By Obi Nwakanma
I was at the University of Nigeria in February to give the keynote to a conference jointly organized by Nsukka’s Institute of African Studies and the Harris Center of the University of Chicago. I remember the gaunt listlessness of the campus, because I arrived there the very day the ASUU strike began. But there was something else beneath the palimpsest of dust that covered the campus of Nsukka. It was decay that felt like a settled crust on the campus of Nigeria’s premier university.
I felt an out of body experience because I am a product of the Nigerian universities of the 1980s. The University of Jos of the 1980s, for instance, still had its Country-Club atmosphere in those years. It was what you might call a “party school.” But serious business went on there. The students were competitively selected for admissions; it was a very diverse group of students, including the presence of international students. Its faculty was equally diverse and international. Conduct and activities on campus was still cultured and mannered. University faculty still had their dignity, and carried themselves with dignified purpose.
The most reputable among them had the high regard of their peers locally and internationally. They were apparently still doing path-breaking work in various areas of research and teaching. Student mentorship was significant. For instance, I retained the regular intellectual counsel and care of the then Dr. Abu Abarry (who later moved to Temple University in Pennsylvania), who was my faculty advisor in the English department. University faculty and staff lived in dignified silence inside the cloister, totally shielded, both my emolument and by creature comfort inside those cloisters. It was a real Ivory Tower situation. That was why I was struck by the changes -physical and intellectual – that had happened at Nsukka.It might as well have been because everything had been stepped
down by the strike, but there was something of a deadly insularity; a loss of
vision and quality, and much of that stood out to me. This decay – this need to
regenerate the Nigerian universities has been at the very core of the ASUU
fight. It is the fight for the survival of the mission of Nigeria’s public
universities, among which is to educate a very competent national work force;
conduct strategic research for national development, provide the basis of
national renewal, and be the foreground for the building of the republic as an
egalitarian society.
The mission of the Nigerian university as articulated by its
nationalist visionaries is contained in that motto developed by Dr. Azikiwe for
the University of Nigeria, which formally opened its gates to its first set of
students on October 8, 1960, exactly one week following the formal end of
colonial rule in Nigeria: “to restore the dignity of man.” In its current
state, neither Nsukka, nor any other Nigerian university in their current
states, can “restore the dignity of man.” How can the graduates of these
institutions help to restore the dignity of man whenyou send young men and women
to live and be educated under conditions worse than the worst ghettos anywhere
in the world.
The best way to measure the situation of the young Nigerian
undergraduate is to enter the toilets and bathrooms in student residential
halls. There is no prisoner of war camp that has any worse facility than
Nigerian university students, nor do prisoners of war under the harshest
conditions endure such conditions. It is terrible. Then you have to wonder what
those in charge of student residential life do for these campuses. You wonder
what facility managers employedby these universities do, both in terms of
proper design, upgrade, and aesthetic renewal of these university campuses as
required from time to time. How can a Nigerian university graduate, who has
not learnt the habits of proper dining; who has not enjoyed the benefits of
cultured life as once modeled by universities; who has never enjoyed the
benefits of elegant sororities and fraternities; who has never done charity
work for the sake of charity simply because it is no longer an ethos of the
university; who has been consumed in an environmentof despair, religious
fundamentalism, bigotry and fear rather than a secular and enlightened pursuit
of knowledge; who are increasingly taught by second rate faculty because the
universities can now hardly attract nor even afford to recruit or retain
cutting edge, world class scholars and researchers from across the world help
advance the dignity of man? The soul of the public university is gone. This has
been, as I understand it, the basis of the fight of the University staff Union,
ASUU since the early 1990s when this began to be a hot issue.
The underfunding of the Nigerian universities and the
misgovernance of these universities constitute not only an existential problem
for Nigeria, but to all intents and purposes, a national security issue,
because, one, no nation lets its most advanced thinkers slide into the ghetto
and become free agents. Not in a world currently driven by knowledge. Besides
the simple logical fact that the devil builds a workshop for the idle hand,
without the well-designed workshop called the Nigerian public university, the
knowledge economy cannot happen or develop in Nigeria, nor would Nigeria be
able to compete in the current world if its National University system is not
repositioned. Two, the universities of nations are connected to their National
Security and Defence infrastructure: whether it is defence from biological and
viral threats; military threats, or even the threats of nature itself, the
universities are the frontline research and analysis centers of nations.
The products, through natural collaboration between National
Research Centers and University research networks and capabilities provide
strategic solutions to aid the productive genius and mission of sovereign
nations. The nation’s universities are the keepers of its national scientific
and strategic secrets. It is only Nigeria that allows its strategic human
resources to be very easily harvested by other nations, and fails to protect
the strategic products of its indigenous knowledge system. Other societies
create laws to protect this, and provide indemnities to secure these
irreplaceable human treasures of nations. This fact is the basis for founding
universities. Universities are not established as commercial ventures.
Universities are not profit-making ventures. They are specially protected
territories or zones of knowledge making.
Many Nigerians have a very poor, usually uninformed notion of the ideaof “private universities.” These are actually not privately owned places, as Nigerians erroneously think. No individual owns a university, n n producing not only the manpower needs of Nigeria, but bolster its goals of national development. The public university system serves that purpose enormously. The Federally-owned public university in Nigeria must be rebuilt therefore, and maintained, and preserved, not dismantled and privatized. Privatization so far has failed to deliver any value to Nigerians. What needs to happen is a reconceptualization of the governance of these public universities. The National Assembly needs to create new, independent funding mechanisms, not new universities. Allow the existing universities, for instance, to set and collect fees, because there is nowhere in the world where university education is free. Anyone who wishes to attend the university must pay for it. But the federal government must set up the Federal Students Loans Board and the Federal Scholarship Board. Fund these agencies with 25% of the Education Trust Fund. Regents of the Federal Universities must step up their game.
Establish University Endowments. There are so many alumni of
these universities who are willing to step up to the plate. But there is
frankly, it seems, a deliberate battle between self-interested actors between the
government and ASUU to ensure that the public universities system, just like
other components of the public education system, collapses, so that privateers
would take over education in Nigeria. This has to stop.
*Nwakanma, a poet
and scholar, is a US-based university teacher
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