Dangote
Nigeria is the “giant” of Africa, yet she sits pretty at the bottom rungs of all indices of human development, not only in Africa, but throughout the world. There are no good roads in most parts of the country, and the majority of Nigerians living within the poverty circle can hardly afford to transport themselves on commercial motorcycles, yet, we have a jet set of the people cavorting about in private jets. We find the poorest of the poor in worship houses, yet the leaders in these places live in opulence, if not debauchery.
They live large, while some of their suffering members can hardly eat a meal a day, and their children drop out of school over inability to pay school fees! Recently, yet another paradox emerged on the Nigerian landscape: That of unemployed citizens with doctorate degrees (Ph.Ds) applying for jobs as truck drivers at a time that universities are suffering shortage of lecturers with doctorate degrees! It may sound as strange as fiction.
But, reports in the dailies last week, confirmed an acute shortage of university lecturers at a time that doctorate degree holders are so desperate to get any job that they are seeking employment as truck drivers with the Dangote Group. The sordid extent of the shortage of varsity lecturers was captured in the media last week in a Needs Assessment Report on Nigerian public universities submitted by a 10-member committee set up by the Federal Ministry of Education.
The report indicated that the situation was so bad that some universities have only five lecturers with Ph.ds, while there are universities with only one or two professors! The report covered all the nation’s 27 Federal universities and 34 State-owned ones, with the exception of the 10 Federal universities recently established by President Goodluck Jonathan, and three state-owned: Sokoto State University, North West University, Kano and Tai Solarin University of Education in Ogun State.
Specifically, Kebbi State University of Science and Technology established six years ago has only two professors and five Ph.D. holders; Kano State University that has been existing for 11 years has only one professor and 25 Ph.D. holders; while Ondo State University of Science and Technology has only 29 lecturers to man all its programmes. Only 75 percent of the 37,504 university lecturers captured in the report were reported to be teaching on full-time basis, while 25 percent are recycled as visiting, adjunct, sabbatical or contract lecturers in different universities.
Only four of 47 professors in Gombe State University are full-time, while all the 25 Readers are visiting lecturers. In Plateau State University, only 26 percent of lecturers were reported to be full time while 74 per cent are visiting. In Kaduna State University, 150 out of 174 Ph.D holders are part-time lecturers. The study of 61 universities out of the existing entire 74 public universities in the country unequivocally determined that there is a shortage of lecturers with Ph.Ds, as only 43 per cent of lecturers nationwide hold the qualification, instead of the expected 100 per cent. Instead of engaging lecturers with the required Ph.D qualification, the universities reportedly bog themselves down with a surfeit of non-teaching staff who, ordinarily, should only support the work of the lecturers.
As a result, teacher-student ratio is high with University of Abuja having 1.122. The report concluded that public universities are grossly under-staffed, rely heavily on part-time and visiting lecturers, have under-qualified academics and have no effective staff development programme outside the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) intervention and the Presidential First Class Scholarship Programme. Only seven universities (Imo State University, and Universities of Uyo, Port Harcourt, Ilorin, Calabar, National Open University of Nigeria and Ondo State University of Science Technology) were found to have 60 per cent of their academic staff with Ph.Ds.
The shortage of qualified teaching staff in Nigerian universities with non-teaching support staff gulping more of the resources of universities is a symptom of the quality of management of these universities.What we have on our hands is a situation in which Vice Chancellors, registrars and other university administrators prefer to commit scarce resources to recruitment of all manners of persons into different clerical and administrative positions in the universities, when there are not enough lecturers to man programmes. Over 70 per cent of these university support staff were reported not to have a first degree, yet persons with Masters degrees and Ph.Ds are not employed possibly because they lack the necessary “contacts” to be considered for lecturing jobs.
The ballooning of the non-teaching staff leads to spiraling personnel cost, leaving little for employment of academic staff and provision of teaching materials such as laboratory facilities and other important infrastructure. The 77,511 full-time non-teaching staff in the 61 universities covered in this report is about twice the number of teaching staff. In some universities, non-teaching staff were reported to be twice, thrice or even four times the number of teaching staff in the institutions. This is a clear case of mismanagement by the university authorities that should be addressed immediately.
It clearly shows that the concerned authorities are unmindful of the important responsibility to ensure that academic programmes are properly manned, but prefer to employ low-level staff into non-academic positions for sundry reasons. The findings of this committee headed by Prof. Mahmmod Yakubu with former Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) National President, Prof. Ukachukwu Aloysius Awuzie, as member, does not paint a good picture of the National Universities Commission (NUC), which has statutory responsibility to ensure maintenance of standards in the institutions.
A situation in which the NUC gives universities clean bill of health during accreditation exercises only for the people to hear that some of the institutions have only one or two professors, is not good enough. The excuse that some universities use part-time and adjunct lecturers to beef-up their academic staff strength during accreditation is not acceptable. Now that the Yakubu report has blown the feathers off the rump of the Nigerian university system as regards the strength of academic staff, appropriate authorities should do the right thing by increasing the academic staff available to the institutions.
Unemployed Nigerians with outstanding grades in their first and second degrees, and those already with Ph.Ds but are unemployed, should be brought into the system and trained to teach in the universities.It is not good that Ph.D holders are forced to go into jobs such as truck-driving for want of better opportunities. The situation may engender bitterness and will certainly not augur well for development of nationalistic tendencies in those involved.
The universities, also, need to rev up the content of their academic programmes with mandatory, hands-on entrepreneurial courses that are relevant to specific programmes. The programmes need not be solely academic; they need to be tailored in a way that graduates from the courses can make a living with the knowledge acquired. For example, it is not enough to just teach Literature in the historical sense of what has been written by other authors. Students of that course can be taught to write books like novels, children’s story books and other fiction and non-fiction work.
This will give them a headway into going into writing as a career, not just memorizing and rehashing the works of the Wole Soyinkas and Chinua Achebes of this world, and pounding the streets in search of employment for many years after graduation. This can be replicated in virtually all fields so that graduates come out prepared with education necessary to launch out on their own. Let our graduates be groomed into job creators, not job seekers.
If this is done, Nigeria will be on her way to tackling the problem of graduate unemployment that has become a national embarrassment.
DailyPost
No comments:
Post a Comment