Nigerian universities, the first of which was founded in 1948, battle with several militating factors such as quality of lecturers, leadership failures, infrastructure gaps and funding.
These have led to Nigerian universities ranking poorly among peers in the global academic community. The most critical indicator in university ranking is quality and quantity of research. “Owing to a consternation of factors chief of which are poor research capacity of staff in the Nigerian university system and the non-salutary research environment, we can hardly move to the top of league tables if these challenges persist” Peter Okebukola, former executive secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC) had told BusinessDay in an earlier interview.
Another strong reason why Nigerian universities rate poorly is due to the dwindling international staff and students. Many Nigerian universities have sparse international students or none at all. International staff is also scanty. The poor resourcing of Nigerian universities accounts in large part for international students and staff not coming to study and to teach respectively. The issue of security also plays a scary role for the international staff and student.
Other challenges facing higher institutions of learning in Nigeria include the absence of infrastructure on campus for learning and an industrial backbone for internships.
“Unfortunately, the industrial backbone has been very weak and the entire economy has been run as one big consumer market, dominated by imports from all over the world, especially China. As such, there are no outlets to practice these theories. Secondly, the institutions themselves need to be upgraded, both for the human ware as well as the soft and hardware, to enable the students study in a 21st Century” said Oyewusi Ibidapo Obe, professor of Systems Engineering, educational administrator and former vice chancellor of the University of Lagos, in an emailed note.
“We have started to have some “in-breeding” in our University System. This is anti-innovation and progress. The quality of lecturers in our institutions needs an urgent audit,” Obe added.
According to Okebukola, Nigerian universities can still play a significant role in the fourth industrial revolution in a number of ways, when care is taken to deal develop the sector. The first direction is in research capacity building.
“There is need to run annual, intensive, capacity-building (training) workshops on contemporary research techniques, for cohorts of science teachers” Okebukola said.
Access to university education has been challenged due to limited carrying capacity. One way of dealing with this is to embark on massive upgrading of physical facilities in existing universities to take at least additional 1, 000 students per year. This will involve more classrooms, hostels, laboratories, workshops, libraries and offices.
In this light, staff recruitment is to be undertaken in the quantity and quality to match the annual growth in student enrolment. With successful scaling of NUC due diligence on the expanded facilities and increased human resources, carrying capacity is increased to 1000.
The university can, thereafter, proceed to enroll additional 1000 students during the next admission season. In ten years, a typical university would have added about 10,000 students to its baseline stock. In terms of cost per university, this option translates to an annual average of N1.6 billion for building, equipment and staffing. In ten years, each university will require at least N10.6 billion for the expansion project.
“The long and short of the story is that if we desire 10 percent annual increase in enrolment in the nation’s 141 public and private universities, we will require N1,494.6 billion (about N1.5 trillion) in ten years.” Okebukola said.
Of this sum, the 40 federal universities will require N424 billion while the 40 State universities will require the same amount. The remaining N646.6 billion will have to be sourced by private universities from their proprietors.
Isaac Adeyemi, former vice chancellor, Bells University, Otta Ogun State told BusinessDay that the growth potential of education in Nigeria especially the tertiary level is stifled by inability to faithfully implement national policy provisions.
Adeyemi observed that this failure in policy implementation has resulted in products from the school system at all levels coming out in poor state.
According to him, “Facilities in public schools are in deplorable condition and the down tooling of lecturers in public universities by ASUU is a pointer to this.”
KELECHI EWUZIE
