no Nigerian university is on the list of the top 1,000 schools around the world in terms of publication of research output. In this age of the internet, it is quite appalling that most university websites are drab and uninspiring.
One of the critical issues in the last ASUU/FG faceoff was the challenge of under-funding the University system. But beyond this, it is clear that lack of research skills in modern methods, dearth of equipment/materials for carrying out state-of-the art research will remain with us for some time.
Lecturers are often overloaded with teaching and administration schedules which leave them with very little time for research. Besides, most Universities have difficulty in accessing research funds, and the young lecturers in the Universities have little or no mentorship because the senior professors have been forced out of the system because of the harsh environment.
Yet we are playing on a world stage where the key indices used in measuring varsities, according to the World Economic Forum, are growth competitiveness index (GCI) and public institution index (PII). In GCI, Nigeria ranks 12 in Sub-Saharan Africa (SAA), and 87 in the world. In terms of PII, Nigeria ranks 20 in SSA and 98 in the world. GCI uses hard data and survey data for ranking educational institutions. On the other hand, the PII indicates the state of the country’s public institutions. Nigeria ranks below such less endowed countries as Cameroon, Namibia, Ghana and Senegal. The general perception is that Nigerian Universities are not well positioned to contribute effectively to productivity, growth and the national economy.
In the USA, a typical ratio of research and development for an industrial company is about 3.5per cent of revenues; this measure is called “R&D intensity.” A high technology company such as a computer manufacturer might spend 7 per cent. Although Allergan (a biotech company) tops the spending table with 43.4 per cent investment, anything over 15 per cent is remarkable and usually gains a reputation for being a high technology company. Companies in this category include pharmaceutical companies such as Merck & Co. (14.1 per cent) or Novartis (15.1 per cent), and engineering companies like Ericsson (24.9 per cent).
Where is our private sector in all this? Yet, the main importance of research is to produce knowledge that can be applied outside a research setting. Research also forms the foundation of program development and policies everywhere around the universe because it solves existing problems of concern, tons of which we have here.
