Why is research a challenge for Nigerian universities?

However short lived University of Benin’s fame was, it was one to savour because very rarely does one hear Nigerian universities make breakthroughs in research of that magnitude. Ironically, Nigerian students who leave the university environment here and go abroad for postgraduate studies, conduct researches that win them awards and sponsorships.But Nigerian universities, unlike their […]

However short lived University of Benin’s fame was, it was one to savour because very rarely does one hear Nigerian universities make breakthroughs in research of that magnitude. Ironically, Nigerian students who leave the university environment here and go abroad for postgraduate studies, conduct researches that win them awards and sponsorships.
But Nigerian universities, unlike their counterparts abroad, do not  enjoy generous funding from government and big corporate organisations to conduct research.
Only last week, the University of Newcastle, Australia, announced it would build a mineral carbonation research pilot plant valued at $8.1m (N1.2bn) to try converting carbon dioxide emissions to carbonate rock bricks for use as building materials in construction. This project will be jointly funded by the Australian and New South Wales (NSW) governments and chemicals manufacturer, Orica.
In Nigeria, such investments in universities for research are a mirage. First, the homegrown industries which could have provided such funding are operating at low capacity and the multi-national companies do all their research in their home countries. But more importantly, the universities themselves appear to be operating in isolation and are unable to even meet the needs of their immediate communities.
So the puzzle now is: is it the lack of funding that has held back our universities from addressing developmental challenges through research or a real lack of ability? The second reason seems more likely.
For example, as part of their yearly interventions from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund),  universities are given N10 million each for research and there is also the N3 billion seed money for the National Research Fund to encourage institution-based research which is yet to be disbursed.
Recently, the Minister of Education Professor Ruqayyatu Ahmed Rufa’i announced that six African countries -Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo – with support of the World Bank have proposed regional African Centres of Excellence (ACE) for higher education.
The objective of the ACE Project is to promote regional specialisation among participating universities within areas that address particular regional development challenges and strengthen the capacities of these universities to deliver high quality training and applied research.
Rufa’i encouraged Nigerian universities to submit proposals in priority fields that included Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), Health Sciences and Agricultural Sciences as grants up to $8 million (over N1 billion) could be awarded to a university.
The National Universities Commission (NUC) went ahead to hold a workshop for universities to guide them on writing the proposals and then set up a committee to appraise the submissions of the universities and articulate researchable topics from the list of the proposals.
At the end of the exercise, 54 proposals were received from various universities but only 14 scaled through. Some of them included those of Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA) on Food Security; University of Ibadan on Analysis, Modelling, Simulation and Computation; Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB) on Agricultural Development and Sustainable Environment and Bayero University, Kano (BUK) on Dry Land Agricultural System.
Other institutions with presentations and prospects were advised to collaborate, to enable them to win at the international level. The six universities in this category include the universities of Jos, Ilorin, Uyo and Ibadan, University of Nigeria, Nsukka and the Redeemers University, Mowe, Ogun State.
One observation which the committee made that is worthy of mention is that the National Universities Commission (NUC) needs to address the inability of vice-chancellors to agree to come together to do collaborative research.
Executive Secretary of NUC, Professor Julius Okojie, lamented the poor response of the universities to the project.
He said that mentorship and mentoring, which used to be the hallmark of academics, had disappeared with the new breed of lecturers unwilling to mentor those behind them, insisting that there was no pride in bearing the toga of a professor, when as an academic, one failed to replicate himself in supervising PhD projects.    
Perhaps a more serious problem is that out of a total of 1.5 million students in 61 public universities in Nigeria, according to the report by the Committee on Needs Assessment of Nigerian Universities, only two percent are PhD students. This suggests that a critical mass of academics needed to do research is highly lacking.
The report recommended that as a “first and immediate step” the oldest university in each geopolitical zone should become postgraduate and research oriented. This would mean that universities like University of Ibadan, University of Nigeria Nsukka, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, University of Benin, University of Maiduguri and University of Ilorin would have 50 percent of their intakes as postgraduate students.
But with the challenge of access to tertiary education, the Federal Government may not be ready to make such move. It therefore means our senior scholars would continue to be underutilised for undergraduate teaching while research takes a back seat.