For decades now, acquiring higher education on the African continent – particularly Nigeria – has remained synonymous with cat and dog life owing to the unwholesome state of the various tertiary institutions of learning situated therein.
The said challenge, which is very glaring, might not be unconnected with the national and local issues affecting the way the Nigerian government plans for the country’s future relevance and sustainability.
Higher education is being reshaped by globalization and the digital revolution. Every institution of learning that knows its onions wants to find itself in the world map regardless of what it would cost. Prospective students are fast becoming academically aware and making decisions about education accordingly, contrary to what it used to be.
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University rankings among other yardsticks of measuring greatness will increasingly have greater influence on positioning institutions in the international market, and graduate career-readiness is a growing student concern.
Students are indeed looking for access to services and education across new technologies and more flexible delivery options. Towards being competitive as well as meeting these expectations, higher institutions would need to invest in expensive facilities and infrastructure.
Higher citadels of learning, such as universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education, are like manufacturing industries, hence, require adequate funding towards sustenance. Commencement of such business alone is strictly capital intensive, and its day-to-day running is sustained by thorough vigilance on the part of the management.
Since schools are not profit-making industries unlike other capitalist firms, their functionality mainly depends on funds coming from outside rather than the students’ tuition fees.
Ironically, Nigeria’s learning citadels, precisely the higher ones, have been wearing pathetic physiognomy thus far, thereby making them produce half-baked products unabated, in the name of ‘graduates’. This set of unemployed, or perhaps unemployable, youths is littered all over the country, searching for white-collar jobs that cannot be properly handled if given to them.
Since the jobs are not forthcoming, they would resort to such various social vices that would generate quick money as armed robbery, kidnapping, abduction, cultism, ritual killing, internet fraud, gambling, and so on, just to mention but a few.
Considering the aforementioned phenomenon, there’s no need to say that about eighty per cent (80%) of the reason Nigeria is currently awash with all kinds of dubious acts is the ongoing plight of unemployment, which is on the rampage.
But if the so-called job-seekers were well equipped/tutored while in school, they would have rather considered becoming employers of labour. They can only become self-reliant if the necessary teachings and training were given to them during their school days.
Take a walk to any university across the federation and see things for yourself. Facilities including laboratories, libraries, workshops, and even lecture classes/halls are nothing to write home about. Most of the institutions are, to assert the least, like glorified primary schools.
What about the lecturers’ offices coupled with their wages? An average politician would go home with millions of naira on a weekly basis whereas a lecturer, on the average, cannot even boast of a hundred and fifty thousand naira (#150,000) monthly.
It would interest, probably shock, you to note that the basic salary of a ward councilor in Nigeria is about five times greater than the overall monthly wage of a professor who is reckoned to be the most learned in any society.
A lot has really gone wrong, and it is high time we made amends toward attaining the anticipated greatness. Each year, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the National Association of Academic Technologists (NAAT), among other labour unions in higher learning citadels, embark on industrial action for a particular cause, yet the demon ravaging the Nigerian schools remains seemingly unbeatable.
The pertinent and inevitable question now is: how do we unravel this lingering mystery, or should we continue folding our arms and watch it deteriorate into a more forbidden scene?