Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Who oversees and accredits the National Universities Commission (NUC)?

Ikihide:

I wont respond to all your issues below but two:

a) Website maintenance must be improved upon in many of the universities. I am in contact with Lead City. I think they all tend to devote limited budgets to them and do not follow up on updates. Do not use the website to judge a campus like Lead City, although I have won them about the impact of not making it more professional.

 

b) The NUC website is  definitely misleading with the reasons it gave for license suspension, actually not honest with its public presentation. In the case of Lead City, it claims that it embarks on courses without its approval and the university says it does not. There is no evidence of such courses!  Students are admitted by JAMB, so there is no evidence of multiple admissions. Okay, suppose both are true, do they rise up to suspending a license, and not considering the fate of 4000 students and their parents.

The real story is actually a personality rivalry between the founder of Lead and Chair of NUC. Lead City took the NUC to court, and won. NUC retaliates by suspending its license!

The world must also know that accreditation process in Nigeria has acquired the elements of a corrupt society in which our colleagues are also tainted with brown envelopes. Where a university refuses to give those envelopes, they land in trouble.

You seek reform, as we all do, but it wont come the way you want until you first reform the entire political culture.

On Jul 21, 2012, at 10:11 AM, Ikhide wrote:

The more I study the confrontation between Lead University and the National Universities Commission (NUC) the more overwhelmed I am by the enormity of the rot; that pervades Nigeria's university education. Starting with the NUC's website one finds a paucity of useful data to go on in terms of meaningful analysis. The question is: Who accredits the NUC? The NUC doesn't look to me like an institution that has the appropriate resources and stature to police 124 federal, state and private universities (I counted the universities on the site; I am sure there are more. There is a web link in there (here, scroll down and look for "NUC Closes "Degree Mills'' in Aba") where the NUC runs around shutting down illegal universities being hosted in dilapidated and abandoned buildings, some classes are apparently held in the rain because these "classrooms" have no roofs! (BE WARNED: Graphic images!I think I am going to be sick!)

The NUC's website is innocent of substance, a typewriter begging to be a computer. The website is so bad, I had to exit the site and use google to find the full name of the Executive Secretary of the NUC (Professor Julius Okojie) even though a grainy picture of his sheepishly adorns the home page. Professor Okojie should as a matter of top priority take down that website and its ancient information, hire someone who can write elementary English and re-present something that is worth the money that we all know was budgeted and spent for the maintenance of the website. Here is the website. In the interest of transparency, the NUC ought to make public the report on each "suspended" institution so that it is clear to the discerning reader why these actions were taken, Specifically, what gaps exist (in detail) in the case of Lead University and what has been the response of Lead to these allegations? It is not enough in my view to simply issue an imperial omnibus decree here suspending all these institutions without offering specific details.

Without the necessary data, I am afraid I cannot seriously take a position on this matter. It does sound like a whole bunch of ancient men misbehaving, the children be damned. I also do not have any confidence in either the aggrieved university (Lead) or Professor Okojie's NUC, certainly not from what I see in their mediocre (to put it kindly) websites. We are all in denial. For many decades out intellectual and political elite have been using pretend systems pilfered from the West to rape the people and the land. Thanks to globalization, their wretched chickens are coming home to roost. The only true accreditation comes from the West. The elite know it and that is why their children do not attend "Lead University" and the dozens of broken institutions that warehouse the children of the dispossessed. Let us do a survey of our vice chancellors, legislators, governors, etc and ask them the simple question: "It is July 21, 2012, in which country are your children going to university?" The real answer to that question is the most eloquent reason why at least half of these institutions ought to be shut down for ever. It is the fair thing to do.

 

- Ikhide

 

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