`NOT INTERESTED IN MONEY’What government has done in the past is to say that we are on strike because of money, now they don’t have that excuse. It is true that part of the agreement we have with government also talked about earned academic allowances, but academics are saying that we are not interested in that; we are saying government should rehabilitate facilities and once they are rehabilitated and they are up to standard, we will now come back to work. If you go to our classrooms, we use chalk boards, the same thing in the sixties, but people are using multi-media facilities, mark boards where you can
download information. That is not available here and government is not interested in that. No country develops without a sound educational system and the foundation is not the primary school incidentally, it is at the university level because it is the university that trains other levels. For instance, if you want to teach in the primary school, you need people who attended the Colleges of Education; if you want to be teacher at the Colleges of Education, you must have a degree from the university; so, the university provides the manpower for other levels of education and that is why you must concentrate efforts on university education. If you don’t do that, other levels of education will suffer and that is what has been happening in Nigeria.
AGAINST THIS BACKDROP, MORE PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES ARE BEING APPROVED BY GOVERNMENT. WILL THIS SOLVE THE PROBLEM?Even the National Universities Commission (NUC), which is, incidentally, licensing private universities, has itself now drawn attention to the crisis of quality in many of these private universities. You know what government does? We have a refinery in Port-Harcourt and another in Warri. I was just talking with some people recently and they said, oh, ‘Port-Harcourt refinery is in a state where it can refine whatever amount of crude oil sent to it; its plants are all now working’, but, as at today, government has not sent crude oil to it and they cannot process anything because they want to import. Nigeria is the only OPEC member-country that sells crude oil to its refineries at the international price; where else does this happen? Is it the same price you sell yam in London that you sell in Nigeria? Does that work? It doesn’t, but they use international price to sell crude oil to refineries, to make it impossible for the refineries to process crude and then they go to Spain and other countries to import refined products.
‘PLOT TO KILL PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES’So, what is happening is that government wants to kill public universities just as it has killed its own enterprises so that it can invite people to come and buy over the universities? Unfortunately, it will not work because universities are not like enterprises. In the UK, most of the universities there are the public ones; in the US, most of the universities are state owned; the one you hear about, HARVARD, is a private one but most of the universities in the world are owned by government because education is a social service; the revenue and tax collected by government comes from the people, the common wealth, that is the fund that is used in funding education. And what government is doing is to under fund public universities; give them a bad name and provide an excuse to license private universities many of which borrow lecturers from public sector universities, many of which do not have the equipment which public universities ought to
have, that is the fact. And many of the private universities focus on the social sciences, law and arts; they do not go into engineering, medicine or sciences because you need a lot of capital outlay, you need to spend a lot of money building laboratories. I went to Oxford University last year and they showed me a laboratory that was built last year, a huge building where people from different parts of the world went to conduct experiments.
It cost billions of Pounds and no private sector person will like to invest such money because the returns on such investment cannot be recouped quickly. So, private sector universities are gimmicks provided by government to say that they are better than the public sector universities, but then, how many people are there? How much fees do they pay and how many people in Nigeria can pay the sum of N350, 000 and above paid in private universities? Those universities are not meant for the children of ordinary Nigerians and development has to be about the ordinary people and it cannot be about the rich. So, there is no way, not in this century, not the next or in a life time that private universities will become more important than public universities.
The way forward is that the ruling elite in Nigeria must be sure of what it wants. We have an example; many years ago, Ghanaians were here; they flooded our universities and then when the Ghanaians rulers saw what was happening, they took a step back and said, ‘lets us change direction’. They closed down the universities for three years or so, rehabilitated all the facilities and brought the students and the lecturers back.
Now, the CBN Governor Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi disclosed that Nigerians spent about N62billion paying school fees for 75,000 Nigerian students in Ghanaian universities. Our people are in South Africa paying fees there, but who are those going there? The children of the rich. Ghanaians are in Ghana universities but they are not paying what Nigerians are paying in their universities. So, the way forward is that government makes up its mind that Nigerians must have a place under the sun and that place under the sun can only be guaranteed with a sound university system at the top.
It must make up its mind; is it that you close down the university system for three years or so, do what should be done and then invite students and lecturers back? For instance, in the University of Benin, you don’t have a foreign student and, if you go to other universities in Nigeria, I don’t think there are foreign students. When I came to the University of Benin, I was interviewed by Prof. Smith, a Briton who was the Dean at the time, and many people from different parts of the world were here as teachers and students. But, right now, they are not in Nigeria; instead, Nigerians are everywhere. That shows that the system has collapsed.
When we went to the National Assembly, Sen. Uche Chukwumerije and his colleagues told us that they were on the knees, ‘recall our students because they are on the streets posing dangers and problems’, and we said, ‘it is better for them to be on the streets than on the campus of universities learning ignorance’. You cannot teach ignore to people or half knowledge to the people because they will be more dangerous to the society.
If you have a doctor that is not well trained, and you say ‘go and remove an appendix’ and he goes and remove your heart because he doesn’t know where the appendix is, it is better not to have doctors than one who will go and remove your heart than the appendix. That is what government wants us to do and academics are saying ‘no, for once, let us do the right thing’; we are prepared to stay at home for between three and five years until these problems are resolved.
We are not asking for money, facilities must be provided to make the universities truly what they ought to be. In terms of how to solve the problems in Nigerian universities, when the financial crisis broke out in 2007 and banks declared that they were in trouble, government brought out N3trillion to bail out the banks. First, they gave the banks N239billion, another N620billion and N1.725trillion making a total of N3trillion. Then the aviation sector said it was in distress, they gave the aviation sector N500billion and they gave even NOLLYWOOD billions of Naira.
‘MIDDLE LEVEL TECHNICAL EDUCATION’These sectors are important, but they are not as important as the fundamental which is the education sector. If you can give the banks N3trillion and the universities are asking for about N1.5trillion, the same way in which they sourced the money which they gave to the banks which they are now saying that they should not pay back, they should be able to do more for education. So, nobody should come to us and say government has no money. They can bail the banks out with N3trillion,banks that are owned by the private sector, but they cannot fund the education sector because the World Bank has told them that Africans do not
need higher education, what Africans need is middle level technical education; that is what the Okonjo-Iwealas and the Goodluck Jonathans are for. So, let them do what they did in the case of the banks to education; if they do that, the problems will be solved.
Culled From The Vanguard Newspaper
