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Indeed, the problem with university education in Nigeria did not start today. It is also true that that is not an excuse for the current administration not to find a solution to it instead of threats.
Education was placed on a priority list till 1966 when the military took over the leadership of the country. Since then, it has never been the same. The coming of the military stagnated the education system of the country for years. The situation got worse in 1983. The funny thing is that whenever there is a claim of no money, education is always the first casualty. In June 1985 the military government terminated the cafeteria system in the university and the withdrawal of subsidies on accommodation.
The coming of General Ibrahim Babangida as the military president further deepen the crisis in the education sector. He brought the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), an IMF/World Bank policy of free market capitalism. He introduced SAP in 1986 despite the resounding "NO" from the stakeholders. The bank advised him to shift investment from higher education and focus on primary education. He implemented it without remembering that primary and secondary schools require teachers trained in tertiary education. How do you produce quality teachers and other workforces without properly funded tertiary education?
To make matter worse, the introduction of SAP and the funding cut on education did not just affect the tertiary institution but also basic education. The salary was stagnant and the value dropped. Life became unbearable for teachers. They had to start farming to be able to survive. The schools were degrading and the commitment of the teachers to the job decreased gradually till interest was completely lost. The sound primary schools that we attended became a shadow of themselves.
Life became unbearable for most people. In 1992, The situation of the university lecturers had become more intolerable. The drive to leave the universities for foreign countries and the private sector was seen by many as the solution to the decay in the universities and the demoralization of university teachers. The decay continued till Gen. Babangida stepped aside in 1993.
All these did not happen without resistance. There was resistance to the IMF and World Bank-SAP by activists and unions. ASUU resistance made it a target for destruction by the military regime. The National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) was on the frontline. Radical student unionism was very much active then. Salihu Muhammed Lukman as the NANS leader in 1989 led the anti-SAP students' protest. The ASUU struggle against the military government, especially when Attahiru Jegga was the president between 1988 and 1994 is well documented.
As the onslaught on tertiary education continued, radical student unionism was seen as a threat and there was a need to tame them. A process to de-radicalize student unionism and silence the radicals was activated. A few years later, the students lost the power to fight for education. Only the lecturers managed to continue the fight to date. There were attempts to deal with ASUU as a union that failed. The university was sustained by the series of ASUU strikes.
But as bad as the public universities were in the 90s due to underfunding, they were still good enough for General Sani Abacha's children, even when he was the head of state. All his kids studied in public universities in Nigeria.
You would have thought that the coming of democracy in 1999 will usher in relief, especially in the education sector, but it got worse. The cut in the budget for education continued. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo who is now a PhD holder called university lecturers all sorts of names. That trend continued to date.
They begin to see spending on the education of the people as a luxury for them that should be eliminated. Education institutions were left hanging while every elected or appointed political office holder is considering sending their kids abroad for studies or to a private school. A member of the House of Representatives in March 2022 attempted a motion for public servants to be made to patronize public schools and the motion was instant rejected. There have been several strike actions and ASUU keeps demanding the revitalization of public universities to make them good enough for everyone irrespective of class at the cost of the welfare of the members.
A colleague recently had a conversation with an elite government official, and when he brought up the ASUU issue, he burst into laughter. He said, "ASUU members are intelligent but not wise". He asked: "how do you mean?" Immediately he said, "this is not a strike, this is suicide you guys are undertaking, you don't care for yourselves, you are fighting for University management. Go and ask NNPC staff whether they've produced a drop of fuel in the past 20 years. Then ask them why didn't they go on strike for the revitalisation of Nigerian refineries. Na ASUU righteous pass abi? Make una dey dia dey waste una time".
That is their mindset. ASUU members are considered "unwise" by them for the struggle for the survival of public universities for months without salary. It is a suicide mission. To them, the wise thing to do is to just let the university crash like the refineries and get their salaries paid. If you can get enough pay to educate your kids, why should you care?
The former student leader that fought against cuts in university funding and is now a politician and the National Vice Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) made a comment recently. He blamed the romance of the Ibrahim Babangida regime with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank policies which imposed SAP, on the collapse of the education sector. That's obvious to all of us.
He agreed that there is a gap to be filled in education and the need for investment. The same gap that ASUU identified a long time ago. But unfortunately, he doesn't know where the money will come from. The solution to revive education according to the former activist and student leader is the regulation of the conduct of ASUU where they are not paid while on strike. That's weird from an activist. I don't know how that will revive primary and secondary education which is in the worst state. I wish he had used his position as the DG of the progressive governors' forum to make the governors revive quality basic education.
Has the ASUU strike ever been beneficial to the universities?
I applied for admission into Ahmadu Bello University's School of Remedial and General studies in 1992 and was waiting for admission. The admission did not come till March 1993 due to the 1992 ASUU strike. When we eventually resumed, there were more strikes. As students, we thought ASUU was not fair to us. But we later realise that the 1992 strike led to the agreement that was signed between the Federal Government and ASUU on the 3rd of September 1992 on funding of universities.
That agreement led to the Education Tax Act No7 of 1993 being promulgated alongside other education-related Decrees in January 1993. The Act led to the establishment of the Education Trust Fund (ETF) as amended by Act No 40 of 1998. The Act was repealed and replaced with Tertiary Education Trust Fund Act 2011. We now have the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), an intervention agency set up to provide supplementary support to all levels of public tertiary institutions.
The NEEDS Assessment report during Goodluck Jonathan's government is well known to all of us. ASUU strike led to the formation of the committee, and the release of the first tranche of N200b by his government. Just go to any university or tertiary institution (federal and state) close to you. Remove the TETFund and NEEDS Assessment projects and see what is left. Then imagine what would have been on ground in our public universities without the ASUU strike from 1992 to 2013. ASUU strike is technically responsible for our public universities having a semblance of a university.
Their propositions...
Some people who enjoyed free education and a scholarship abroad to study, return to tell us that there is no free university education and the need to introduce tuition fees to solve the funding crisis in public universities. The claim is false as there are several countries, even in Europe, with free education at all levels. They have no problem funding their education because they have excellent resource management.
There is so much talk about the introduction of tuition fees and students loan as it's done in the US, UK, etc as the only solution to save the universities. They have refused to look at the future implication as a developing nation. But then, I have asked that if tuition is the only solution to the crisis in the university, do we also need tuition to revive public primary and secondary schools? I am yet to get an answer.
Meanwhile, Michelle Elizabeth, a US social worker tweeted a few days ago: "I'm a social worker. I left graduate school 20 yrs ago with over $52,000 in student loans. I've made every payment since and still owe $42,000. It's almost gone to interest... I've paid $48,000 but still owe $42,000". Robin Chance, a school teacher left grad school 26 years ago with $60,000 in student debt. Her loan debt has grown to $297,000.
There is a student loan debt crisis in the US and they are campaigning for student debt cancellation but there is a campaign for us to take that path. Student loan was once introduced and failed. We need to understand the source of its failure before the re-introduction. Meanwhile, supposing a student takes a student loan of say N2m to study physics and graduates to get a job as a physics teacher in Kaduna state secondary school with a salary of N55,000 per month.
There is no job creation in Nigeria. It gets worse if the graduates take some years to secure a job. How is he going to service the loans? How sustainable will the loan scheme be? Every environment has a peculiar situation. We need to be realistic and find a solution that will fit into our peculiarity.
Then, a presidential candidate intends to keep the premier universities and offload the remaining universities to the state governments. The question is how he expects a man who cannot take care of his responsibilities to carry more responsibilities. He is creating a path for the state governors to reduce the universities to the state of primary schools. They don't care after all their kids are not there.
Meanwhile, academics are losing interest in the job and looking out for something else as advised by the public. 1992 situation seems to be reinventing itself 30 years later. Some have left and more will be leaving as they are preparing their exit plan. The worst that will happen to a university is having lecturers with a non-academic side hustle. If that side hustle brings in more cash, more time will be given to it and God help the students and the system. That's a system we should not pray for. Academic is beyond class teacher job and it is a full-time job.
My proposition...
I completely agree with ASUU that education can be revitalised. It's a matter of priority and political will. It appears that whoever her into political office unconsciously absorbed the 1980s SAP ideology. We need to have a brain reset to purge that out of our brains. If we can watch the security budget grow geometrically and we are funding it conveniently, the education budget can be increased to properly fund education. We are a developing country. Somebody cannot be hearing those figures in billions been stolen and you want to convince him that there is no money to fund education. Just block the loopholes and reinvent the political will.
Why establish more universities with independent management structures when you are finding it difficult to fund the existing ones? Norway is merging its universities while we are establishing more. It may be a good idea to merge the smaller universities with the bigger ones and retain the structures as campuses. That may reduce operational costs.
University is a research and innovation hub. Universities around the world have established start-ups from their research output. Such research is properly funded. We need all the money to develop our capacity instead of shipping our limited funds abroad for PhD training. These funds are used to develop those universities. We have trained enough scholars through PTDF, TETFund, NITDA, etc, that are back in the country. Most of them return without any proper labs or resources to use. We need to have a return plan for them.
There is a recent report that Nigerians are the third largest international students in the UK and a good number are on a government scholarship. There is no fund to revitalize our universities but there is a fund to sustain the yearly scholarship abroad for postgraduate training. What are we training them for? What is the impact?
TETFund, PTDF, NITDA, etc, may need to sit down and re-evaluate their scholarship schemes. They need to assess the gap that has been filled by the scheme, what is left to be filled, and the role of the already trained scholars. We have plenty of professors across various fields doing great research in Nigerian universities. We need that fund to develop our research and development capacity.
My experience with the TETFund NRF research grant reveals that if a large chunk of such funds for the international scholarship is converted to local scholarship and judiciously used, we can nurture and grow our research facilities and output. We can adopt the DAAD model in Germany.
The scholar under training needs international exposure. All we need to do is to package the scholarship to include a collaborator in a reputable university abroad so that the scholar can visit his lab for some months for international exposure. There will also be international conference participation every year to interact with the international community in the field.
Most universities rely on the tuition fees from international students to fund the institution. According to the BBC, The fallout from Covid-19 posed a significant financial threat across UK higher education in 2020, with most institutions left with reduced net assets. High-ranking universities in the UK with large numbers of international students faced a drop in income due to COVID and students restriction.
Malaysia is earning good forex from international students. Ours is zero. When I was to go for my PhD in 2008, I was informed by my sponsor that the university must be among the best 200 in the World ranking. I was sent the list. I google High Voltage labs in the UK. I applied and got admission offers and chose to go to Leicester. I took the PhD grant to Leicester to use their facilities and resources. Do we have facilities to attract international students? It's only a purposeful revitalisation that can place us in that position.
You can't be waiting for tuition to revitalise the universities. You invest to revitalise and make it attractive to prospective students. They will come. You can then start talking about how much to pay as tuition fees. We need to study how Malaysia was able to turn around its universities which made them attractive to international students. If we are willing to revitalise the universities as ASUU has been demanding, the country has a lot to gain.
But then, even without the introduction of tuition fees, the N30k per annum university is no more feasible in our current reality. Even with the current state of public universities, the VCs will need to increase the IGR of their respective universities to make provision for the basic needs of the students. That IGR will surely come from the students. The students and parents should get ready to pay more.
As it is at the moment, it's going to be a tough war to make those in the government commit funds to an educational setting that is not accommodating their kids. One of the ways out is to force NASS to establish that law that will make it mandatory for every single public officer to patronize public primary, secondary schools, and universities for their kids no matter how rich they are.
When politics and academia collide, quality suffers. The public university is in deep crisis and the recent media briefing by the Minister of Education is an indication that they are playing politics with education. The union of academic staff has played a great role that has kept us this far, despite the starvation strategy. They had a choice to let the system crash like the refineries, and that won't stop their salaries. But they choose to fight to give the universities a semblance of a university. If we still want to keep our public universities, the other stakeholders need to wake up to fight their fight to save the system from total collapse.
With proper resource management, there is enough money to inject into education.
Time to take a break for reflection!
Abdelghaffar Amoka Abdelmalik, PhD
Department of Physics
Ahmadu Bello University Zaria
aaabdelmalik@abu.edu.ng
©Amoka
