Dangote
Nigeria is a country of paradoxes and contradictions. We have a
nation raking in billions of dollars in oil revenue every year, yet it
is ranked among countries with the highest poverty levels in the whole
world. We have hundreds of square kilometers of arable land and an army
of unemployed persons, yet we cannot grow enough food for our
population, and we commit billions of dollars to food imports yearly.
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
