By Owei Lakemfa
June 2024. Festivity was in the air. Professors and students, staff and high class visitors were in attendance. The highlight was a first class dinner. Africa’s book factory, Professor Toyin Falola, flew into the country to deliver the farewell lecture. It was all in honour of Professor Abd-Rasheed Na’Allah, out-going Vice Chancellor of the University of Abuja, UNIABUJA. But, trust spoilers.
They are never far away from festivities. As the wining and dining went on with fine speeches seeing off the VC at month end, students of the university were lamenting the N500 daily they pay to charge their cell phones. It was the second week the university had been plunged into darkness. It was not that the university is new to power outages, but this particular one had lengthened to pay farewell to Professor Na’Allah.
UNIABUJA claims it is “the model University in
Nigeria (and) a pride of Nigerians and in the provision of higher education”. I
am amazed it achieved these and attained such lofty heights while enveloped in
darkness.
UNIABUJA students are quite
measured: they can live under any condition. But not so the students of the
University of Benin, UNIBEN. Confronted with the same circumstances, they took
to the streets, blocking the busy Benin-Ore Highway to protest weeks of
electricity cut. The students were two weeks away from their examinations, yet
had no electricity to study after lectures. They demanded a 24-hour electricity
supply. The authorities could not meet the demand, so they shut down the
university.
While professors in other
countries are professing and advancing the frontiers of knowledge, their
counterparts in the Ahmadu Bello University, ABU, are lamenting the lack of
electricity to do basic work. So, 40 of them signed a petition last week asking
the Visitor, President Bola Tinubu, to intervene given the centrality of
electricity supply to the operations of the university. They stated what
appears to be the obvious. That a university with an average total annual
budgetary overhead grant of N150 million, cannot pay an electricity bill of
N3.6 billion. The egg heads calculated that if the bill were to be transferred
to the 50,000 students of the institution, charges would need to be hiked by
over 500 per cent.
The professors suggested
alternatives. Government could pay for the cost of electricity as part of its
overhead grant or, use its 49 per cent shareholding in the electricity
companies to direct them to supply universities uninterrupted power supply in
exchange for tax credits. A third suggestion is to mandate the electricity
companies to introduce a dedicated social tariff band with rates the
universities can afford.
The government’s response is
uncertain, but I assume that the university still has many moons to go:
producing first class materials without the benefit of electricity supply. Is
it for nothing our national anthem proclaims ‘Nigeria, we hail thee’?
The University College Hospital,
Ibadan, founded in 1952, is the pioneer teaching hospital in the country. Its
1,000 beds makes it one of the biggest hospitals in the country.
The legendary UCH proclaims,
like Ozymandias: “We are the flagship tertiary healthcare institution in
Nigeria, offering world-class Training, Research and Services.” It even has a
Department of Nuclear Medicine, that branch involved in the use of radioactive
substances in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, including nuclear
imaging. Short of witchcraft, how can the UCH perform all these, including
blood storage and endless operations, with power outages and even conscious
power disconnections? The Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company had for
several days, disconnected UCH from the electricity system for owing N400
million.
Six years ago, the College of
Medicine, University of Lagos, Idi-Araba decided to check power cuts by
imposing an N11,000 electricity levy on each student. When the students refused
to pay, the tertiary health institution reduced power supply to four hours
daily. But mass protests led the authorities to seek other ways of reducing the
power outages.
The first generation University of Nigeria, UNN, was
by 2018 producing about 10,000 first degree graduates and 3,000 higher degrees.
But its power outages were between 48 and 120 hours weekly. Sometimes, power
cuts lasted a whole week. So, small or micro generators began to pollute the
campus.
The Federal University Kashere,
FUK, Gombe State is in an area with sweltering temperatures. So, the
authorities supply the hostels two hours of electricity daily. The students in
most cases pay commercial centres to charge their phones and laptops.
But these power cuts to
universities, lasting weeks at a stretch, is like child’s play when compared to
the case of the Kaduna State University, KASU. The Academic Staff Union of
Universities, ASUU, branch Chairperson, Peter Adamu, who made a diagnostic
analysis, said the situation, like advancing cancer, had gone from intermittent
and epileptic to a total blackout. It became so bad that the Kafanchan campus
had no electricity supply for over seven months! Adamu described the atmosphere
in the university: “There is a feeling of pessimism, hopelessness, despair,
despondency and dissent premonition that if the management of the university
did not redouble their efforts, the end to this ugly situation might not be
palatable.”
The miracle is that KASU, which
is like a patient on life support, is still breathing and giving birth to new
graduates and post- graduates!
Power failures, I must say, is
not just a disease of public universities, the private ones also suffer it. For
instance, the students of the American University of Nigeria, AUN, on April 24,
2024 staged peaceful demonstrations against persistent power cuts. To assuage
the students anger, school authorities gave an assurance of a minimum five-hour
power supply daily until public power supply is restored. They also shifted the
commencement of examinations and, agreed to halt regular teaching to give the
students more time to study.
Anybody who does not believe
academics, staff and students can perform miracles, should visit Nigerian
universities.
Electricity is central to the
operation of universities, polytechnics and technical institutions. It is
necessary for the running or functioning of equipment. It is fundamental to
learning, industrialisation and development. So, running tertiary institutions
with little, epileptic or no electricity, is nothing short of the miraculous .
But it is not a lesson other institutions outside Nigeria want to learn from or
experiment.
Do our universities deserve what
they are getting having failed to find solutions to the country’s problems,
including electricity generation and distribution? Or, does the country deserve
the universities it has for not providing even the most basic needs like
electricity? On the other hand, do they deserve themselves? But this is no time
to trade blames. Rather, it is the time to put our hands on the plough and let
there be light.
*Lakemfa
is a commentator on public issues
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