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From: Hussaini Jibrin
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From: Hussaini Jibrin
THISDAY - EDITORIAL
Critical Issues in Tertiary Education
10 Dec 2012
The NUC should look beyond the Mahmood Yakubu panel report and find alternatives to funding tertiary education
In an obvious commitment at ensuring that its plans and interventions in our universities are guided by concrete and up-to-date information, the National Universities Commission (NUC) recently set up the Professor Mahmood Yakubuled Panel on challenges of public universities (otherwise called the Needs Assessment Panel). The Panel has turned in its findings, the details of which say nothing new – even though they are disturbing.
The report says, in part, that university library resources are mostly outdated and manual; and that no library in the public university system is fully automated. Other findings include the fact that less than 10 percent of the universities "have video conferencing facility, while less than 20 percent use interactive boards". The report also noted that "more than 50 percent don't use public address systems in the lecture rooms/ theatre; internet services are non-existent, or epileptic and slow."
The panel, we think, laid the emphasis in the wrong direction. How, for instance, does an interactive board become an object of vital importance in a community where there is dearth of quality lecturers? Did the Panel really understand its brief? And can it say that it has justified the expectations that made the NUC to set it up? We note, forinstance, that nearly all the inadequacies listed by the Panel are predicated on one premium factor: poor funding and the need for procurement of physical infrastructure.
The summary of the findings is that some of the universities provide less than optimal circumstances for creditably discharging their basic functions of teaching, research, etc. Standards began to slip when some of the best and the brightest, finding it increasingly difficult to access good libraries, decent research laboratories, conducive environment, attractive pay and modern technological gadgets which facilitate teaching and learning, began to leave for other climes and for better paying sectors of the economy. The increase in the number of schools, as well as the drop in funding, also adversely affected the quality of academic staff, research and much more in our universities.
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund established as an intervention agency, and given more fillip in recent years, cannot be said to have done well – as its interventions would seem not to have touched on things that are central to the core mission of the university system. Today, no Nigerian university is ranked; and that is only half the story. Many of the graduates are barely literate. The functionally literate ones are uncreative and unproductive. The corporate labour market shuns them. Meanwhile they went through over 12 years of primary and secondary level education before finding their way to the universities. The crisis is therefore a systemic one that cannot just be dropped at the door step of the NUC.
For a country in hurry to develop, and in dire need of top scientists and engineers to catch up with today's knowledge economy, Nigeria is too far behind in education.
As Professor David Durosaro of the University of Ilorin said, "We now live in a knowledge –driven world where the power of the brain is superior to the power of the muscle. What you know determines what you are capable of doing." This calls for far-reaching changes in the tertiary education sector.
The NUC has taken the commendable step of undertaking a needs assessment. It must now go beyond the possible shortcoming of the Panel's effort and do more, by consulting further with individual universities and publishing an intervention template with timelines. Better ways of funding our tertiary institutions must be found, while the universities are made to eliminate the waste in their systems. The world's best universities have enormous cash with which they attract the best to their communities- from the best equipment to the brightest professors. That is what Nigerian needs today.
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Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
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