On N2.5m monthly salary for professors

On Tuesday, October 1, 2013, I commenced my doctoral studies at the University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, UK, on a fully-funded studentship, which means both my tuition fees and living expenses were paid by the university for three years, totalling about £98,000. I won that scholarship through a competitive process, but will forever remain […]

On Tuesday, October 1, 2013, I commenced my doctoral studies at the University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, UK, on a fully-funded studentship, which means both my tuition fees and living expenses were paid by the university for three years, totalling about £98,000. I won that scholarship through a competitive process, but will forever remain grateful to the UEA for it.

My starting monthly stipend was £1,143. Just a month before, I was an Assistant Lecturer at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University (IBBU), Lapai, on a net monthly salary of N112,000. When I started teaching at UEA as an Associate Lecturer from September 2014, I was paid a net salary slightly lower than my stipend each month for 5-6 hours of teaching weekly. That is, my combined salary was now about £2200 monthly. At the time, the exchange rate was N260 per sterling, and N160 per dollar. This meant that I had climbed from an Assistant Lecturer in Nigeria on N112,000 to a doctoral student and associate lecturer in the UK on a combined monthly salary of about N570,000. This was five times my IBBU salary or equal to the salary of most professors in Nigerian universities at the time.

Of course, living anywhere in Britain is much more expensive than living anywhere in Nigeria, but with that stipend I could still afford to buy a few books and subscribe to magazines like The New Yorker, Economist and the London Review of Books each month. I was also able to send a few quid home, and in my second year, get married and start a family.

All this was 12 years ago. Since then, so much has changed in both Nigeria and Britain, although some things have stayed stubbornly the same. For one, the exchange rate has since jumped from N260 per sterling in 2013 to N2,062, and from N160 per dollar to N1,530 today. This means that my monthly stipend of £1,143 in 2013 (or £13,726 per year) is now about N2.35 million, while my combined salary of about £2200 from September 2014 is today N4.53 million per month. Also, the monthly stipend for a freshman doctoral student at UEA and other UK universities has increased, such that if I was starting at UEA in October this year, my monthly stipend will be £1,731 or N3.56 million (£20,780 or N42.84 million per year). In other words, a doctoral student’s stipend is six times higher than the salary of a Nigerian professor.

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Meanwhile, the monthly salary of a professor in a public university in Nigeria has stayed exactly the same over all this time. It was in the region of N500, 000-N600,000 in 2013 and it remains in the same bracket in 2025, despite the fact that the value of the naira has depreciated by more than 720 per cent against the sterling, and 860 per cent against the dollar during the same period. A child born in 2013 would have enrolled in Junior Secondary School by now. Since 2013, there has been three Nigerian presidents, six British prime ministers, three full U.S presidential terms, and the fourth is right now underway. In 2013, the UK was still in the EU, the Pandemic had not happened, Russia had not ceased Crimea, let alone invade Ukraine, and the immigration was not yet the hot topic it is today.

And yet, the salary of a Nigerian professor has stayed the same. This is either a form of cruelty, an active loathing for learning and the learned, or a national disgrace. Perhaps, it is all three because in Nigeria, the whole idea of a salary—for professors or whoever—has what, for want of an appropriate terminology, we might call three distinct sociological features.

The first has its roots in colonial history and policy. For colonial policy, salaries and wages paid to local workers were not about fair reward for their labour but an instrument of imperial rule, since Nigerians under colonialism were subjects, not citizens. Like the geospatial separation of people into GRAs (Government Reservation Areas) for colonial officials and practical slums for everyone else in urban areas, the salary was meant to demonstrate that the colonial and the native were not equal peoples, even if they did the same work or had similar levels of skills and experiences. So, wages and salaries were just enough to ensure that local workers stayed alive to continue to work. (Europe itself had a somewhat similar internal history with salaries).

The number of Nigerian workers who died when the railways were being laid or at mines in Enugu and Jos, for example, more than illustrate this sad of history of salaries in this country. But it also explains why trade unions and later, returnee soldiers from both World Wars were among the first Nigerians to begin the agitation for independence, long before unemployed and underemployed graduates from schools and colleges joined in during the late 1940s.

But since there were scarcely any salaries and wages for anyone before colonialism, colonial salaries and wages were still a significant advancement on what existed before. If you worked in the colonial enterprise—for the native authorities or the largely colonial private sector—you were paid gruesomely low wages, but you were still better off than those who worked outside of it. This remains the standard model of salaries and wages in Nigeria to date, 65 years after so-called independence. Public and private sector workers still generally receive absurdly low salaries and wages, but informal sector workers are even worse off.

Multi-national companies, international governmental and non-governmental organizations, foreign embassies and the local NGOs they fund are the only employers who have moved on from this colonial relic of salaries and wages in Nigeria, as they pay the highest salaries. Perhaps it is time to have the moral courage to reform this shameful practice.

Secondly, salaries in Nigeria, particularly in the public sector, are not a reflection of productivity, skill, experience or some universal principles as fairness or equity. Government salary in Nigeria is simply about how you are positioned within the patronage system of the state itself. If you work for state-owned enterprise like the NNPC, or if your agency generates substantial revenue, then you are likely to receive a salary several times higher than your peers who do the same type and amount of work in other agencies of the same government. This means that if you are a professor, a doctor, a nurse or whatever, you will receive peanuts.

At the same time, this blatant discrimination remains even for people working within the same sectors at different levels, for example, among those who work in the universities and those who work in secondary and primary school levels, or between those who work for federal, state, and local government levels. To illustrate, just last week, while university professors were demanding N2.5 million monthly salaries, a demand I whole heartedly endorse and support, they did not say anything about the salary of primary and secondary school teachers who produce the raw materials that university professors then fine tune.

Meanwhile, in the same week, the Minister of Interior negotiated a life-time salary for the senior cadres of his staff, but not for lower officials who did most of the work. The President signed off on this unique absurdity for the senior officials of one ministry, but not of the other two dozen or so ministries. This is how salaries work in Nigeria, but this is still not the full story.