Category: academic

Should Women Work? Empowering Women’s Choices, Challenging Control, Celebrating Aspiration, and Supporting Women in Marriage

by Salihu Lukmanacademic / EducationLeave a Comment on Should Women Work? Empowering Women’s Choices, Challenging Control, Celebrating Aspiration, and Supporting Women in Marriage

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Should Women Work? Empowering Women’s Choices, Challenging Control, Celebrating Aspiration, and Supporting Women in Marriage

By: Dr. Salihu Lukman

I want to share an interesting discussion with my friend, Dr. Usman Isyaku in his post about allowing a wife to go out and work. I will reproduce his post and comment which are available on our Facebook walls for context. Happy reading.

Dr. Isyaku’s post:

People always ask women, “what are you bringing to the table?”. Well, a woman can bring many things to the table, it all depends on what kind of table you have. If you have a shiny marble table, they bring shiny dinner sets, if you have a wooden broken table, they bring nails and gum to help you mend it.

After i prepared my table, the last thing I will ever want a woman to bring to it is money. I don’t want a working woman who is struggling to go out and work for a boss like me. I never wanted an absentee wife who leaves the house to hustle for money like me. I looked for something opposite to what I am doing. Someone who can stay at home to take care of the kids and be present. Someone who works or do business from home to make her own money and spend it on the things she wants. I never wanted a woman that spends a Kobo to help me run the household. Funding is done by me and I am happy to continue to do so indefinitely. Raising children is alot of hardwork that shouldn’t be combined with external work. Its a full time job that must be respected and rewarded.

When I was searching for a wife, I looked for a respectful and cooperative woman who has good family values and is 100% committed to the marriage relationship as a first priority. Someone who is attractive enough to bring me back home every single day after work. Someone who can push me to grow and become the best man I can ever be. Someone who is supportive and comforting. She has no business helping me or my children with money. I can make more than enough for all of us!

My comment

Dr. Usman Isyaku’s post reflects a traditional view of gender roles, where a man’s primary role is financial provision, and a woman’s is to stay at home, care for children, and manage domestic responsibilities. While this perspective is valid for some relationships, it is important to consider a broader viewpoint that embraces the evolving societal norms and the diverse aspirations of women.

Importance of Women in Healthcare and Education

Women play a crucial role in sectors like healthcare and education, not just for their ability to contribute professionally but also because of the unique empathy, understanding, and care they often bring to these fields. For instance, in healthcare, many women feel more comfortable being examined by female doctors, especially in intimate situations like gynecological exams or childbirth. For a man, knowing that his wife is being cared for by another woman during such moments provides peace of mind and maintains a sense of dignity for both partners. If the husbands of those female medical doctors and other female healthcare providers weren’t allowed to work, no woman would be attending to one’s wife’s gynecological and obstetrics needs and this is a big problem for most men.

In education, women educators often serve as nurturing figures, especially in early childhood education. They help shape the emotional and social development of children, offering a motherly touch that complements academic learning. Denying women the opportunity to work in these fields could lead to a society where people lack options for care and support from those who understand their unique experiences.

Impact of Working on Women’s Psychological State

The notion that a woman’s primary role should be confined to the home overlooks the psychological and emotional benefits many women derive from working outside the home. Work can provide women with a sense of purpose, and intellectual fulfillment. Being part of a workforce gives women opportunities to develop skills, contribute to society, and form social connections that enrich their lives.

Denying women the ability to pursue their professional interests can lead to feelings of confinement, unfulfilled potential, and even resentment. By supporting women in pursuing their ambitions when the situation calls for it and it is convenient for the husband and her children, we are acknowledging their rights to self-determination and personal growth.

Flexibility in Roles

While not all women need or want to work outside of their homes, those who wish to pursue careers should be supported. A woman’s desire to contribute to society, through work or business, does not undermine her ability to be a nurturing and present mother or partner. It’s important to understand that working outside the home does not necessarily make a woman “absent” from her family. Many women successfully balance work and family, demonstrating that external work can coexist with strong family values.

Financial Contribution Is Not the Only Value

The argument that a woman should not contribute financially to the household because the man can “make more than enough” dismisses the fact that financial contribution is not the only form of value a woman brings. Women bring emotional, intellectual, and social support to relationships, and in some cases, they may also desire to contribute financially—not because they have to, but because it makes them feel fulfilled. A woman’s financial state can also provide a safety net in difficult situations, like the death of the husband, which strengthens the family unit rather than weakens it.

Supporting Aspirations and Dreams

Just as men have the right to aspire to greatness, to grow, and to pursue their dreams, women should have the same opportunity under a conducive atmosphere. Society stands to benefit when women are empowered to achieve their full potential. Husbands who support their wives’ dreams foster a relationship built on mutual respect and shared growth. When the environment is conducive, such as when childcare support is available or when the work-life balance is manageable, women should be encouraged to pursue their passions and interests.

Conclusion

While the sentiment in the passage of wanting a supportive, nurturing wife is valid, it is equally important to understand that women are not a monolith. Some women thrive as full-time homemakers, while others flourish in professional careers. The key is allowing women the freedom to choose the path that aligns with their values, desires, and personal aspirations so long as it is convenient for the husband. A balanced and equitable relationship is one where both partners can support each other, not just financially, but emotionally and in their respective personal growth. By doing so, we foster a more inclusive and harmonious society, where everyone, regardless of gender, has the opportunity to thrive.

Dr. Isyaku’s comment:

I agree, Prof. People have to find what works for them. A lot of these fundamental differences have ruined many marriages. I refused to marry many medical doctors for the fact that they have to work at the hospital. In as much as many people are looking for such women to marriage justifiably, they are not for those like me.

My response

While personal preferences are valid, they should not become an excuse to undermine the potential and ambitions of a wife, especially when such choices impact the family’s well-being or suppress the rights of the wife. Let me dissect my points.

 

(1) Irresponsible Men Who Prevent Wives from Working

Some men claim they do not want their wives to work due to “principles,” but they simultaneously fail to fulfill their role as the family’s financial provider. In such cases, preventing the wife from working becomes not a matter of preference or principle, but an exercise in control and selfishness. If a man insists on keeping his wife at home but is unable or unwilling to meet the family’s basic needs—such as feeding, schooling, clothing, and other necessities—he is failing in his duties as a responsible partner and father.

It is hypocritical and narcissistic to deny a wife the opportunity to contribute financially to the household, while also not providing adequately for the family. Preventing a woman from working under the guise of “principle” while failing to uphold the duties of a provider reflects more on a man’s insecurity than on any genuine desire to maintain traditional gender roles. A real partnership is built on the ability to collaborate and adapt, especially when circumstances such as financial difficulty arise.

(2) The Daughter’s Perspective – A Medical Degree and Denied Work

Imagine your daughter spends years working diligently to achieve a medical MBBS degree, investing her time, energy, and passion to become a doctor. She dreams of helping others, saving lives, and contributing meaningfully to society. Now imagine her husband denying her the right to work because of his so-called preference against working women. How would you react to this decision?

It would likely be a crushing disappointment for both you and your daughter. As a parent, you’d have supported her aspirations, celebrated her achievements, and nurtured her dreams. For a husband to deny her the right to work after all her hard work and dedication would feel like a betrayal of those dreams. Such a decision would not only disrespect her professional achievements but also limit her personal fulfillment, self-worth, and the opportunity to use her skills to improve society. Moreover, it is a waste of talent and education—resources that could be used to benefit the community.

This type of control over a woman’s professional life is an example of undue dominance and is often rooted in fear or insecurity, not genuine concern for the well-being of the marriage or family. A healthy marriage should encourage growth, both individually and together, where partners uplift and support each other’s ambitions, not suppress them.

(3) The Value of Women in Society and Marriage

Personal preferences in relationships are natural, but when those preferences extend to controlling and limiting another person’s freedom or growth, they become harmful. Women—like men—have the right to pursue their education, careers, and dreams. Preventing them from doing so denies their autonomy and potential. When a woman earns a degree or builds a career, it is not just a personal achievement; it’s an investment in the future of her family, her community, and society at large.

For instance, imagine the difference your daughter could make as a doctor—saving lives, improving public health, and serving as a role model for younger generations. To deny her this opportunity because of a husband’s preferences is a disservice not only to her but to the countless people she could have helped. Moreover, the societal benefits of women working in critical professions like healthcare, education, and science are profound. Women bring diversity, empathy, and a different perspective that enriches these fields.

(4) Mutual Respect and Adaptation in Marriage

While it’s important to find someone compatible with your values and lifestyle, marriage should not be about forcing one partner into a predetermined mold. Instead, it should be about mutual respect, adaptation, and supporting each other’s dreams. If a man prefers a wife who stays at home, it’s essential that he communicates this early in the relationship and ensures that he can fully meet the family’s needs without her contribution. If the man is failing to provide, his refusal to allow his wife to work reflects selfishness rather than love.

Marriage is a union where both people should have the freedom to grow and contribute in the way that suits their abilities and desires. In cases where the wife is passionate about her career, the husband’s role should be to support her if the condition is conductive just as he would expect her to support him in his endeavors. Having a water-tight control that completely prevents a wife from working even when the atmosphere is conducive, is in my humble opinion too restrictive and controlling and could negatively impact the union.

The argument for not marrying working women based on personal preference is valid if both partners agree to it, but it becomes deeply flawed when it evolves into controlling behavior that limits a woman’s rights or suppresses her potential. In a world where women’s education and professional contributions are increasingly recognized as essential, it could be considered regressive to say the least, and harmful at worst to restrict them from working in the right atmosphere, especially when doing so compromises the family’s well-being.

If a man claims he doesn’t want a working wife yet fails to meet the family’s needs as is mostly the case in our contemporary society, he is simply masking irresponsibility under the guise of “principle”. Moreover, for a father to watch his daughter work so hard to achieve a medical degree only to be denied the right to work by her husband would be heart-wrenching. Such control is neither respectful nor conducive to a healthy, fulfilling marriage. Instead, husbands should uplift their wives, respect their choices, and support their dreams, as true love involves growing together, not holding each other back.

 

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Introducing Calculus To My SS2 Son

by Salihu Lukmanacademic / Biography / Education / Islam / Science1 Comment on Introducing Calculus To My SS2 Son

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Introducing Calculus To My SS2 Son

By: Dr. Salihu Lukman

Introduction

As a parent, we should be following up on our children’s educational progress, especially their understanding of the fundamental scientific principles taught in Basic Science subjects at the junior levels or in Physics, Chemistry, and Further Mathematics at the senior levels. My first child, Muhammad, would ask me tons of questions related to the above subjects since when he was in the junior level, some of which I had to research before answering. Today, their Further Mathematics teacher started treating differential calculus. He asked me when he came back home from school, ‘What is this differential calculus all about and what are its applications?’ The popular way to refer to calculus is the notation dy by dx pronounced by reading the letters separately as dydx. I thought about sharing my responses with the public with the hope that someone with a similar question as Muhammad’s could benefit from my simple introduction to calculus. Happy reading!

How It All Began – The Falling Apple Observation

Most of us are aware of Newton’s falling apple story. Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727), the greatest scientific genius the world has ever seen, was in a garden when he saw an apple fruit falling off from its tree. This simple observation sent the young Newton – who was not even up to the age of 26 at the time – to begin to wonder about the nature of gravity. He thought to himself, ‘Does the moon also fall toward the Earth in a similar way as the apple fruit fell toward the Earth?’. He answered in the affirmative after performing thought experiments in which he projected an object on the Earth’s surface with increasing velocities thereby picturing, for the first time, how an object can be placed in orbits around the Earth like satellites and how an object can escape the Earth’s gravitational influence like spaceship. In fact, Newton calculated for the first time the minimum Earth’s orbital velocity as 5 miles per second and escape velocity as 7 miles per second. Back to the falling moon problem, Newton did not have the mathematics to analyze it. So, he invented calculus, almost on a dare, as Neil dyGrasse Tyson (the most famous astrophysicist of our time) would put it.

Newton did not stop from just analyzing the falling moon problem, he went on further to predict the motion of the numerous moons of Jupiter with great accuracy. Newton became so fond of modeling the positions of celestial bodies that he would say, tell me the present state of a system and I will tell you how it will behave tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Hence, calculus is the first mathematical tool invented for modeling physical systems and that is why it has applications in almost all engineering disciplines.

Gravity

From this apple fall story, Newton understood that the Earth pulled the apple toward it with a force of gravity. He came up with Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation after formulating the 3 Newton’s Laws of Motion. When these laws were applied to predict the path of Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, there were small deviations.

Fast forward to the 1900s when Albert Einstein (the greatest genius of the 20th century) came up with his groundbreaking theories of relativity. The first one was in 1905, called the Special Theory of Relativity which modified Newton’s laws of motion to incorporate objects traveling at very high speeds, close to the speed of light, and introduced time as the 4th dimension in what he described as spacetime. Einstein again formulated the 2nd theory in 1915 called the General Theory of Relativity which modified Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation to describe the motion of objects near a high-gravity source like the Sun and corrected Newton’s understanding of gravity as a pull by heavier objects on smaller ones with a simple space push on the smaller objects whose space is warped by the heavier objects. With Einstein’s theory of relativity, the path of Mercury was more accurately predicted without any deviations than with Newton’s laws because Mercury was near a high-gravity source, which was the Sun. In essence, when you plug in low gravity and low speeds into Einstein’s equations, they will reduce to Newton’s equations. This means that Einstein’s equations are special cases of Newton’s equations for a high-gravity source such as the stars and black holes and high speeds that approach the speed of light.

Conclusion

The foregoing introduction and applications of calculus with specific cosmic examples and historical perspectives could spark an excellent interest in any fresh student of calculus. Science and mathematics teachers should devote so much time and effort to introducing new topics to their students with a view to sparking a passion in the students and making them understand some of these complex principles better. One of my physics teachers at the secondary level, Mal. Ibrahim Physics would introduce all Physics topics to us like what I did above and I can still remember vividly, over 29 years now, his specific practical examples and explanations of physics principles to this day. His explanations created a strong bond between Physics and me to this day.

Salihu Lukman is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hafr Al Batin, Saudi Arabia

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Never take anything serious in life, yet, take everything seriously – My Interpretation

by Salihu Lukmanacademic / BiographyLeave a Comment on Never take anything serious in life, yet, take everything seriously – My Interpretation

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Never take anything serious in life, yet, take everything seriously – My Interpretation

By: Dr. Salihu Lukman

Introduction

Almost a decade ago, Dr. Noor Mohammed Khan, an old nice man and owner of the popular hospital Dr. Noor Mohammed Khan General Hospital in Hafr Al Batin, Saudi Arabia, advised me, “Don’t take anything serious in life”. I would argue with him again and again that if I don’t take anything seriously in life, then, how can I progress and achieve my goals in life? He would still maintain his stance that, “Don’t take anything serious in life”. Anybody with personality traits of being controlling, perfectionist, inflexible, responsible and goal-getter will throw away this piece of advice for obvious reasons. Almost 10 years down the line, Dr. Khan’s advice has been reverberating in my mind and I have been trying to make sense of it but couldn’t until now when I added the second part of the title, i.e., “Yet, take everything seriously”. You see, our various experiences in life play a significant role in shaping our perspectives on everyday events. Unfortunately, these experiences are not up for sale, you have to live through them. Ten years down the line, I have now gathered enough experience to make sense of his great advice that will serve as one of my guiding principles for the remaining part of my life on Earth. Yes, the title is definitely a paradox, that many would not comprehend its underlying meanings at first glance. It is deliberately meant to provoke deeper thought of these two seemingly contradictory ideas. It can be interpreted in many ways based on one’s perspective and experiences. Presented below are my interpretations from my perspective.

 

Never Take Anything Serious In Life

  • Take things easy by detaching from the seriousness that often comes with everyday worries, expectations, and anxieties through maintaining a sense of lightness and humor, and not getting bogged down by those things in your life that are ultimately out of your control.
  • This should also serve as a reminder that no condition is permanent. Since everything changes, then clinging too tightly to things can lead to undue hardship and stress. Let go of some strict attachments and embrace the flow of life.
  • By extension, inject playfulness and joy into your life by all means and at all costs. Do not take yourself too seriously, allow yourself to have fun and experiment.

 

Yet, Take Everything Seriously

  • Notwithstanding the above interpretations, approach everything in life with dedication, commitment, and a sense of responsibility by giving your best effort to whatever you do, be it work, relationships, or other personal pursuits while not allowing every little thing to consume you in the process.
  • Live a life of mindfulness by recognizing the importance of every moment and experience.
  • Combine a lighthearted approach to life with a strong sense of purpose and meaning.

 

Conclusion

The title reminds us to find a middle ground between two extremes – carefree enjoyment and dedicated responsibility. Hence, we should live with a light heart – devoid of unnecessary stress and overthinking – while still being mindful of our commitments and the impacts of our actions. I find this to be one of the best ways to manage stress on various fronts, be it family, work, or contemporary local or global happenings, and strongly recommend it for you to give it a try. Effective stress management especially for old people like me who are above 40 is of paramount importance. Medical doctors would tell you that managing your stress effectively can help you prevent numerous physical and mental illnesses. A word to the wise is enough!

Salihu Lukman is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hafr Al Batin, Saudi Arabia

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Alternative Perspectives 3: University Rankings & Investment

by Salihu Lukmanacademic / EducationLeave a Comment on Alternative Perspectives 3: University Rankings & Investment

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Alternative Perspectives 3: University Rankings & Investment

By: Dr. Salihu Lukman

Find below another interesting engagement I had with Dr. Usman Isyaku in his posts about the importance of selecting high-ranked universities for those who want to study abroad, especially the terminal degree, PhD. Another interesting perspective on which one is better between owning a house or investing the money follows. I will reproduce his posts which are available on his Facebook wall, and my comments for context. Facebook has restricted me from commenting for 13 days, hence, I will respond to your comments after the ban is lifted. Happy reading.

Dr. Usman Isyaku’s post

If you want to study abroad for undergraduate or masters degrees, the ranking of the university matters. My suggestion is to select those that are ranked within the top 200 by Times Higher or The Guardian. They are typically more expensive but the quality of education and alumni connection is worth the additional costs. Universities are brands just like Nike, LV, Adidas, Apple or Samsung, and they are valued differently in the job market. A Cambridge University graduate is more valued by employers than a graduate from Robert Gordon University.

At PhD level, the ranking doesn’t matter. What you should be looking for is the qualification of the supervisor and his/her quality of publications. The success of your PhD depends on your supervisor’s knowledge of the subject area, experience with supervising international students, size of grants he/she was able to attract, and his/her academic networks. For example, a highly competent supervisor can be working in a low ranking university like London South Bank, but will help shape your experience better than the one from Imperial College. Also, their reference reports in support of your job applications are more likely to be considered than a relatively unknown academic because of peer to peer respect and recognition.

Many students have made mistakes and are paying the price. Choose wisely!

My comment

Thank you, Dr., for your usual guidance on academics and life in general. Having recruited numerous academics for the departments I headed here in Saudi Arabia from all over the world including those from all the highest-ranked universities, I have the following comments based on my experience:

  • Select universities that are ranked at least 500 and below. If you can get a university within the best 10, that will be excellent. Selecting from the top 200 universities is good if you can, otherwise, don’t go beyond the top 500 universities.
  • In selecting the ranking bodies, don’t use Webometrics ranking. Rather, I would suggest any of the following highly established and acceptable global ranking bodies in the following order:
  • QS – UK
  • Times Higher Education (THE) – UK
  • Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), Shanghai Ranking – China
  • US News & World Reports (US N & WR) – US
  • Go to one of the top universities based on the ranking suggested in (1) above for your undergraduate or master’s degree if you can. PhD, being the highest and ultimate academic brand coming from the universities, is the most important one that deserves to be awarded from the highest-ranked university you can that you can afford. You can get bachelor’s & master’s degrees from any university, but the ranking of the university that awarded you a PhD is what matters the most in my humble opinion. Because it will be used to brand you ultimately. You can attend Oxford or MIT for undergraduate and master’s degrees, but if your PhD is from an unranked or low-ranked university, you might be branded low. In other words, obtain your last degree – bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD – from a highly-ranked university, because, that will be used to brand you.

Dr. Usman Iyaku’s response

that’s another important perspective yhat I missed, Prof. A good ranking university is always a smart choice.

Dr. Usman Isyaku’s post

UNPOPULAR OPINION ABOUT BUYING A HOUSE

Buying a house could be a foolish idea if you have an investment strategy. Why? A decent house could cost up to 50 million Naira on average in big cities like Kano, Abuja and Lagos. Renting could be 1-2 million Naira per year.

A smart investor will rent for 3 years at 6 million Naira and invest the remaining 44 million into a business that could bring 2-5 million Naira per year. That is enough to pay off the rent plus living costs. He can quickly move out to follow opportunities everywhere they go. All it takes is to pay the rent.

A home owner doesn’t pay rent but will have to spend money on maintenance. His capital is tied up in the house for his children to inherit after he dies. He will kill any plan to move elsewhere to follow opportunities. Anytime he decides to sell the house, his wife, mother, children and neighbours will be the first to cry out even if he is dying of poverty. He bought the house for them and not for himself.

Some will say that owning a house is an investment. I don’t think so. At 2 million Naira per month, it will take 25 years to pay off. Even if the value goes up in 25 years, the house can only be sold after you die. How about your children? Well, many of them might not live in the same place, while others might be too rich to live in an old house.

Building a house in your home town or village can get you a lot of respect and recognition, but that is where it ends. You can’t find a tenant or a buyer. You threw investable money away.

Buy only when you can pay for it 3-5 times!

My comment

This is an interesting discussion, Dr. From my little exposure to investment and owning a house in Nigeria, I want you to understand that investment or starting a business is one of the most uncertain and risky areas because of several reasons that could make you lose money instantly. One of the greatest factors that affect kickstarting any business now in Nigeria is trust, especially for diasporans like you and me. People are not trustworthy at all, they will waste no time grabbing any opportunity to defraud you of your hard-earned money. This has happened to me and many diasporans, because living abroad denies you the luxury of carefully supervising your business or investment, you must rely on other people to run the show on your behalf. Other important factors affecting investments are naira instability and insecurity, especially in the north. These factors and many more make owning and investing in landed properties very attractive for those who can. The risk is low when you compare it with most other investments even though it may have a lower ROI. EFCC has said that over 95 % of embezzled monies are invested into landed properties for obvious reasons.

Depending on where you live in Nigeria, owning a house could be everything one can ever wish in life. There are places where you cannot get good rented apartments that can offer you the luxury you need in a house even if you have the money to afford it. You would be moving from one rented apartment to another in search of that ‘ideal apartment’ that you can never find. In the end, your only way out is to build your own house based on your personal preferences or buy a house and turn it into your dream house. Trust me on this, there is nothing in this world better than having satisfaction irrespective of the type of satisfaction. In our area, where you and I came from, finding satisfaction in a rented apartment is very rare. Hence, one would do all it takes to own a house if he can afford it.

Dr. Usman Isyaku’s response

very valid points. Thanks for adding your voice to this topic, Prof.

My response

It’s my pleasure. Keep charging our brains with your thought-provoking posts. This way, our brain cells will not die but will always be regenerated. 😊

Salihu Lukman is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hafr Al Batin, Saudi Arabia

 

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Alternative Perspectives 2: Quality Publications & Indexing

by Salihu Lukmanacademic / EducationLeave a Comment on Alternative Perspectives 2: Quality Publications & Indexing

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Alternative Perspectives 2: Quality Publications & Indexing

By: Dr. Salihu Lukman

This is part 2 of the interesting engagement I had with Dr. Usman Isyaku in his posts about how to publish freely, where to publish, and whether university-based journals should be avoided entirely. I will reproduce his posts which are available on his Facebook wall, and my comments for context. In the end, I have added one comment by Olusegun and replied to it here because Facebook has restricted me from commenting for 13 days. Happy reading.

Dr. Usman Isyaku

I understand your optimisation, Prof. My condemnation is from my experience in making a change in that direction and was vehemently rejected. In theory, we can strive to change the way university based journals operate. In practice, it is an impossible task because the gatekeepers have more incentives to maintain the status quo than to change it. I have tried and failed, and am yet to see anyone who has succeeded in bringing quality to a junk journal. Kindly let me know if you know anyone.

My Response

While I acknowledge that there exist some shady practices affecting some of our journals, we can still make them better like the good old days. The new breeds of academics with excellent international exposure are gradually taking over the academe. No Nigerian university has made it to the list of the top 500 or 1000 universities based on the 2 prominent ranking bodies, THE and QS, in the last 10 years. With the infusion of competent academics with international experience, this has already changed. You can now find Nigerian universities among the top 1000 or 500 on THE list. Change is always a very slow process, especially when the existing structures have too many defects. Demolishing these defective structures and erecting standard ones in their places is an impossible task. These so-called junk journals that did not have any online presence, are now getting online presence starting with Google Scholar indexation. These are journals that were hitherto only purchased by authors whose articles appeared in them and kept these copies for promotion’s sake alone, they are now available online for a larger audience to read, cite, and critique. Some of them follow Google Scholar indexation with Scopus and ultimately ISI indexation. I can almost say that we have always had some of our local journals indexed by Scopus and ISI.

Dr. Usman Isyaku

Prof. Salihu Lukman and I have exchanged insightful opinions on academic and publication quality in Nigerian academia. I share his optimism that things will change in time. But I am not satisfied with the speed at which things are changing. In my opinion, the system cannot correct itself because the gatekeepers have too much vested interests to allow change to happen rapidly. The system can only be changed by outside elements, such as changes in funding policy (privatisation), creating a new knowledge economy that will demand quality research skills from graduates, and incentives to reward academic excellence beyond promotions and certification.

Additionally, if students are continously informed about research quality, they will demand it from the system, which will force the system to adjust itself to meet this new student orientation. Allowing existing and upcoming research students to remain in the dark, totally incapable of distinguishing between excellence and mediocrity, will continue to produce the results we are aiming to change.

I hope this conversation will continue.

My response

I share your sentiments. However, in my opinion, privatization of Nigerian public universities will remain a mirage that cannot produce water. There may be some school fee increments from time to time by the university administrations to increase their IGR. As promising as privatization may appear to be for uplifting the standard of our educational system, it will not be an option for our governments. Why? Because we operate a social economy rather than a capitalist one and I don’t foresee us going the capitalist way any time soon. Now, there is an upsurge of many private universities, especially in the North which had hitherto very few private institutions. Accordingly, the patronage of private universities is increasing exponentially. With the incessant strike actions that different governments force ASUU to embark upon to press home their demands before they can get a listening ear, public universities are no longer appealing, especially to those parents who can afford private universities. This has strengthened the private universities to outperform many of our premier universities. Take the case of Covenant University, usually, only UI and sometimes Unilag rank higher than it on THE ranking. Again, the remunerations offered by some of these private universities are many times more than what is obtainable in public universities. This imbalance could cause a massive migration of good brains from public universities to private ones. As they say, self-preservation is the first law of nature.

Olusegun (Commentator)

as a graduate student in 2012, I only got to know of ISI or Scopus while attending one of the sessions you organised upon your return from KSA. I reckon same for other members of faculty at the event.

The challenges you highlighted above will resonate with anyone who has gone through our system.

We had sparing access to ScienceDirect that year, though I’m not so sure of the availability of this database currently.

A number of graduate students and faculty members alike are unaware of these standards. You hardly get told, even in your research methodology module.

My response

The said workshop on ISI and other related publication issues took place in 2014 not 2012, just a year after completing my PhD at KFUPM. Those scholars and academics who had the privilege of getting both their MSc and PhD abroad will not resonate with the background story behind the paucity of the standard research methodology and expertise that had bedeviled Nigeria within those years and now. Those who earned their MSc in Nigeria and PhD abroad, like my humble self, will tell you that Nigerians are neither lazy nor incompetent. Give them the enabling environment and the sky will not be their limit but their starting point. This is not an exaggeration. I have seen many Nigerians with a 3rd class or pass degree from a Nigerian university who were privileged to pursue their higher degrees in the UK or US only to graduate with distinctions and on top of their class. Our learning environment is generally far from ideal, hence, it suppresses our grit in no small measure. An excellent learning environment abroad takes our God-given gift, the grit, to the fullest.

Can you imagine that my first article which I submitted to our Faculty of Engineering journal, ABU, in 2007 was rejected by the reviewers, but we were able to get it published in a Scopus-indexed journal in 2009 and yet, I did not know anything about Scopus at the time? One of my mentors, Prof. Ibrahim Musa Jaro, Department of Geography, ABU, invited me to collaborate.

Can you also imagine that my first set of ISI and Scopus-indexed articles were also published in 2009 and 2010 when I had no idea about ISI or Scopus indexation? I was in Nigeria during all these years, doing my MSc which I finished in 2009, and left for my PhD in Saudi Arabia in 2010. My other mentor, with whom we still work together now, Prof. Isaiah A. Oke, a former lecturer of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering ABU, but transferred to OAU, spearheaded the research. Again, I published part of my MSc thesis results in 2010 in a Scopus-indexed journal.

Do you see where I am heading? In 2009 as an MSc student, I had 2 papers, one was indexed by both ISI and Scopus, and the other one by Scopus only from research conducted in Nigeria, yet, we had no idea about these indexations. These were followed by another set of 2 papers in 2010, with similar indexations as the first 2 above. I started hearing about ISI when I came to KFUPM in 2010, only to realize that I already had 4 Scopus-indexed and 2 ISI-indexed papers when other students were struggling to get their first ISI-indexed papers. During that time, nobody talked about Scopus, ISI was the target, being the gold standard for scientific journals. That was what informed my decision to share with my colleagues and other postgraduate students the few things I felt could improve their research and I organized a series of 3 workshops in 2014 among which I discussed the ISI indexing.

Salihu Lukman is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hafr Al Batin, Saudi Arabia

 

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Alternative Perspectives 1: Quality Publications & Indexing

by Salihu Lukmanacademic / EducationLeave a Comment on Alternative Perspectives 1: Quality Publications & Indexing

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Alternative Perspectives 1: Quality Publications & Indexing
By: Dr. Salihu Lukman

I want to share an interesting discussion I had with my friend, Dr. Usman Isyaku in his posts about how to publish freely, where to publish, and whether university-based journals should be avoided entirely. I will reproduce his posts which are available on his Facebook wall, and my comments for context. Happy reading.

Dr. Usman Isyaku
Post 1
I often get this question: “where can I publish my research without paying?”. Journals that are indexed in the Scopus database (Elsevier, Springer, Taylor and Francis etc) are entirely free. I mean zero article processing and review fees. All you need is to submit something original, and they have a software called iThenticate to check it line by line. The publishers make their money through access subscriptions by individuals or universities. You can pay up to 10-100 US dollars to access a single paper if the journal has a high impact factor ranking and the content is extremely useful.
In some cases, some of these journals can offer Open Access options, where the author(s) can pay fees for the paper to be openly accessible to everyone for free indefinitely. Prices can be prohibitively expensive ranging from 500-3000 US dollars for a single paper. This is not a mandatory payment, and the paper can still be published if authors cannot afford it.
Any journal that is asking for money from authors beyond open access fees is a money grab that must be avoided if authors want to publish with impact. I personally do not publish in those journals, and will not read or cite their contents in my publications. 99.9% of everything written therein is a plagiarised junk or unimportant information that nobody needs. They are targeted at those who are desperate for academic promotions and nothing else. Excellent publications can be extremely rewarding in many ways. Publish wisely!

Post 2
How about our university based journals?
1. Politically correct answer: they are reviewed by our researchers and are accepted in our university system. It is good to publish locally to demonstrate local knowledge and engagement with our experts. They are more recognised by the promotion committee and are highly recommended.
2. Non-politically correct answer: they are not properly peer reviewed and indexed for experts to access, read, cite, and critique. Contents are often disconnected from state of the art knowledge and methods. They are operated by a small circle of friends and well wishers. Avoid them.
Choose your answer!

My 1st Comment
While I agree with some of your positions on this matter, I would like to make some clarifications that I feel are important to this discussion based on my little experience in research publications in Nigeria and abroad.

There are 2 distinct categories that we need to accept, each having its own peculiar properties as follows.

(1) Nigerian-based researchers
This category includes those Nigerians whose research experience is only limited to Nigeria. In other words, they have never been abroad for any postgraduate degrees or postdoctoral fellowships. You can find in this category, those never heard about Scopus or ISI, which is the the gold standard for scientific journals, and they are not to blame entirely. Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), formerly under Thomson Reuters and now under Clarivate Analytics, primarily focuses on highly-cited, peer-reviewed journals in science, technology, medicine, and social sciences. While Scopus covers more journals and areas than ISI due to the latter’s stricter criteria for including a journal in the ISI core collection, ISI indexation is considered superior, especially in science and engineering fields. Most of the ISI-indexed journals are also indexed by Scopus. Many Nigerian-based researchers now know about Scopus and ISI journals. But the million-dollar question now is the access to these worlds of the highest quality journals. Nigerian universities either do not have the money to subscribe to these databases or it is not their priority to do so or fail to renew subscriptions in some instances. For someone who does not know the kind of quality information he is missing without these databases, it would be business as usual, and open-access journals from Google Scholar and Google Search engine suffice. He would patronize local journals and other international journals with questionable quality and move on with his life. Others who are very passionate about the quality of their research, could make a list of some good articles without open access that they came across, and ask their friends abroad who may have access to these articles to get them to improve the quality of their research.

I can remember when I was doing my master’s degree research work in the late 2000s, one of my mentors, Prof. @Nafiu Abdu (from ABU), introduced me to the HINARI (launched by WHO) and AGORA (launched by UN) databases for developing countries where I freely accessed high-quality journals. This was in addition to the numerous other resources that my other mentor, Prof. @Nuhu Muazu Dalhat sent me from KFUPM, Saudi Arabia.

Exposure to these high-quality research materials had a profound impact on my quest for a PhD in that I had resolved NEVER to earn my PhD from any Nigerian university. If I could not find any scholarship abroad, I was determined to utilize my meager salary if it would be sufficient to pay my way to Ghana to earn my PhD there, but not in Nigeria. In Allah’s mercy, I got the KFUPM scholarship to study in Saudi Arabia. And the rest is history.

Another major challenge for researchers whose area entails elaborate laboratory experimental study and adequate material characterization is the lack of the requisite equipment either to perform the lab experiments or test the results to such a standard that the research outcome could be published in those high-quality Scopus or ISI-indexed journals. There are 2 problems here. One is the lack of research funds to purchase these equipment, and in a few cases where some of these equipment are available, the tests may be prohibitively expensive for the researcher or they may not be properly maintained. I know this for a fact because I supervise MSc and PhD students in Nigeria. In this unfortunate situation, one has to make do with what is available as well as affordable.

However, I assure you that even in the absence of a conducive research atmosphere in Nigeria, some researchers are doing excellent and original work despite publishing them in local or non-Scopus-indexed journals to the extent that some are getting patents for their inventions. Patent signifies the highest level of originality. Nigeria also has a couple of local journals indexed by ISI. The awareness of publishing in high-impact factor journals is on the rise despite the above challenges.

(2) Diasporan researchers
This includes those with any foreign touch in research. It could be spending a few months abroad for benchwork, earning a degree, especially an MSc or PhD, or a postdoctoral fellowship, or working in a country with a conducive atmosphere for research. Those who belong to this category are more often than not exposed to some of the best resources for conducting quality research that can be published in the top-ranking journals available. Research funds, state-of-the-art laboratory equipment for experimental research and testing, subscription to all the top databases, technical expertise, relevant computer packages, and supercomputers for extensive simulations, and adequate remunerations are not lacking at all. With these resources, Nigerians would be churning out articles in some of the highest-quality journals available and obtaining US patents every now and then. This goes to tell you that the major problem necessitating those Nigerian-based researchers to publish in local or non-Scopus-indexed journals is not necessarily because they cannot perform high-quality research publishable in those journals, it has more to do with the lack of a conducive atmosphere to research bedeviling our institutions. Some of those in this category usually try to distinguish themselves by doing a quality job as much as possible when they go back to Nigeria, others are caught up by the Nigerian reality and blend as though they never had any foreign research exposure. But it is not something new that Nigerians are among the most intelligent and hardworking people on Earth. Just give them the opportunity and a conducive atmosphere, and see how they will outshine others in almost everything.

The bottom line here is that one has got to make do with what is available and affordable under given circumstances. At the same time, one can attain a renowned position in research, with a humble background.

Dr. Usman Isyaku’s Response

Prof, the only line of separation between the 2 categories you mentioned is the willingness to follow standards. I know Nigerian researchers who are publishing with impact and they have never trained abroad. Our desire to create a separate category for mediocrity, accepting their excuses, and recognizing them as equivalent to the competent ones will do more harm to our tertiary education. I have no academic respect for junk journals, irrespective of those who publish therein and the excuses that produced them.

My 2nd Comment

(1) I am not after creating a separate category for mediocrity. I am only providing another perspective so that readers can be well-informed with respect to the background problems and challenges that led us to where we are today.
(2) It is so easy to criticize a faulty system, but changing such a system entails having a thorough understanding of what corrupted the system in the first place with a view to bringing the necessary changes for improvement.
(3) Nobody should have any respect for junk or predatory journals, and I don’t want you to relax your position on that. However, I want you to understand that some universities, at least ABU for a fact – where you and I did our undergraduate from – are striving to stamp out these predatory journals by blacklisting them. Hence, they cannot be considered for promotion. The list is being updated periodically.
(4) On university-based journals and other local journals in Nigeria, it will appear inappropriate for one to simply advise that they should all be avoided, because according to your other post on the same subject matter, “they are not properly peer-reviewed and indexed for experts to access, read, cite, and critique.” This is a gross over-generalization and does not represent the facts on the ground.
(5) What are these facts? One, many university-based journals are available online now for experts to access, read, cite, and critique. Two, there are Nigerian journals (university-based or otherwise) that are indexed by both Scopus and ISI with the associated impact factor from each. This, I have known for almost a decade now. Below are just 2 samples of these journals, one is a university-based, published by the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Benin, and the second one is a publication of the Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria (MDCAN).

ISI & Scopus-indexed Nigerian Journals
(a) Tropical Journal of Pharmaceutical Research.
Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Benin
(b) Nigerian Journal of Clinical Practice.
This is the official publication of the Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria (MDCAN).

(6) You see, getting indexation by either Scopus or ISI does happen overnight. Journals have to be up and doing, publishing for some time, applying, and awaiting the decisions from these bodies. This could take a very long time. In my view, rather than advising researchers to boycott all university-based journals some of whom are actually Scopus and ISI-indexed, Nigerian diasporan academics can strengthen and support our local journals to improve their quality and standards to such a level that we will have many more Scopus and ISI-indexed journals in Nigeria rather than condemning all of them to hell. This does not in any way imply that we should abandon the renowned international publishers for local ones.

Salihu Lukman is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hafr Al Batin, Saudi Arabia

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ASUU Strikes, Subsidy Removal and Privatization of Nigerian Universities – Charting the Way Forward

by Salihu Lukmanacademic / Education / Mentorship2 Comments on ASUU Strikes, Subsidy Removal and Privatization of Nigerian Universities – Charting the Way Forward

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Written By: Salihu Lukman (PhD)

Petroleum subsidy

Cambridge Dictionary has defined subsidy as the ‘money given by a government or an organization to reduce the cost of producing food, a product, etc., and to help to keep prices low’. The official price for petrol, also known as the Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), is N162 – 165 per liter. On March 5, 2022, BusinessDay Newspaper reported that the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) claims that it pays N168 per liter as a subsidy and that the total daily petrol consumption in the country is 60 million liters. Accordingly, the monthly subsidy becomes N302.4 billion against an average of about N250 billion for the past recent months. This subsidy is expected to skyrocket as a result of the appreciation of the price of a barrel on the international market due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent banning of Russian crude oil by the US. Historically, General Olusegun Obasanjo introduced fuel subsidy in 1977 under his regime with the promulgation of the Price Control Act.

Subsidy removal & consequences

BBC Pidgin has reported that Nigeria spent about 10 trillion Naira on petroleum subsidies between 2006 – 2018. Former senate president, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, while appearing on the Politics Today program on Channels TV held in March, disagreed with the daily petrol consumption peddled by the NNPC. He purports that the actual daily consumption according to his findings does not exceed 30 – 45 million liters. According to him, fuel racketeers are the main beneficiaries of the subsidy. The smuggling of the product into the neighboring countries where it can be sold at much higher prices has been identified as one of the sources through which the subsidized product is being lost.

All previous administrations and regimes from 1979 to date have tried to remove subsidies by increasing the price of petrol. Complete subsidy removal is what the petroleum economists call full deregulation of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry. More than N3 trillion is expected to be spent on subsidies alone in 2022. The government claims time and again that its cash inflow cannot sustain the payment of subsidy on petrol and that it will surely remove all petrol subsidies in due course in a similar way that it removed all subsidies on power. Complete removal of fuel subsidy will surely lead to an inflation of market commodities, transportation, and some services. While subsidy removal will increase Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP), it will detrimentally affect household income, especially in poor households which constitute the majority of Nigeria’s populace.

 The current state of our educational system

Basic/secondary education

In August 2020, I wrote two articles in which I exhaustively shared my views on the state of our educational systems at the basic/secondary level and university level. The first piece is titled: Education, My Journey & the Present State of Affairs – Primary & Secondary Education (Part 1). I will reproduce some portions of the piece.

‘Let me begin by saying that anyone whose age is around 40 years and above, will – without any fear of contradiction – agree with me that the Nigerian educational system has been experiencing serious and continuous devaluation for at least the past 2 decades. The one-time excellent and qualitative educational system has been experiencing a sharp and rapid decline at all levels, viz, primary, secondary, and tertiary. Many articles have been written in the past to buttress the poor state of our educational system, I choose to add to the list of these articles by highlighting some salient points that require urgent consideration by all stakeholders especially the Government (at all levels: Local, State & Federal), parents and educational administrators, using this memoir. This is borne out of my 23-year teaching experience at all levels (primary, secondary, remedial, diploma, undergraduate, and postgraduate) in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. Given the enormous challenges facing the educational sector, the need to urgently declare a “State of Emergency” in the educational sector cannot be overemphasized with a view to holistically overhaul the system such that our large population becomes our greatest asset rather than our greatest undoing.’

While reviewing the Kaduna State Government’s intervention in education under the leadership of Mal. Nasir El-Rufai, I have this to say.

‘There were 4,250 public primary schools when he took over as Executive Governor of the State in 2015, 50 % of whom were sitting on a bare floor due to lack of furniture. About 2/3, representing 67 % or 22,000 of the total 33,000 teachers were deemed ‘incompetent’ to teach after failing to score at least 75 % in a structured primary 4 examination. They were sacked to give way to the recruitment of 25,000 qualified teachers.’

Additional recruitment of several secondary school teachers has been undertaken and the new teachers have already received their appointment letters since August 2021 but up till now, they have not been posted to various secondary schools by the Ministry of Education to help in filling the manpower gap that has ravaged the public schools in the state.

On the infrastructural decay, I have this to say.

‘About 700 public primary schools have so far been renovated and the Governor’s effort in providing public schools with the required infrastructure and equipment has been commended by all irrespective of political party affiliation. Love him or hate him, he is truly a pacesetter and undoubtedly a visionary leader.’

However, providing adequate infrastructure and qualified teachers alone cannot guarantee the graduation of high-quality students from public schools. It is not unheard of to find a junior secondary school pupil who cannot write down his name correctly. State governments, most especially in the north, need to set some minimum learning outcomes for all primary and secondary schools using their quality control agencies and ensure that they are achieved otherwise all the investments in infrastructure and qualified teachers will be in vain. Do you wonder why Unity Schools, i.e., Federal Government Colleges (FGCs) produce high-quality graduates that can beat their counterparts from the best private schools? State governments need to understudy how FGCs are efficiently churning out excellent graduates with a view to improving the quality of graduates from public schools.

Tertiary education

The second piece which addresses the problems bedeviling university education is titled: Education, My Journey & The Present State of Affairs – University Education (Part 2). You may wish to spare some time to read this detailed piece if you did not read it before.

Core issues of ASUU struggles

Let me reproduce some portions from the piece I wrote on university education in 2020 when ASUU was on strike. These contending issues are still unresolved today and ASUU is already in its 2nd month of another strike action.

‘These ASUU strikes which dominated the 90s culminated in the signing of an agreement between ASUU and FGN in 2001 with a view to reverse the decay in the university system, reduce brain drain by enhancing their remuneration, ensuring university autonomy and academic freedom, and to restructure Nigerian universities through massive and sustained financial intervention, among others. Also, the ASUU-FGN 2001 agreement was to be periodically reviewed every 3 years. Every right-thinking and rational human being who is conversant with the learning conditions in Nigerian universities will support ASUU struggles as per the above terms. Well, students may not be expected to be sympathetic to ASUU struggles for the obvious reason that their graduation will always be affected. As an undergraduate, I vowed never to join the union should I become an academic staff because of the 20 months added to my undergraduate residency period, due to ASUU strikes. When I joined as a lecturer in 2006, I deliberately refused to fill the ASUU membership form for the above reason but I was later registered automatically by the union by virtue of my being an academic staff. That membership allowed me to follow ASUU activities and struggles religiously until 2009 when I resigned from my membership in the union. ASUU embarked on monthly deductions in my salary for the building of its national secretariat in Abuja without following due process, we were not informed in writing before the deductions began. I hope to rejoin the union one day. Despite FGN’s acknowledgment of the rot in the university system through its needs assessment report of 2012 under Prof. Mahmud Yakubu’s committee, not much has changed. Since 2001 when the agreement was first conceived and ratified to date, FGN has been continuously reneging time and again which always leads to preventable ASUU strikes every now and then in the university education system and by extension, the remaining tertiary education systems run by Polytechnics and FCEs. To me, the simple way to curb and prevent these strikes that have bedeviled our tertiary education system is for the FGN, through the Federal Ministry of Education, to do the needful by providing the needed fund to turn around these universities for the better and improve the relatively ‘poor’ remuneration of the academic staff of universities. The current Minister of Education, Mal. Adamu Adamu accepted FGN’s failure in fulfilling its own part of the bargain in the following comment:

“I must confess that government has not fulfilled its own part of the bargain. Although we are unhappy that ASUU went on strike without fulfilling due process and giving us good notice, we realised that we promised something and did not fulfil it”

–Mallam Adamu Adamu, Minister of Education, August 15, 2017.

 

The two main contending issues that ASUU insists must be implemented before it calls off the strike are (1) implementation of the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) in paying salaries for its members instead of the current Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) which has been used to systematically reduce the net take-home pay of the academics as a result of inserting some bogus deductions and (2) implementation of the new condition of service or simply, salary increment which was renegotiated by a government-appointed team and ASUU. This renegotiation has been completed in May 2021.

On the first contending issue, the government declared, through the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) that UTAS has failed the integrity test. NITDA had previously expressed its satisfaction with UTAS as a suitable solution for salary payment in our universities when it conducted an integrity test on UTAS in August 2021 in the presence of relevant government agencies as reported by the ASUU president, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke. On the second contending issue, the government set up another renegotiation team to renegotiate the already concluded renegotiation which was completed in May 2021 on the grounds that some of the proposed allowances were too high and needs to be renegotiated. Consequently, ASUU extended its 1-month warning strike by 8 weeks.

The foregoing contending issues all affect the remuneration of the academics which is currently extremely poor when compared to what their counterparts obtain in other federal government agencies. Imagine, a newly promoted academic to the final rank of a professor earning just about N333,000, i.e. $580.

On the poor remuneration and its attendant negative impacts, I have this to say in my 2020 article on university education.

‘FGN should understand that if lecturers are not paid well enough to take care of their basic responsibilities, they will surely search for alternative means of livelihood which could be by engaging in another job on a part-time or even full-time basis (e.g. business, consultancy, running a firm, farming, etc.). These jobs would take their time so much that they cannot give their best to their primary assignment. I am not against lecturers taking part-time jobs like consultancy or farming. However, you find that in the long term, these part-time jobs systematically and unofficially replace their primary jobs. ‘Self-preservation is the first law of nature’, man would do anything to survive, whether legal or illegal. The terms ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ have now become relative terms in Nigeria and are purely subject to one’s interpretation and perspective because of the harsh conditions that people find themselves in. Who will ultimately be at the receiving end? The poor students – our leaders of tomorrow. It is not uncommon to hear of full-time lecturers who come to the university only once a week, or once in a month because they are busy attending to their side businesses or jobs elsewhere. This will only worsen the university education system further. The Government can reverse this unfortunate trend if it wishes. No wonder, studying abroad is now more rampant than at any time in the past. About 13 thousand Nigerians are currently studying in America alone. We have many Nigerians studying in Malaysia, the UK, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Ghana, and even Niger Republic. Some of them would engage in other untoward and corrupt practices such as extorting money from students to pass them in their courses, diverting research funds for personal use i.e., if they have access to one, etc. Local and international brain drain. Those who can get jobs at other lucrative MDAs or private firms would resign from their university jobs and go for a greener pasture. Others who have internationally recognized qualifications would get jobs abroad and leave the country for good or for only God knows when. Universities have now become ‘transit camps’, where you temporarily start before you can get a better job. I am not saying that lecturers should earn the highest salary in the land, no! All I’m saying is that lecturers should earn a decent salary just enough to keep them on the job and enable them to give their best. Nobody would go as far as obtaining a PhD only for him to remain a pauper. You have many PhDs that cannot afford to buy a car. Many lecturers cannot pay their rent without doing an annual ‘contribution’. They become more affected when their salaries are stopped by the Government whenever they are on strike to press home their demands. The Government would not honor an agreement she had entered into with the union for reasons best known to her, yet, she would starve the innocent souls by cutting off their meager livelihoods for months. This, to say the least, is the highest level of injustice. No country can survive if she stands on the pillars of injustice.’

Incessant ASUU strikes and privatization of universities

Some people are of the opinion that ASUU strike has failed to achieve any meaningful outcome, hence, ASUU should change its tactics, or better still, accept the privatization of universities as the only lasting solution to their demands.

One of the best outcomes of ASUU struggles is the creation of TETFUND. On TETFUND, I have this to say.

‘TETFund (Tertiary Education Trust Fund) scholarship for academic staff was introduced in 2008. By 2010, it had spread to most institutions. This helped increase the number of academic staff who obtained PhDs abroad (mostly in Malaysia) or did bench-work in other countries such as South Africa or the USA. Now, foreign-trained PhDs have flooded our universities and some polytechnics & FCEs.’

This is in addition to countless infrastructural projects undertaken by TETFUND which resulted in addressing the infrastructural deficit in our tertiary institutions. TETFUND thrives on just 2 % education tax paid from the assessable profit of companies registered in Nigeria.

If the government understands any other language apart from the strike, then ASUU would not have been embarking on strikes whenever it wants to press home its demands. People should also remember that strike is always the last straw when all negotiations hit a dead end. Academics suffer more during the strike because their salaries which may be their only source of income are usually stopped by the government. Can you imagine that ASUU has to always go on strike before its members can be paid their arrears of Earned Academic Allowance (EAA)? EAA is always paid in arrears after it has accumulated for several years because the government did not find it suitable to include the allowance in the annual budget of the universities which would have paved the way for paying the allowance as and when due without the need to embark on any strike before it is paid. Much as I hate strikes, to tell you the truth, I have a phobia for ASUU strikes, but I cannot blame ASUU for these incessant strikes. I can assure you that ASUU will continue to embark on strikes for the welfare of its members, for the infrastructural decay on our campuses, and by extension for the brighter future of the teeming Nigerian students until that day when Nigeria will be blessed with a government that will accord university education the much-needed attention it deserves.

Another school of thought argues that the government does not possess the financial wherewithal to address ASUU demands and that the only viable solution is the privatization of all universities as obtains in most developed nations such as North America and Europe. To me, this is tantamount to comparing apples with mangoes instead of comparing apples with apples. Rather than trying to force privatization on Nigerian universities by looking at the US or Europe, I think it is better if we try to copy from some of the developing nations like South Africa, Ghana, or Saudi Arabia.

For the sake of discussion, let us assume that the government does have enough funds to efficiently run the current universities even though it keeps on creating new ones every now and then – how interesting and convenient to hide under paucity of funds when it comes to effective maintenance of the current universities – is privatization the only solution? I intend to provide an alternative to privatization vis-à-vis the subsidy removal palliatives that the government intends to provide to the poor masses, because in my view, Nigeria is not yet ripe for privatization of her universities.

Firstly, subsidy removal is only a matter of when is it going to be completely removed not a matter of whether the government will completely remove it. Even Saudi Arabia, the largest exporter of crude oil in the world has removed the petrol subsidy. Petrol sells at SR2.18 (N329) per liter in Saudi Arabia and the price undergoes a monthly review. Yet, citizens and residents who work in the government sector enjoy free education in public schools at all levels and free healthcare services at all government hospitals even before the subsidy removal. The dollar to riyal exchange rate has been stable for time immemorial. Can we also enjoy these goodies in Nigeria using the money that would accrue from the subsidy removal rather than giving N5,000 stipend monthly to about 40 million poor masses as indicated by the Finance Minister?

Based on the current price of petrol and Nigeria’s daily consumption, the monthly subsidy stands at around N300 billion. I have the following proposal on how to spend the money that would accrue from subsidy removal instead of giving 40 million poor Nigerians N5,000 per month. Over 40 % of Nigerians live below the poverty line. Hence, there are more than 80 million poor Nigerians, not just 40 million. Hence, there is a need for an all-inclusive solution that will go a long way to cushion the effects of subsidy removal on all Nigerians not just 20 % of the total population.

  • Create a new agency that will receive N200 billion monthly from the NNPC instead of giving out this money to just 40 million poor Nigerians N5,000 per month.
  • Use the money to declare education free for all at all levels (primary, secondary and tertiary) and improve the standard of education at all levels to such an extent that private schools will no longer be appealing to the masses as they used to be in the 70s and 60s.
  • Use the money to declare free healthcare for all and improve the standard and quality of our healthcare delivery system to such an extent that medical tourism and private hospitals will no longer be appealing at all.
  • Current petrol subsidy engulfs about N300 billion and counting not N200 billion, hence, the government can still save over N100 billion monthly that can be dedicated to areas such as improving the power supply, boosting local production and incentives, providing and maintaining infrastructure, and stabilizing the dollar exchange rate. Stabilizing the dollar exchange rate will in no small measure curb inflation and attract foreign investments into the country.

If you wonder whether N200 billion monthly could provide free and standard education and healthcare, then, be informed that TETFUND got only about N221 billion throughout 2019, as reported in its annual report. It received a total of N251 billion in September 2020 and was projected to receive a total of about N300 billion at the end of 2020. It means that for all the good works undertaken by TETFUND, its annual income is just slightly above N200 billion which in this case will be the monthly income to be used for the provision of free education and healthcare. With this proposal, the poor masses will suffer at the beginning of subsidy removal due to inflation in essential commodities and transportation but will later smile when they receive free qualitative education and healthcare. Consequently, there will be no need to privatize public universities at all, and subsidy removal would turn out to be a blessing for the masses rather than a curse.

Dr. Salihu Lukman is an assistant professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hafr Al Batin and writes from Saudi Arabia. salihulukman@yahoo.com

 

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Education, My Journey & The Present State of Affairs – University Education (Part 2)

by Salihu Lukmanacademic / Biography / Education / Mentorship6 Comments on Education, My Journey & The Present State of Affairs – University Education (Part 2)

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Written By: Salihu Lukman (PhD)

Twitter Handle: @SalihuLukman

Challenges Of University Education

Oh, home sweet home! This is my primary domain. I have been teaching at the university level since 2006. Hence, I have many things to say here without any fear of contradiction. Problems affecting university education ought to be treated with utmost diligence because the university serves as the training ground for teachers, public servants, leaders, politicians, etc. We cannot afford to sit back and just watch the university education getting ‘raped’ and destroyed.

(1) Overseas Training of Lecturers and its Impact on Academics

Lecturing used to be an attractive job in the 80s. One would obtain his bachelor’s and master’s degrees here in Nigeria before proceeding to either UK or USA on Government scholarship for PhD. This continued till 1984 when President Muhammadu Buhari came to power. He canceled overseas training for lecturers. It was one of the numerous changes he made to the university system. Former Central Bank Governor and Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II (SLS), narrated how he was affected by this. He was a lecturer in the Department of Economics, completed his MSc at the time with the hope of going abroad for his PhD. His hope of studying abroad was dashed and he exited the system on that note. I remember my department’s founder, late Prof. Ogunrombi of blessed memory, obtained his BSc, MSc and PhD from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the best university in the world. I learned that resident medical doctors also used to go abroad for an internship during their residency training to get foreign exposure until sometime in the 80s. NARD has been agitating for the reinstatement of this internship.

Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) revived Government’s overseas scholarship to the UK in 2000, in the fields of Engineering, Geological Sciences, Environmental Studies and Energy Studies to meet the long term capacity building and energy requirements of the Oil and Gas Industry. It started awarding the overseas scholarship in master’s degrees only but later expanded the scholarship to include PhD scholars from academia only. This has significantly improved the training of lecturers and enhanced their technical and field capabilities. UK’s PhD programs are usually industry-tailored and purely research-based without any official coursework. It produces excellent researchers for the industry. On the other hand, American PhD programs have intensive coursework for about 2 years before one begins his research work which can last for about 2-4 years. In some cases, the coursework and research work may run concurrently but a PhD student officially begins his research work after completing his coursework and passing a ‘comprehensive examination’ to become a PhD candidate. This intensive drilling in courses, yet again, makes the American PhD programs more robust and produce far better teachers than their UK counterparts. With the introduction of coursework at PhD level in Nigerian universities, we stand to gain more by obtaining an American or American-based PhD than the UK or UK-based PhD. I hope PTDF will expand the country coverage to include the USA, Canada and Australia. Canada and Australia both use the American system of education.

TETFund (Tertiary Education Trust Fund) scholarship for academic staff was introduced in 2008. By 2010, it had spread to most institutions. This helped increase the number of academic staff who obtained PhDs abroad (mostly in Malaysia) or did bench-work in other countries such as South Africa or the USA.

Now, foreign-trained PhDs have flooded our universities and some polytechnics & FCEs. The million-dollar question is what is the impact of this foreign training on the quality of education vis-à-vis curriculum development and updating, quality control and assurance, monitoring and evaluation, and research output.

(a) Curriculum Development & Updating:

Despite the periodic curriculum review observed in most of the universities and departments, a lot needs to be done in this regard. Lecturers who trained in some of the best universities abroad have an important role to play in this regard because they have experienced 2 different systems – one local and the other international. This is the most important step toward achieving the program’s educational objectives (PEOs) and student outcomes (SOs) – two requirements of outcome-based education. Before developing any new curriculum for new programs or reviewing existing ones, bench-marking all courses and descriptions with the top universities globally is the only way to achieve an internationally recognized degree plan.

We need to redesign our engineering and some science curriculums such that their durations are reduced from 5 years to 4 years, irrespective of whether the summer or third semester is re-introduced or not. Even the best universities globally don’t offer engineering in 5 years. Hence, the 5-year duration does not in any way confer any special or extraordinary skill or knowledge to the students but only ends up unnecessarily prolonging their stay in the university and preventing them from effective utilization of the extra 1 year. Even the so-called American University of Nigeria (AUN) has all its engineering programs spanning for 5 years. This is not to mention the fact that these 5 years are actually 5 + X years, even for the brightest student where X is the additional years due to ASUU’s (Academic Staff Union of Universities) cumulative strike actions within the stipulated 5-year period. For the period of my undergraduate study period, from February 1999 to August 2004, ASUU’s cumulative strike period was 20 months, i.e., X = 1.7 years, hence, I ended up spending 6.7 years (almost 7 years if you factor in when final results were announced) instead of the already long stipulated period of 5 years. 7 years of continuous uninterrupted study could have earned me BEng, MSc & PhD in Malaysia and possibly the UK, you can imagine the precious time wasted. I bet you, all other students from Nigerian public universities (except the University of Ilorin) have a similar experience. Similarly, I obtained my MSc in 3.6 years (i.e. 3 years and 7 months), something I was supposed to spend just 2 years but the ASUU strike helped in unnecessarily prolonging my residency again. Another unfortunate thing is that ‘all ASUU strikes are preventable’! I will prove this statement of fact as we continue. After obtaining my MSc, I became fed up with the Nigerian educational system – ASUU strikes and lack of a conducive environment to quench the thirst of a passionate young academic – I vowed never to obtain my PhD there. I made up my mind that even if the best place I could go to was Ghana, then I was ready to go there to obtain my PhD. Luckily, I got a PhD scholarship at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia, after passing TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) and GRE (Graduate Record Examination) organized by the American Educational Testing Service (ETS). I spent just 3.2 years (i.e. 3 years and 2 months) for my PhD, i.e. 5 months less than what it took me to get my MSc in Nigeria. But for a minor hitch, I would have finished my PhD in just 2.7 years.

I observed in one of my previous articles, that;

“The 5-year compulsory duration of our undergraduate engineering and science (in some universities) programs are adopted from neither the American nor the British educational systems. On average, it takes 3-4 years and 4 years to obtain a bachelor’s degree, under the British and American systems, respectively. Even in the GCC Arab Nations, where students study the English Language during their preparatory (remedial) year program, they spend 4 years for all their engineering and science disciplines and they all follow the American university educational system almost in toto. Our undergraduate engineering educational system needs a complete overhaul to be in line with global best practices in engineering education.”

At this juncture, I must confess that the Nigerian educational system has this “advantage”. It teaches resilience to students due to the unconducive atmosphere of most learning institutions. This resilience is what makes a Nigerian graduate with a Third Class or Pass degree become the Overall Best Graduating Student in a postgraduate classy (MSc or PhD) abroad, under a conducive atmosphere. This is a known fact and there are countless examples.

I have a special passion for curriculum development, having co-authored a Civil Engineering curriculum from scratch, supervised the development of a Chemical Engineering curriculum from scratch, and reviewed a Mechanical Engineering curriculum. This took place when I headed Mechanical, Civil and Chemical Engineering Departments at the University of Hafr Al Batin, Saudi Arabia.

A friend of mine narrated to me how he had to study an undergraduate course on Python programming language when he was doing his PhD at one of the top ten universities in the world because he needed to use the programming language in his research work and the curriculum he studied in Nigeria during his undergraduate study did not include Python. Consequently, his PhD graduation had to be delayed because of our outdated curriculum that failed to be in sync with the recent developments in the world. I don’t know if BASIC and FORTRAN programming languages are still being taught in our universities at the expense of recent and more widely applicable ones like the C Language, Java, Python, and other multidisciplinary simulation and modeling related packages like MATLAB, MATHEMATICA, COMSOL Multiphysics, Design Expert, etc.

I am not oblivious of the only advantage of a 5-year course over a 4-year course in Nigeria when it comes to the starting academic ranks in universities. Graduates of a 4-year course start as graduate assistants and those that spent 5 years and above (such as Engineering, Medicine, Law) start as assistant lecturers. In fact, if a medical doctor has an MBBS degree and an additional 3-year experience in any hospital (not necessarily a teaching hospital), the starting point is Lecturer II (L2). I seriously don’t comprehend why all these unnecessary discrepancies and discriminations in the Nigerian academic staff ranks. This means that a fresh PhD in the Sciences or Social Sciences who does not have publications will be employed as a mere Assistant Lecturer (02 Grade Level) even if he got his PhD from MIT while a mere bachelor’s degree holder of MBBS having 3-year working experience will be employed as a Lecturer II (03 Grade Level), i.e. one Grade Level higher than a PhD. I cannot rationalize this discrimination that is inherent in our university academic staff ranks despite benefiting from it. The worst hit by this discriminatory stratification are graduates from 4-year programs in the Sciences and Social Sciences. This only fuels the superiority complex. The medical doctors will argue that their bachelor’s coursework of 6 years is the reason why they are compensated in the academic staff positions. I respond thus, as long as after the 6 years of coursework they will graduate with a bachelor’s degree, not an MSc or a PhD, then, there is no need whatsoever to discriminate between someone whose bachelor’s degree program spanned for just 4 years and someone who spent 5 – 6 years to obtain a bachelor’s degree. How will someone who spent 7 years in America to obtain a bachelor’s degree in Law or Medicine be compensated if he is employed as an academic in that case? Will he start as Lecturer 1? Again, where will our system place someone who obtained a 3-year bachelor’s degree in engineering from Malaysia, South Africa, or the UK? Unfortunately, there is no rank below Graduate Assistant. I assure you that he will still be employed as Assistant Lecturer. These 2 examples clearly demonstrate the arbitrariness in the starting position of academics based on the number of years they spend obtaining their bachelor’s degree. The same unnecessary discrimination and arbitrariness have crept into our civil service where all other fresh graduates start on Grade Level 08 whereas fresh medical doctors start on Grade Level 10 and lawyers and geologists on Grade Level 09 (in some States and parastatals). This apparent and undeserved favoritism by NUC in the employment and promotion of academic medical doctors is going to hit a brick wall come 2025 because NUC has declared that there will be no promotion to the level of Senior Lecturer and above for medical doctors in the clinical departments of faculties or colleges of medicine without a PhD! This means that once they become consultants by obtaining a National Fellowship or West African Fellowship, they will be promoted to L1 and this rank will be the ‘terminal rank’ for them if they don’t have a PhD. In other words, their Fellowship will no longer be considered an equivalent of a PhD. I wonder if NUC has opened new postgraduate programs in all areas of clinical medicine that will be awarding the needed PhDs in the area before 2025 or it is just making the rules without consulting the Vice Chancellors to discuss the practicability of creating new postgraduate programs in all areas of clinical medicine to meet up with the 2025 deadline. I seriously pity those caught in the middle, I.e. the younger academic medical doctors who cannot enroll in any PhD program in their areas of specialization due to unavailability of such postgraduate programs.

The minimum teaching qualification is a PhD. Let us use standard systems from other developed nations. There should not exist any dichotomy between a GA and AS, all bachelor’s degree holders should be employed as GA or AS irrespective of the duration of their undergraduate programs. GA and AS should be synonymous in all aspects. All master’s degree (or its equivalent) holders should be employed as lecturers irrespective of their various disciplines. Let us abolish L2 and L1 dichotomy. All PhDs should be employed as senior lecturers (SLs). Let us keep it simple. Promotion requirements and intervals can be updated to suit this proposed stratification. For instance, the minimum promotion interval can be increased from 3 years to 4 years. This will eliminate the unnecessary discrimination among academic staff who possess the same degree but are unfairly ranked based on the duration of their undergraduate degrees.

The following points can be considered when attempting to reduce the duration of engineering programs from 5 years to 4 years with a view to restructuring our engineering curriculum to fit into the 21st-century outcome-based education, rather than some traditional and conservative system which is completely outdated.

(i) Elimination of Non-Essential Courses: There is really no need to design an engineering curriculum in which almost all the programs have similar courses in the 2nd year, i.e. 200 Level. All non-essential courses should be purged out of the degree plan depending on specific program needs and intended student outcomes. Such courses that may need to be eliminated can be major courses from a given program or core or elective courses from other programs. For instance, the following 2nd-year common engineering courses should no longer be common for all engineering programs.

  • Electric circuits (from Electrical Engineering): Deemed non-essential for Chemical Engineering program.
  • Thermodynamics (from Mechanical Engineering): Deemed non-essential for Civil and Electrical Engineering programs. Some universities give a choice between Electric Circuits and Thermodynamics.
  • Statics (from Civil Engineering): Deemed non-essential for Electrical & Chemical Engineering programs.
  • Dynamics (from Mechanical Engineering): Deemed non-essential for Electrical & Chemical Engineering programs.
  • Strength of Materials or Structural Mechanics (from Mechanical or Civil Engineering): Deemed non-essential for Electrical & Chemical Engineering programs
  • Fluid Mechanics (from Civil Engineering): Deemed non-essential for the Electrical Engineering program. Mechanical and Chemical Engineering programs may need a different fluid mechanics course targeting mechanical engineering systems involving gas and energy.
  • Electrical Power and Transducers (from Electrical Engineering): Deemed non-essential for Civil & Chemical Engineering programs.
  • Materials Science (from Mechanical Engineering): Deemed non-essential for Electrical & Civil Engineering programs.

(ii) Defragmentation of Courses: This entails combining related courses to free up some credit hours. For instance, instead of splitting Fluid Mechanics into 2 or 3 courses, the same course contents can be delivered using just 3 credit hours rather than 4 or more credit hours. Similarly, instead of having 2 courses (a total of 4 credit hours) for Structural Analysis, the same course contents for the 2 courses can be delivered using just a 3-credit-hour course.

 

(b) Teaching Quality Control & Assurance, Using Monitoring And Evaluation

Without proper monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of teaching-related activities, even the best-developed curriculum cannot achieve the desired PEOs and SOs. Some of the basic, yet important items to be discussed under the teaching quality control and assurance include detailed syllabi development, the achievement of course outcomes (COs), teaching, and program evaluations. All tertiary institutions must have a clearly defined framework for each of the above items if we truly want to overhaul our tertiary education for better service delivery. National Universities Commission could come up with these frameworks for universities for their strict adherence and program accreditation. Alternatively, the Directorate of Academic Planning & Monitoring of various institutions can come up with these frameworks and ensure strict adherence by all programs in a given institution to ensure uniformity.

(I) Development of Syllabi:

A comprehensive course syllabus should contain not just course description, but additional useful information such as textbook, course objectives, course outcomes, weekly lecture schedule (if possible), assessment plan and timelines or deadlines, class rules, etc. It is the contract between a lecturer and students.

One of the important components of the syllabus is the choice of an appropriate textbook for the course, especially for undergraduate courses. More often than not, there are available excellent textbooks that cover the course description in detail with adequate numerical and conceptual examples for better students’ understanding. For Science and Engineering programs, I found American textbooks to be the best in spite of the cost. In this internet age, one can find numerous ebooks for free online by simply googling the title of the book. Copyright issues associated with some online content especially ebooks are some of the concerns of the developed nations who usually author these books, they are the inventors, custodian and police of the internet, hence, it is on them to take down any of such websites that provide materials without legal copyright. Unfortunately, Third World Countries like Nigeria cannot afford such expensive, yet, must-have textbooks in their libraries for their students. For instance, a world-class textbook used for teaching Statics written by Hibbeler costs about $190 (i.e. about N90,000) on Amazon. For this reason, cheap Indians books have flooded our bookshops. It will do academics, students and tertiary institutions in the country good if the National Library of Nigeria could subscribe to outstanding ebook publishers and journal databases such as Wiley, McGraw-Hill, Taylor & Francis, ScienceDirect, ProQuest Dissertation, Springer, etc. and grant access to all tertiary institutions, students and academics in the country for free if possible or charge a small but subsidized token, if necessary. In Saudi Arabia, we access all these databases, some content from the publishers, and many more for free using the Saudi Digital Library.

By now, we should migrate to outcome-based education whereby all our courses will have a clearly defined set of skills and capabilities intended to be acquired by any student who enrolls in that course. They are called Course Outcomes (COs) or Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs). At the end of the course, all COs should be quantitatively evaluated using rubrics or other methods to determine the extent of the achievement of the COs.

(ii) Teaching Evaluations

It is not enough to draft the best course syllabus without following up on the lecturer’s adherence to the syllabus as well as l quality delivery of course. Students, being the target audience, should be engaged in evaluating the lecturer’s conduct and overall performances using unambiguous evaluation criteria. The overall score of the students’ evaluation should be communicated to the lecturer for his record and possible improvement, where necessary. If a lecturer’s evaluation by students consistently turns out to be below a certain threshold, then, there is a cause for alarm. We still have a long way to go in this regard. We should eliminate lecturers’ absolute impunity which is inimical to the growth of our educational system. These impunities include:

  • Absconding from attending classes at will. Some lecturers start attending classes almost half-way into the semester while some postgraduate courses get only a single-day lecture for the whole semester. You read it right, a single-day lecture to cover all the course content of a given course per semester. This is the highest level of irresponsibility and has got to stop!
  • Poorly prepared and delivered lectures that add almost zero value or knowledge to the students. Due to a lack of passion for academics exhibited by some lecturers who consider lecturing as just another job rather than a passionate career. Many lecturers have no passion for the profession. It is just another job, they cannot take their time to carefully prepare and effectively deliver their lectures to the satisfaction of their clients, the students. Some lecturers hide under the name ‘lecturer’ to tell students that they are not teachers, they are lecturers. Hence, they are not expected to come down to the level of teachers to effectively teach everything. This should not be used to justify the ineffective delivery of course materials. I took 11 courses during my PhD study, and all my professors taught me effectively as though I were an undergraduate or even a secondary school student. If we fail to properly teach our students today, they will become lecturers tomorrow and cannot give what they don’t have. Hence, an undesirable chain reaction will be initiated, and the quality of our educational system will keep on deteriorating.
  • There should be a transparent, non-victimized and unbiased process of remarking an examination to address students’ concerns. Although this is a student’s right, for fear of victimization by lecturers, students are usually afraid to apply for remarking even when they are almost sure (99.99 %) that they were wronged. I once failed a course during my 2nd year undergraduate days together with my friends from other departments, most of whom were either the best or one of the best students in their various departments. It appeared as though the course was inversely marked, meaning, those with low Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) multiple carryovers scaled through unscathed while most of those who failed the course were top of their class in various departments. There was no attempt to remark the course for the affected students and we could not summon the courage to apply for remarking, for fear of victimization. A year or 2 earlier, the same lecturer was confirmed to have wrongly interchanged final year students’ grades whereby he awarded low grades (E or D) to the best students and excellent grades (A or B) to the poor students. The best students at the time were quick to raise a loud alarm and the matter was rectified in their favor.
  • Sexual harassment. This is one area that many lecturers are found wanting. Using one’s privileged position to make sexual overtures towards students now attracts a jail term of 2 years under the proposed law. ASUU opposes this bill on the grounds that the bill is discriminatory and infringes on university autonomy. According to ASUU, the bill particularly targets lecturers in the tertiary institutions for an act that is a general societal problem and not exclusive to the tertiary institutions. Anyone with the slightest inkling on the widespread menace of sexual harassment in our institutions will wholeheartedly welcome this new bill with open arms. While ASUU is correct when it says that sexual harassment is a general societal problem and not peculiar to tertiary institutions, lecturers hold a privileged position that they can use to escalate the menace more than most employees in other sectors. I truly pity the womenfolk, because they encounter ‘predators’ day and night, in all nooks and crannies.

Peer review of lectures by other lecturers may also be undertaken to provide useful feedback to individual lecturers using assessed pro forma. In this case, the assessor attends the lecture from the beginning to the end before he fills the pro forma, similar to what obtains during the assessment of teaching practice interns.

These evaluations by students and peers are meant to ensure optimal delivery of course materials to the students irrespective of one’s teaching experience.

(iii) Program Evaluations

From curriculum development to teaching quality control and assurance, NUC can play the most important role coming up with a unified framework for all Nigerian universities to adhere to, for accreditation of new and existing programs. Alternatively, the Directorate of Academic Planning & Monitoring of universities could spearhead these activities. I have the privilege of using the Saudi Arabian NCAAE (National Center for Academic Accreditation and Evaluation) and American ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accreditation systems for our programs here in Saudi Arabia. Although ABET is the most prestigious accreditation for Engineering and Technology programs globally, NCAAE is more detailed and has some common components with ABET. Most Engineering and Technology programs in Saudi Arabia and the other GCC Arab countries have ABET accreditation. One would expect the Engineering programs offered at the American University of Nigeria (AUN) to possess ABET accreditation since it claims to offer the American standard of education. AUN claims on its School of Engineering website,  that “our programs aspire to pursue international accreditations such as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET).” If it truly intends to give its students the American standard of education in all ramifications not just in name, then, merely aspiring to pursue ABET accreditation is not enough. My humble opinion is that NUC should make it mandatory for AUN to obtain ABET accreditation for its Engineering programs to lend credence to its claim of teaching the American curriculum and save unsuspecting Nigerians from being scammed into believing that they are truly getting the much-coveted American standard of education standard-wise. Recall that AUN’s Engineering programs have a 5-year duration. From a cursory look at the Engineering curriculum, it looks more Nigerian than American despite the relatively expensive tuition fees of N 2.66 million per annum which it charges.

In addition to external program evaluation by accreditation, internal key performance indicators (KPIs) can be developed and assessed annually to provide useful feedback on the state of the various organs of a program. A realistic and ambitious target should be set for each KPI.

(c) Research Output

Lecturers who returned from overseas and whose specializations don’t need any lab equipment to conduct their research have relatively little challenges compared to those whose specializations require expensive cutting-edge equipment that is usually not available in our labs. Engineering is one discipline that requires highly sophisticated and very expensive equipment before any meaningful research can be undertaken. The availability of adequate research funds is another area that needs attention. The enormous number of current postgraduate admissions which is close to the undergraduate admissions in some universities brings with it the need to provide research funds to lecturers and students alike and adequately equip the labs for effective postgraduate training. This will limit the amount of high impact research and publications coming from Nigeria. Hence, lecturers can hardly publish in a high impact factor ISI (Clarivate Analytics) journal. ISI-indexed journals represent the best quality scientific journals and are recognized globally. Just 8 Nigerian journals from Medicine, Pharmacy, Library Science & Agriculture (none from Engineering) are currently ISI-indexed out of 21,643 ISI journals. Saudi Arabia has 23, Egypt 41 and South Africa 170. Universities are grossly underfunded by the Federal Government. It is making commendable efforts by establishing professorial chairs such as PTDF and Shell in some universities in addition to centers of research excellence and TETFund interventions. The Executive Secretary of TETFund lamented last year that about 80 % of research proposals received by the agency were rejected because they are poor. He further mentioned that most Nigerian professors, 8,000 in all, have low capacity to write a fundable research proposal. Most of those who studied abroad especially at PhD level do not have this problem at all because they have written many research proposals and gotten them. A Paucity of research grants, poorly equipped labs, inaccessibility to world-class scientific databases and books in Nigeria dampen the research productivity and output of lecturers who studied abroad. We have excellent researchers in Nigerian universities who got many US patents during their studies abroad. They however could not keep the tempo when they returned home due to the unconducive environment that keeps one’s performance below the optimal level. Our lecturers have the intellectual capacity to undertake cutting-edge research but they are mostly limited by the availability of research grants, lab equipment and technical materials. If the Nigerian Government would adequately invest in universities, we can perform better than Malaysian universities because we have all it takes to be great. The best Malaysian university (Universiti Malaya) now occupies the 59th rank in the world based, on the 2021 QS World University Rankings. No Nigerian university has made it to this list. It is no longer good enough to just earn a degree abroad in any university irrespective of its global ranking. Choosing universities based on their global rankings on QS World University Rankings, Times Higher Education (THE) or Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) can help to boost one’s international appeal and recognition for securing international research grants, research fellowships and for employment.

(2) Incessant ASUU Strike, Salary of Lecturers & Corruption

(a) Incessant ASUU Strike

These ASUU strikes which dominated the 90s culminated in the signing of an agreement between ASUU and FGN in 2001 with a view to reverse the decay in the university system, reduce brain drain by enhancing their remuneration, ensuring university autonomy and academic freedom, and to restructure Nigerian universities through massive and sustained financial intervention, among others. Also, the ASUU-FGN 2001 agreement was to be periodically reviewed every 3 years. Every right-thinking and rational human being who is conversant with the learning conditions in Nigerian universities will support ASUU struggles as per the above terms. Well, students may not be expected to be sympathetic to ASUU struggles for the obvious reason that their graduation will always be affected. As an undergraduate, I vowed never to join the union should I become an academic staff because of the 20 months added to my undergraduate residency period, due to ASUU strikes. When I joined as a lecturer in 2006, I deliberately refused to fill the ASUU membership form for the above reason but I was later registered automatically by the union by virtue of my being an academic staff. That membership allowed me to follow ASUU activities and struggles religiously until 2009 when I resigned my membership of the union. ASUU embarked on monthly deductions in my salary for the building of its national secretariat in Abuja without following due process, we were not informed in writing before the deductions began. I hope to rejoin the union one day. Despite FGN’s acknowledgment of the rot in the university system through its needs assessment report of 2012 under Prof. Mahmud Yakubu’s committee, not much has changed. Since 2001 when the agreement was first conceived and ratified to date, FGN has been continuously reneging time and again which always leads to preventable ASUU strikes every now and then in the university education system and by extension, the remaining tertiary education systems run by Polytechnics and FCEs. To me, the simple way to curb and prevent these strikes that have bedeviled our tertiary education system is for the FGN, through the Federal Ministry of Education, to do the needful by providing the needed fund to turn around these universities for the better and improve the relatively ‘poor’ remuneration of the academic staff of universities. The current Minister of Education, Mal. Adamu Adamu accepted FGN’s failure in fulfilling its own part of the bargain in the following comment:

“I must confess that government has not fulfilled its own part of the bargain. Although we are unhappy that ASUU went on strike without fulfilling due process and giving us good notice, we realised that we promised something and did not fulfil it”

–Mallam Adamu Adamu, Minister of Education, August 15, 2017.

In support of ASUU struggles, he wrote 3 articles in 2013 when ASUU was on strike to press home its demands. In one of the articles, he wrote the following statement, 2 years before he became the Minister of Education:

“No doubt, the 2009 agreement with ASUU and the memorandum resulting from it provide a very good starting point if the government is really interested in helping education. But perhaps that much is clear that no one in Abuja is really interested in anything that can move the nation forward, especially anything as nebulous as education, and more especially what needs to be spent on it.”

–Mallam Adamu Adamu, November 8, 2013.

Mal. Adamu Adamu may need to come out to tell Nigerians what has changed since he became the Federal Minister of Education in 2015, a position that can see him putting the incessant ASUU strikes to rest for good. Ironically, ASUU has been on strike since March 2020.

I wonder why ASUU does not have a functional website to display its activities for its members and non-members alike.

(b) Salary of Lecturers

Despite the important role the universities play in supplying the nation’s manpower needs for all sectors of the economy, it is among the least-paid sectors of the Federal Government’s MDAs (Ministries, Departments & Agencies). Ministry of Health is among the best-paid sectors.

ASUU wrote the following on its Facebook Page on July 17,

“Did you know that the peers of University Professors in other Nigerian sectors fare much better. The army General, the Police DIGs, the justices not to mention political appointees putting in few or no hours of work in a week. What crime has the Nigerian lecturer committed?”

I said to myself, does ASUU know that a newly-employed medical resident in a Federal Teaching Hospital who has just an MBBS earns almost the salary of a newly-promoted professor in our Federal universities? The resident is just starting as a Federal civil servant in the Ministry of Health while the professor has just reached the peak of his career in the university under the Ministry of Education. Of course, the professor in this example does not belong to the medical profession. While I don’t know how much a professor in clinical medicine earns, but a newly appointed consultant in the hospital who is an academic staff earns about 2 times the salary of a professor in other disciplines. This is the sorry but true state of salary stratification that affects the remuneration of professors. Some years back, a newly-promoted professor in a Federal university told me that a senior lecturer, which is the equivalent rank in a polytechnic, earned more than him. There used to be very few MSc holders and PhDs in polytechnics because they used to join the university once they earned their master’s degrees or PhDs. This is no longer the case now. They are very comfortable where they are, relative to university lecturers and may work less than them. NNPC (Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation) is another lucrative sector whose employees are well-paid. Three of my friends who were employed with me as assistant lecturers back in 2006 soon left for NNPC. I also learned that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), and Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) are among the best-paying sectors. If FGN is truly serious about upgrading the salaries of lecturers in Nigerian universities, then she should upgrade the salary scale of the Ministry of Education to be at par with other lucrative MDAs. This will go a long way in eradicating the serious local and international brain drain facing the universities. FGN should understand that if lecturers are not paid well enough to take care of their basic responsibilities,

  • they will surely search for alternative means of livelihood which could be by engaging in another job on a part-time or even full-time basis (e.g. business, consultancy, running a firm, farming, etc.). These jobs would take their time so much that they cannot give their best to their primary assignment. I am not against lecturers taking part-time jobs like consultancy or farming. However, you find that in the long term, these part-time jobs systematically and unofficially replace their primary jobs. ‘Self-preservation is the first law of nature’, man would do anything to survive, whether legal or illegal. The terms ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ have now become relative terms in Nigeria and purely subject to one’s interpretation and perspective because of the harsh conditions that people find themselves in. Who will ultimately be at the receiving end? The poor students – our leaders of tomorrow. It is not uncommon to hear of full-time lecturers who come to the university only once in a week, or once in a month because they are busy attending to their side businesses or jobs elsewhere. This will only worsen the university education system further. The Government can reverse this unfortunate trend if she wishes. No wonder, studying abroad is now more rampant than at any time in the past. About 13 thousand Nigerians are currently studying in America alone. We have many Nigerians studying in Malaysia, the UK, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Ghana, and even Niger Republic.
  • Some of them would engage in other untoward and corrupt practices such as extorting money from students to pass them in their courses, diverting research funds for personal use i.e. if they have access to one, etc.
  • Local and international brain drain. Those who can get jobs at other lucrative MDAs or private firms would resign their university jobs and go for a greener pasture. Others who have internationally recognized qualifications would get jobs abroad and leave the country for good or for only God knows when. Universities have now become ‘transit camps’, where you temporarily start with before you can get a better job.

I am not saying that lecturers should earn the highest salary in the land, no! All I’m saying is that lecturers should earn a decent salary just enough to keep them on the job and enable them to give it their best. Nobody would go as far as obtaining a PhD only for him to remain a pauper. You have many PhDs that cannot afford to buy a car. Many lecturers cannot pay their rent without doing annual ‘contribution’. They become more affected when their salaries are stopped by the Government whenever they are on strike to press home their demands. The Government would not honor an agreement she had entered into with the union for reasons best know to her, yet, she would starve the innocent souls by cutting off their meager livelihoods for months. This, to say the least, is the highest level of injustice. No country can survive if she stands on the pillars of injustice. Nobody should tell me that the country does not have enough money to provide adequate resources in the universities and handsomely pay the lecturers. We read and hear about billions of Naira spent on ‘ghost’ projects everyday by MDAs. Few people in the position of power and authority are milking the country dry at the expense of the general populace. Something urgent needs to be done to reverse this unfortunate trend.

(c) Corruption

In all fairness to other low-paying MDAs, all employees should be paid a minimum wage that can truly cater to their basic needs. This will help in curbing the menace of corruption which has become omnipresent. I know that corruption is not just about providing enough to the populace, but failure to adequately pay employees is one of the factors that exponentially promotes corruption on a cosmic scale. There is a group of innocent law-abiding citizens that the system has literally forced into the arms of corruption, I call them the ‘passively corrupt’ because they cannot fight the existing corrupt system alone no matter how hard they try. ‘Actively corrupt’ people are those that are willing participants in corrupt activities and can even go out of their ways to ensure that corruption thrives by all means and at all costs because of the benefits they drive therefrom. These are the agents of the devil or devil incarnate. Civil service has now become synonymous with corruption. Corruption has seriously affected our psyche, you appear ‘abnormal’ if you don’t give in to corrupt practices. On the spectrum of corruption, there is only a thin line separating actively corrupt and passively corrupt individuals, very few people belong to this category. Corruption has become more of a mental disorder than merely a moral problem. Some people are obsessively and compulsively corrupt.

In 2017, I practically witnessed the corruption taking place in contract bidding, award and ‘kickback,’ firsthand. I asked my boss and mentor the question “when are we going to eradicate corruption in Nigeria?” He replied with one of the best answers I have ever come across, ‘until people are adequately paid’. In the same year, I applied for a Managing-Director’s position in one of the agencies in my State, following an advertisement placed by the State Government to attract the best-qualified candidate for the job. This I did out of my passion to use my experience in the water resources and environmental sector to turn around the comatose water sector in the State. Unfortunately, I have been an academic all my life with zero industrial experience in the water sector except during my undergraduate internship. For that reason, my application for the MD’s position was rejected, and I was being considered for the position of Director of Operations in the agency. Two weeks to my interview, I found out that the salary of a Director in the agency including all other allowances was less than what I was just surviving on as a lecturer. It then begs the question if my current salary could not cater to my basic needs, how can I survive on anything less? I feared becoming “passively corrupt” if I accepted the position. On that note, I opted out. This has nothing to do with greed because I was not expecting to be paid a humongous amount that will make me rich, at the same time, I was not patriotic enough to sacrifice my little salary that I was just surviving on for anything less. I just wanted to be pragmatic. I know that the salaries of State and Federal Government employees are wide apart, but I never expected a Director to earn that low. I was vindicated a few weeks later when I met a family friend who worked in that agency and even acted as a Director at one time. He verified the Director’s remuneration that I gathered earlier and then explained to me how I could augment the meager salary. He said Director of Operations was responsible for all maintenance works of water infrastructure in the State, hence, a job that would normally cost N 3 million could be quoted for N 10 million and I can conveniently pocket the balance of N 7 million. In the end, the agency’s management team that was constituted that year after I opted out was sacked. That was a year after the appointment. I could not thank the Almighty Allah enough for opting out.

I still believe that the Government can do better in her fight against corruption. She celebrates when her anti-graft agencies secure convictions of top Government officials like former Governors, Ministers or Heads of Agencies such that millions or billions are recovered from them in cash or assets. While this is truly worth celebrating, but the Government should try harder to nib corruption in its bud. In other words, corruption should be fought fiercely from its cradle not to wait until it is just about entering its grave and has already done some irreparable damages to the polity. The main anti-graft agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is only interested in high-profile corruption cases that involve millions, say, starting from N3 million upwards. Unfortunately, everyday corrupt practices that take place in the country fall far below this minimum threshold, hence, they continue to flourish unattended to and over time, accumulate to generate billions of Naira to its benefactors. More unfortunate is the fact that these ‘petty’ corrupt practices are the ones affecting the ordinary person on the street. For some unknown reasons, the Government has chosen to turn her head the other way on the following everyday corrupt practices that could be completely eliminated within the shortest possible time.

Our Federal highways have many so-called security checkpoints for ensuring the safety of the highways. This they do at the expense of commercial car drivers. You see them in broad daylight, confidently extorting money from mostly poor and hardworking commercial car drivers and they don’t face any consequences for their heinous act at all. There are numerous confirmed reports of commercial drivers dying after being shot at a checkpoint for refusing to pay a bribe of sometimes as low as N20 or N200.

In January this year, the energetic Borno State Governor, Prof. Umara Zulum caught the security personnel at a checkpoint leading to Maiduguri extorting N500 and N1000 from poor travelers plying the road. Can you imagine how much the security personnel made per day, week and month? Can’t the heads of these security outfits (Inspector-General of Police and the Chief of Army Staff) work round the clock to eliminate this long-standing menace? Definitely, EFCC has nothing to offer here.

Kaduna State Governor had to constitute a task force that consists of his humble self and cabinet members, viz, commissioners, heads of agencies and parastatals, aides, etc. to take over the patrol of the State borders from the security personnel to prevent inter-state movement of vehicles enforced by the State Government. Do you think that he involved his cabinet members just for fun? No way! The security officials manning the checkpoints were allowing vehicular movements after receiving bribes from drivers. This made the Governor take the bull by the horn and do it himself. Although he is the chief security officer of his State, the security outfits (soldiers and police) are federally-owned and controlled. Hence, there may be little he can do to ensure that these security personnel at the checkpoint stop collecting bribes that allowed inter-state movement.

What does it take FGN to wake up one day and declare that this highway bribe collection by her security personnel has to stop and take concrete steps to completely stamp it out? I believe it is achievable, where there is a will, there is a way.

This applies to NCS at the borders and some highways. Despite declaring that importation of foreign rice has been banned since last year, this same foreign rice finds its way into our markets and is available in all shops in the markets across the nation. Is it that our foreign rice reserve has not been exhausted for all this time or the Custom officers manning our borders have decided to allow the passage of this contraband? I am no longer being extorted at Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport whenever I arrive from Saudi Arabia. It used to be another avenue for open extortion by the NCS officials. They used to openly block and extort passengers on arrival without showing any interest in searching any baggage. Now, they search my baggage and I don’t have to pay them a dime. I used to stock Naira whenever I was coming back to Nigeria for that extortion because they would demand foreign currency if you told them you didn’t have naira.

In all the 10 years I spent in Saudi Arabia, I have never been extorted by anyone. I never had any cause whatsoever to bribe anyone except once when I was going to Nigeria from Jeddah. Despite having the right baggage allowance in terms of the number of bags and their associated weights, an Egyptian man denied me and a fellow Nigerian entry into the departure lounge for no just reason. He later hinted that I see a cleaner to ‘settle’ him before I could pass. For fear of losing my flight, I had to succumb to his extortion rather than taking the matter up with the airport managers. Egyptians are also extremely corrupt. Toilet cleaners at their international airport in Cairo would openly and shamelessly extort money from passengers for using the toilet.

Another sector that needs serious attention is the FRSC (Federal Road Safety Corps) and its corresponding State-owned outfit like KASTELEA (Kaduna State Traffic and Environmental Law Enforcement Agency). FRSC is responsible for the safety of the traffic plying our highways. What does it take to bring back ‘genuine’ driving tests for those applying for driver’s licenses? I said ‘genuine’ because first-time applicants have to obtain driving school certificates now before they can get the driver’s licenses. While this is a step in the right direction, but the aim of ensuring that applicants truly get tested at a driving school is defeated because all one needs to do is to pay the fees for the driving school and wait for about 4 weeks to collect the certificate. In the end, introducing the driving school into the process has only increased the price of getting the driver’s license unnecessarily. I paid for a 5-year license in 2018 but received a 3-year license without receiving any balance from the officials because the 2 licenses have different fees.

The biggest life-threatening state-sanctioned corruption is in the issuance of the so-called ‘road worthiness’ confirmation document. It is one of the car documents issued together with vehicle license and vehicle insurance. It contains the signature of the Director, Road Traffic Vehicle Inspection Office who testifies in the document as follows:

“I hereby certify that I have examined the Vehicle or Motorcycle described below which in all respects conforms with the requirements of the Road Traffic Regulations 79(1-4) of 1975, and that it is Roadworthy and suitably constructed for use.”

It also has a list of tests or inspections (e.g. chassis, suspension, axle, tires, steering, windscreen, doors, hydrocarbon emission, engine, etc.) that are supposed to be carried out and passed before declaring the vehicle roadworthy. None of these tests or inspections are carried before the road worthiness confirmation is issued by KASTELEA. No matter how unmotorable your car is, no matter its life-threatening mechanical problems, all you need to do is to pay the money and you will surely get the document in a jiffy. There is no mechanism in place to carry out these tests and inspections at all. States and FGN are aware of this. Why can’t the Government think about preventing unnecessary accidents on our highways resulting from allowing unmotorable and unfit vehicles ply our roads daily by ensuring that every vehicle undergoes and passes these inspections and tests before they are issued with the road worthiness confirmation. Those that do not pass the tests after several attempts should be banned from our roads and taken to the junk yards for recycling. This is what obtains in any law-abiding nation and we can also do it. This will save us from many deaths resulting from sudden mechanical failures of vehicles on the roads and veering into oncoming vehicles or crowd as well as the unnecessary breakdown of vehicles in the middle of our roads.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) now uses the process of obtaining an ‘international’ passport to milk Nigerians dry. Officials of the NIS hoard the passport booklets and sell them to the highest bidder. The price is no longer fixed, it depends on who among the officials is contacted and how much he is willing to process the passport for you. At least this is my sad experience at the Kaduna NIS office which may or may not be different from what obtains in other states. I used to get a new passport or renew it in a day. Nowadays, we hear all sorts of stories about the unavailability of the passport booklets just to push you to pay for more if you are truly in a hurry. This corrupt practice can be stopped if the comptroller-general of the NIS is determined to root it out.

NIS has also systematically replaced the 32-page booklet with the 64-page one in its bid to cunningly generate more revenue. The 64-page booklet is targeted at frequent travelers who may run out of pages before their expiry dates. Since the introduction of the supposedly ‘optional’ 64-page booklet in 2014, the 32-page booklet has been gradually and systematically eliminated from the options making people pay higher prices for what they don’t really need. Again, I don’t really understand the wisdom behind asking anyone visiting the NIS office to obtain a passport to mention the person that he is visiting at the gate. This happened to me always at their offices in Kaduna and Abuja. Can’t I just walk into the NIS office without knowing anybody and request a passport?

Job racketeering is another corrupt practice that has seeped into most MDAs. The requirement for getting a fat job is “connection”, not merit. Gone are those days when graduating with a first-class degree guaranteed one an academic position in the university. Jobs in ‘juicy’ MDAs have been completely reserved for the sons and daughters of the ‘who is who’ in the country and shrouded in utmost secrecy.

As per my little understanding of public service and governance, heads of agencies and parastatals and the boards supervising the agencies can all play key roles in helping to curb corruption as long as they get the necessary support of their supervising commissioners at the State level and Ministers at the Federal level. Ultimately, the full support of Governors and the President in this fight against corruption cannot be over-emphasized. Remember the popular saying that if we don’t kill corruption, then corruption will surely kill us. All hands must be on deck, the haves and the have nots, the old and the young, the employed and the unemployed before corruption can be successfully brought to a standstill.

We need to use digital technology to our advantage in exposing corrupt practices and individuals. Our smartphones and social media can be effectively utilized for this purpose. Secretly record any untoward activities by any Government official or extortion by any security personnel and make it go viral on social media platforms. Learn how to create hashtags (#) and share your sad story or experience on any MDA, banks, or any other private organization. Sometimes you may not need to go this far, a simple threat can bring the required change. Many accounts from many Nigerians have proven the efficiency of this method in fighting corruption and injustice. This way, the Government may be forced into taking appropriate measures on her erring officials. Let us keep writing and talking about the various specific injustices taking place in our polity. This is no time to keep quiet. We have to change this sad narrative of daylight corruption and injustices taking place daily in our country, in our own way. Corruption does more damage to Nigeria than the corona virus pandemic can ever do.

No country can be rendered 100 % corrupt-free, every country on Earth grapples to contain corruption and reduce it to the barest minimum.  Corruption in Nigeria is different, it is killing us and will continue to do so till we do something about it. We still don’t have adequate power and pipe-borne water, our roads have become death traps either due to accidents resulting from the poorly-maintained roads across the nation or the activities of kidnappers who have turned some of the Federal roads into their dens where they feast daily. It is my sincere belief that our security agencies are up to the task. They have the expertise it takes to protect us against all enemies, foreign and domestic. This they have demonstrated times without number by capturing any kidnapper that dares to kidnap any highly-placed popular figure or those close to them. Occasionally, kidnappers of the poor and “unconnected” are also captured.

There is the challenge of getting adequate security personnel to contain the rising insecurity in the country vis-à-vis the provision of adequate weaponry and timely payment of their entitlements. President Muhammadu Buhari has admitted that the army is poorly equipped to adequately fight the insurgency ravaging the North East. This he did during the presidential debate moderated by Kadaria Ahmed before the 2019 presidential election. Recently, he pledged more resources for the country’s security agencies to tackle the unwanted security situation heads-on. We have seen frontline soldiers fighting Boko Haram in Maiduguri staging a protest when their allowances are not paid. Payment of allowances to security personnel should be deemed sacred and any default in such payments should be met with the harshest punishment from the Government.

Dr. Salihu Lukman is an assistant professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hafr Al Batin and writes from Saudi Arabia. salihulukman@yahoo.com

 

 

 

 

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