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 21^st-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 2^nd 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 2^nd-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 2^nd 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 59^th 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