The most pernicious deficits in the Nigerian public university sector are nepotism, ethno-religious exclusivity, insular, parochial thinking, and incestuous intellectual culture.
These problems have taken a toll on the primary missions of the universities: teaching and research.
Today, everyone agrees that the two most serious existential challenges to university education in Nigeria are poor teaching and poor research.
These two problems in turn are tied to the broken system of academic staff recruitment. The collapse of professional protocols for recruiting academic staff has over the last several decades brought many mediocre people into the Nigerian academy, faux academics who would never have entered the system had meritorious professional entry mechanisms been used.
The result is that the Nigerian university system is now saddled with a majority of professors and lecturers who have no interest in the passions and obligations of the academy, teaching and research, because they lack the capacity to fulfill these obligations and because they only see university academic work as a mere vocation, much like a civil servant sees his/her job. You show up and get paid at the end of the month while accumulating time and experience for the next promotion.
Which takes us back to the factors of nepotism and ethno-religious preference that now underpin normative operations and decision making in Nigerian universities.
In most public universities in Nigeria, academic staff is recruited simply with a note from the VC or from a governor, minister, or some other top government official. Such well-connected people are usually egregiously unqualified to enter the academy and do not possess the aptitude and skillset to cope with and thrive in the rigor of academic work. Nor do they even have any passion for academic work. There are scandalous stories of Heads of Departments coming to their offices to see strange faces with notes from this or that Oga asking the HOD to provide office space for the department’s new academic staff!
These mediocre academics enter the system because their highly placed benefactors or relatives simply want them to have a secured, pensionable government employment, and because such top university administrators and external influencers see public universities in crudely patrimonial terms as spaces in which to reward and place loyalists and family members.
Then you have a major aspect of the problem: the insistence on recruiting academic staff from preferred and favored ethno-religious and other parochial identities. No matter how qualified, passionate, and prepared a candidate is, in today’s Nigerian higher education system, they cannot make the cut if they do not belong to the preferred primordial community of a particular university and they are forced to give way for a mediocre candidate who comes from the right place and/or prays in the preferred manner.
This is a national virus that has destroyed the "universality" in the idea of the university in Nigeria. Federal universities in Nigeria have all essentially become catchment area universities, recruiting academics and in some cases admitting students mostly from their catchment areas. There are, in some cases, even further sub-ethnic and sub-religious fragmentations and dichotomies that determine who gets hired or admitted and who does not, or who gets elevated and who gets ignored, with absolutely no regard for ability or output.
I am a graduate of Bayero University, Kano (BUK), so I am what we call a proud BUKITE. That pride is anchored on something special. I am not one to romanticize the past as a perfect contrastive foil for the present, and the BUK of my undergraduate days had its problems of provincialism, professorial laziness, and poor ethics. However, when I attended the institution, my class was very diverse, refreshingly reflecting Nigeria's ethnic, regional, and religious plurality. Even the academic staff was fairly diverse.
As a result, the campus played host to an ecumenical, cosmopolitan intellectual culture. A vibrant intellectual community of multiple perspectives and approaches to questions existed and was nourished by the assemblage of students and faculty from different backgrounds.
For lack of a better term, the “caliphate” perspective was ever present as the dominant, modulating intellectual foreground, but many “non-caliphate” perspectives flourished, tempering, enriching, critically and productively engaging and ultimately unsettling the certitude of the caliphate perspective. As a result, those of us from non-caliphate milieus came away profoundly reeducated and humbled and those born and raised in the caliphate way of seeing were forced to become self-reflexive and to look outside themselves.
I have learned that since about 2005, the people of the catchment constituency where the university is located have reclaimed “their university” by admitting students and recruiting academic staff only from the catchment area — the Northwest. When I hung out with two BUKITE friends in Nigeria recently they both confirmed that the university now thoroughly reflects Kano and the northwest and is no longer demographically or intellectually national in character. How sad.
Federal universities in other parts of the country have, to varying degrees, similarly recalibrated to become extensions of their immediate sociocultural environments, resulting in intellectual and academic inbreeding and in incestuously insular intellectual reinforcement. Conversely, the very things that make the university a marketplace of ideas — diversity of thought, cultures, and perspectives — are now missing from these universities.
In some federal universities, such as the Federal University Otuoke, the mission to “reclaim what is ours” as our share of the national cake and to keep “outsiders” out is so brazen that there is a toxic convergence of two anti-intellectual and reactionary actions. One fight, directed mostly at Nigerian academics from other parts of the country, seeks to remake the institution in the image of its ethnic host community in recruitment and administrative hierarchy. The other seeks to undo a previous policy of recruiting and relocating diaspora academics to deepen the pedagogical and research talent pool of the young university.
Such projects of sub-national takeover of the university are fueled by a suspicion and a demonization of the national and diasporic Other as a disruptive, intrusive, and undeserving academic interloper who should go back to universities in his or her own natal or residential space.
The state universities are even worse in that most of them are not only unviable political creations but they also replicate the political and ethnic hierarchies and hegemonies in the larger politics of the state. And, of course, the governance of such universities depends on networks of loyalty and political support that correspond to the dominant patronage arrangements of particular governors and regimes.
In Benue State University for instance, no non-Tiv academic from Benue state (not to mention from another state) has ever been VC or ever will be, not because there have been no qualified non-Tiv candidates but simply because they are not Tiv by birth. BSU is governed consistently as an extension of the Tiv political hegemony in the state, and the distribution of administrative offices mirrors the distribution of political offices in the state. Meritocracy and excellence are happily sacrificed for a mediocrity that conforms to the prevailing political hierarchies in the state. How can such a space be called a university?
To complicate matters for BSU and other state-owned universities, the schisms of ethnic and zonal politics intersect with the volatile and fluid politics of personal loyalties and camps, all of which, combined, determines recruitment, promotion, rewards, and opportunity structures to the detriment of research and teaching excellence.
If the segregated and reclaimed federal universities are fostering academic incest by excluding brilliant “outsiders” and privileging mediocre insiders, the state universities are even more parochial since their network of inclusion and recruitment is not even the usual multi-state catchment area but rather a narrowly defined state indigene criterion. Most state universities are simply vernacular institutions reflecting the state’s civil service. They are not universities.
You cannot have institutions that are for all practical purposes not universities and expect them to behave like actual universities.
Institutions that incubate and cultivate mediocrity while doing violence to merit and the intellectual enterprise cannot but produce mediocre graduates and research output.
By: Moses Ochonu
{Only First Paragraph was Edited}
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