"For I while now, I have been making the wild/provocative/unfounded/incendiary/baseless claim that 90% of lecturers in Nigerian Universities are pretty much useless or not fit for purpose. Sadly no one has taken me up on this to ask me to prove how I came about this number.
So I'm going to have to raise the stakes. I am by no means a rich man but if I beg, borrow and steal, I am sure I can raise N1m. This is the deal – if any Nigerian University faculty will agree to a simple performance test of all the teaching staff there, I will donate the N1m to a charity or cause of their choice, provided more than 10% of them pass the test. The tests wont be designed to save me N1m so 40% of the questions will be questions the lecturers themselves have recently set for their students. The pass mark will also be 40%. So if they can answer their own questions satisfactorily, they will just about make the grade. The rest of the questions will focus on checking how much personal development they have undertaken since they themselves qualified as lecturers and general knowledge on education and academics.
I am confident that I will win simply because it is almost impossible for me to lose.
But that's not the point of this blog post. We are currently in the middle of another strike which has an ending more predictable than a Nollywood movie. Government will cave in and agree to meet most of ASUU's demands (usually sometime in the future) and ASUU will go back to work. Once we have a change in government (could be the same government but with a new election mandate) or even change in minister, the new guys in charge will then proceed to completely ignore this agreement and express surprise that it even exists at all. Then ASUU will strike again. Ad infinitum. World without end.
Having been a victim of a Nigerian University with at least 3 ASUU strikes as part of my 'educational experience package', I can confirm that the quality of teaching from these lecturers does not improve one bit whenever they return to campus after such strikes. If anything, some of them can't even remember where they were before they responded to the cries of aux barricades and dropped their handouts.
In normal circumstances, it is useful to ask why teaching doesn't seem to improve after government meets ASUU's demands even if temporarily. I am also certain that the problem is not really funding per se. Nigeria is really a poor country, so any solution we come up with, no matter how well-intentioned, will have to operate within the constraints of lack of funding. President Goodluck Jonathan has at least increased funding of education to a priority. You can quibble with the amounts dedicated to education but he has at least shown his priorities by allocating the highest budgetary amount to education – N433bn or 8.7% of the total budget. The reliable guys at Budgit also tell me that of this amount, N219bn is for Universities."
- Ikhide
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