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Jeyifo: The Mega-Crises Of Tertiary Education In Our Country And Our Continent (1)
Note: On August 3, 2011 in Abuja, I delivered the 14th Annual Wole Soyinka Lecture of the National Association of Seadogs. In this series, I have extracted parts of the lecture that are germane to one of the most delicate and seemingly intractable aspects of the crises of higher education in Nigeria and Africa. This is the calamitous fall in the quality, not only of the products of our tertiary educational institutions, but of the producers themselves - the teachers, the junior and senior lecturers and, especially, the professoriate. This is simultaneously the most delicate and the least talked about problem of higher education in Nigeria and Africa. But it is a problem that we cannot afford not to talk about comprehensively, exhaustively and productively. This is the rationale behind my observations and reflections in this series that is compounded of parts of my lecture of August 3 and revisions based on the vigorous discussion generated by the lecture.
BEFORE giving a profile of the crises, perhaps it is necessary to give a word of caution. Like a terrifying disease, some of the symptoms of these crises of education in Nigeria and Africa are extremely debilitating and stupefying. Now, we all know that a frightening disease for which no name, no diagnostic identity has been given is doubly terrifying. But as soon as a diagnosis is made and a name found for the disease, it becomes less frightening precisely because it has been identified. I suggest that this is equally true for the extremely debilitating symptoms and expressions of the crises of higher education in our country and our continent. The figures, the expressions are usually trotted out without giving a name, an identity to the symptoms and their impacts. A failure rate of over 95% among secondary school leavers in Nigeria: how in the world could a country record, consistently, a failure rate of over 95% among its school leavers? Are we breeding cretins, a generation of congenital oridotas in our country? Or take the following statistic: among the top ranked 2000 universities in the world, there is not a single Nigerian institution. I shall soon be stating more figures, statistics and anecdotes along the same lines, some even more alarming. Before doing so, I wish to suggest here and now that there are names, there are theoretically sophisticated and descriptively apt designations for these symptoms and we should bear these in mind as we confront the crises.
One name, one designation that has been used a lot in many parts of the developing world is the development of underdevelopment: as a poor, looted and misruled nation in the Global South sinks more and more into wretched conditions, the development process itself becomes the basis, the object of underdevelopment. A cognate term, "maladjusted development" has also been used, but the one I personally prefer over all the others is regressive neocolonialism, perhaps because it is my own coinage! In this form of postcolonial state and society, independence and sovereignty often take extremely costly and extremely bizarre forms as the alliance of local and foreign forces in control of the nation's vital resources prove vastly inept before the challenges of development and modernity. Every step forward comes with two or three steps backward, so much so that the colonial period of total foreign control actually begins to look like a golden age. This is why, in regressive neocolonialism one must expect morbid and perplexing symptoms as a prevailing expression of reality. Thus, as I begin now to identify some of the most perturbing of the symptoms and expressions of the educational crises in our country and our continent, I ask you to please bear in mind that there is nothing natural, nothing preordained and nothing beyond redemption in these crises precisely because regressive neocolonialism will one day come to be a thing of the past in our country and our continent. On that note, let us now move to the crises themselves, together with the forms and expressions that they characteristically assume.
Nigerians of all political camps and ideological persuasions like to think of our country as the giant of Africa and the hope of the Black race. Ladies and gentlemen, the abysmally low level of the indices of educational standards are most decidedly not the place to look for evidence of this patriotic, idealized view of Nigeria that we are the giant of Africa and the hope of the Black race. In the last twenty years standards have more than plummeted; they have gone far below ground level and settled at the bottom of underground caverns in the rankings of the tertiary institutions of our continent and the world. I have remarked earlier that no single Nigerian university is ranked among the top 2000 universities of the world. Well, consider the following statistic: of the highest ranked 100 universities in Africa, only 8 are Nigerian institutions and not one of them is among the top 30 African universities. Now, juxtapose this extremely poor ranking of Nigerian universities within Africa with the fact that African universities are very scarce among the highest ranked 500 universities in the world, there being only two in that group of the world's top universities (University of Cape Town and University of Witwatersrand, both in South Africa). The grim fact is as undeniable as its ramifications are inescapable: Nigeria lags far behind the standards obtaining on the African continent; the African continent lags far behind world standards.
It must of course be stated clearly that the business of ranking the world's universities in regional and global hierarchies of excellence is not exactly a straightforward and uncontroversial affair. But that does not mean that it is a redundant and diversionary affair, as some African university administrators defensively claim. And indeed, for the most part, most Nigerian and African universities are indifferent to the generally very low ranking of our continent's universities in the world. The general feeling is that there is very little that Nigerian and African universities can do to remedy the situation. Moreover, beside the loss of prestige for older African universities like Ibadan, Legon and Makerere for being so lowly ranked among the world's universities, there don't seem to be any direct consequences for our scholars and students for being in this situation. But Africa is part of the world and the world is not that far from Africa and being out of the charts in the world ranking of universities has consequences in Africa itself. Which is why, for at least the last two decades, Nigerian parents who can afford it have been sending their children to South African and Ghanaian universities and in Nigeria itself potential employers of our university graduates have been complaining that a high percentage of those who pass through our institutions of higher learning are so poor in quality that they are either downright "unemployable" or have to be reeducated and retrained in order to meet the demands of the market and the professions in all fields: science, technology, engineering, administration, medicine, law, business, the arts and the humanities.
These are extremely sobering facts and conditions. Why are Nigerian universities so poorly ranked, not just in the world at large but in Africa as well? Why are South African and Ghanaian universities now preferred over Nigerian institutions by rich parents who surmise that if they cannot afford to send their children to American and European universities, they can at least send them to institutions in other African countries that presumably do much better than Nigerian universities in educating our young people for the modern world and the global economy? And why is the term "unemployable" so widely and freely bandied around with regard to the quality of the products of our universities? As I have observed earlier, we like to think of ourselves as the giant of Africa and the hope of Black people everywhere, with the projection in the so-called "Vision 2020" that by the year 2020 we will be one of the biggest 20 economies in the world. A big player in the world without world class universities, indeed with universities that lag far behind the universities of many other African countries: is this not a delusion of grandeur, the product of totally fanciful and dangerously unrealistic projections from our oil wealth and our high population figures?
Some thoughtful comments are necessary here. Nigerians, both from our home institutions and those trained in foreign universities, tend to do very well in graduate programs of study in European and North American universities. As a matter of fact, Nigerians tend to do comparatively much better than Africans from other nations of the continent in such programs. And in North America (United States and Canada) the first generation children of Nigerian immigrant parents consistently outscore and outperform the children of many other national immigrant communities from Africa and other parts of the developing world. This, in effect, means that the "problem" is not something in us but in the entire institutional order of higher education in our country. One big factor here is the fact that education in general and tertiary education in particular, is greatly under-funded in Nigeria and Africa. This has led to the much-discussed phenomenon of the "brain drain" as droves of some of the most gifted scholars flock to the well-financed centers of international scholarship.
These are all very important factors in the precipitous decline in the quality of higher education in Nigeria in the last two or three decades, but in my personal opinion, the single most important factor is the extremely rapid rate of expansion of the tertiary educational sector in the same period as scores of both publicly financed and private universities emerged to stretch the capacity of the system as a whole to expand without severely depressing standards beyond minimal limits. From a single national university at independence in 1960 we moved rapidly to six, then to twelve, then to twenty-four. It was at that point that we began to hear talk of first, second and third generation universities. These were initially all publicly financed institutions, but they were later joined by private ones. As of now, no one knows exactly how many universities are in Nigeria and the figures we hear range between 130 and 150. Universities are not kindergarten schools, they are not primary schools and there are limits to the rate at which you can create new universities without fatally crippling the system as a whole. Nigeria in particular and Africa in general long ago crossed these limits and mere certification has massively replaced the dissemination and reproduction of the unique kinds of knowledges traditionally purveyed by universities.
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