So, what is Buhari going to do about the universities?

The most charitable thing to say would be that the universities, like Nigeria itself, are not doing great. It is, therefore, in General Buhari that the question of what would happen to the educational sector is still a puzzle, should he win. I cannot remember immediately if he too fought the Academic Staff Union of […]

The most charitable thing to say would be that the universities, like Nigeria itself, are not doing great. It is, therefore, in General Buhari that the question of what would happen to the educational sector is still a puzzle, should he win. I cannot remember immediately if he too fought the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) when he was military Heads of State between 1983 and 1985. That is what has been common to every Nigerian Heads of State since Gowon. And this is one terrible irony about Nigeria that ASUU, which is the only organised group with any modernist blueprint worth reflecting upon regarding the repositioning of (university) education, is also the one that is combated by successive administrations in Nigeria. Why this has been the case tells us so much about the very abnormal logic of the state in Nigeria.
But it must be clear to everyone by now that universities in particular constitute the fulcrum of national power. Can anybody imagine what the UK has been in the world and its ability to remain what it still is in the world today if it didn’t have Oxford, Cambridge and the University of London universities, (SOAS, Imperial, UCL, LSE, King’s, etc, etc)? A measure of the power of its universities in relation to national power might be in the position of some of these universities in the global ranking exercises. In the 2014/15 QS World Ranking exercise, for example, four out of the global top 10 are in the UK: Imperial College and Cambridge sharing number two while Oxford and University College London shared number five position. Number one is retained by the United States – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (MIT), pushing Harvard to number four and after the UK universities on the fifth row, the rest of the top ten are American universities, two of them located in California alone. Although California is big in size, it is still not a run of mill thing that it hosts two world leading universities when the entire Africa is absent.  Of course, the ranking exercises do not amount to a list of anything like ideal universities. There is also nothing like the best university but these exercises do give us anangle to what is going on in this arena globally.
There is not much sense in any universities in Africa getting stressed about not finding themselves in the top bracket in these ranking exercises because they reflect the realities of neoliberal globalisation and the power relations undergirding it but that is not a reason for not aspiring to build functional universities. After all, my personal experience of Nigerian universities as they were up to the early 1980s and what I have seen in the UK in the last one year plus is that Nigeria had world class universities. Then came the SAP regime and the devastation beyond recovery we see now. Instead of responding to that by collating views from the key stakeholders on the way forward, the Nigerian elite thought they found an easy solution in sending out their children to get university education in large numbers. But the universities in Nigeria can also be positioned to earn money from students of other nationals, among other things. So, why is this not happening?
There is nothing wrong with Nigerians going out for education. In fact, it would be great if anyone has been thinking of ensuring that as many as possible of all undergraduates spend at least a year outside Nigeria attending one university or another in one country or another: from the US to Canada, from Australia to Tokyo from Singapore to UK, from China to South Africa and so on. A country with Nigeria’s regional and global aspirations must think in those terms. It was part of China’s magic – looking far for systems that work. Compared to the investment there, the cost is not a factor. Is this the sort of thing Buhari and Osinbajo might be thinking about already?
And might they have equallyhad the space to think about the imperative of retraining Nigerian academics? Here, I suspect the best resource person they can get must be Professor Asisi Asobie. As a journalist, I once interviewed him and one of the questions had to do with the quality of some of the academics in Nigeria. His answer was that the fault does not lie with individual academics but the system. Most people who got into the system were the students who got either a First Class or a very high 2:1 and they were retained while those who got anything less were pushed out to the job market. The first fundamental problem here is that, unlike before, First Class is being awarded to so many graduands by one university or another even when the library facility and ratio of professors to students in most of the departments cannot support that. There is a contradiction there because a First Class in Nigeria should be a First Class anywhere else. There is no Nigerian First Class. The second problem is that it is one thing to grab a brilliant student who made a First Class in the degree examination and make him a lecturer but it is another thing to make him a real academic via attendance in academic gatherings related to his or her field, access to the key journals and be generally involved.
In Nigeria, this doesn’t happen except in a few cases where personal efforts land some people in anything higher than the Nigerian level. So, what happens is that, few years after his or her employment, the ‘brilliant guy’ is no more than vegetating, regurgitating the same lecture notes s/he took from equally under-exposed superiors yesterday. And yet, we expect him or her to superintend the production of the Nigerian students who will provide the kind of ideas that will inform social transformation in the country. Are we not living a lie?
And let me make this point before I move on. We have this tendency of referring issues in the domains to the minister for that domain. Someone would say, come on, the issue of the courses in the universities is a matter for the education minister or the National Universities Commission, (NUC). This is grand lie! Presidents or the political leadership embody the system, it means, one way or the other, the question of the general direction of the courses taken together is a subject fit for presidential attention. If this was not the case, how did we come to the Nigerian establishment saying they flushed out “lecturers who were teaching what they were not paid to teach” or some words to that effect? Subsequently, there was the ‘purge’ of so-called radical lecturers, followed by the “streamlining” of university courses. And it was not done by anybody in Nigeria but external actors, principally the IMF and the World Bank. A minister of education can do a lot if s/he is up and doing but these are political matters requiring political power.
The point about intimate presidential awareness of what the universities are doing is that it is one thing to provide university opportunity for everyone but still subvert it by the nature and orientation of courses on offer. Universities, by their nature, have an in built reality adjustment mechanisms. The culture of subjecting every claim to interrogation provides this adjustment mechanism. But universities are also informed by the power relationship on the ground and, before you know it, some discourses have established themselves as the paradigm. Before they are dislodged by the system of subjecting every claim to interrogation, the side effects have diffused into society.
What would what I am saying amount to in practice? It would amount to the president asking the Vice-President or one of his ideologues why, for instance, is it the case that almost all Departments of Political Science in Nigeria, (the private universities might have disturbed this by now), teach “Development and Underdevelopment”? Why is it so and which concept of development are they teaching at a time when development is one of the most contested concepts? What was the name of that course unit before recently?  Was this not exactly the point Samora Machel was making when he came to ABU, Zaria in 1977? That’s just one example. I do not advocate stasis but, in our context, stasis is to be preferred to progress in certain direction. Actually, university courses in the entire Nigeria are due for holistic rejuvenation but it should not be done by people who only know Nigeria on their computer.
We cannot overstress the point that organisation of (university) education is as much a bureaucratic as well as ideological thing. Because it is the cheapest and fastest means of moving millions from metaphysical to functional citizenship, it is also, to that extent, a national security priority because those who are denied this opportunity stands to fall to the temptation to venture into membership of what Eskor Toyo would call ‘the army of adventurers’. The violence of the last few years, I believe, excuses me from explaining what ‘army of adventurers’ might refer to, notwithstanding that the theory linking terrorism to lack of education stands in total disrepute at the moment.
I end this piece without a conclusion, leaving that for whoever might have one or two things to say on this issue. Suffice it to say that the time has come to really make education a right rather than a somehow kind of thing. And political leaders should not be intimidated by the patriotic but positivist analysis issuing from the Soludos of this world. Notwithstanding the punchy early warning import of his latest article, financing governance is more of a discursive rather than exclusively statistical matter. If a government wants to do anything, it will find the money. Soludo illustrated this elegantly by quoting Awo’s argument on the cost of running government. Awo’s approach is the puritan’s approach which should appeal to Buhari. After all, Buhari is, according to Mahmud Jega, the Awolowo of the North. Beside the puritan’s approach, there are even harder headed approaches.

To be continued next week
Onoja sent this piece from UCL in the UK