Sunday, August 13, 2017

USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: - Symposium on Higher Education, ISGPP event in photos, 3


Moses:

First, thanks for confirming my very educated guess about that published paper that you crypticslly referred to earlier.  Let the authors sue you:  I will be your expert witness! 

Secondly, I have never really implied that all academics should be the highest paid in society, but University Professors with their high degree of  qualification, length of service, and production of both intellectual minds and tangible services to society should certainly be in the solid middle class of any society.  In fact, you also know that in societies other than ours  - say in the US -  those Professors significantly enhance their primary salaries by being hired for consultancies by those former classmates and formers students who earn fat monies in the private sector...... Not so very much in Nigeria....and I am not talking of state commissionerships and Federal Minister-y or Special Adviser-ship, which have tended to give  Professors the accusation of  complicity  in the underdevelopment of Nigeria due to no fault of theirs, thereby eroding confidence in the Acafemy! :-) 

By the way, if you are not a Head of Department or Dean or DVC or some Director of some academic or training program in a university,   no  earned allowances come your way.  However strange and unsustainable devices of EA were introduced into the 2009 ASUU Agreements, which run counter to the spirit of true scholarship. 

Thirdly  please note that the present ASUU gripe is no longer about salaries.... In general, I did not hear any complaints at all about the chart that I showed.  Rather, the complaints have been about certain other unfulfilled. - and I dare say largely unfulfillable - promises of the 2009 ASUU Agreements, an example of which I mentioned above. . I have written about those before, and need not belabor the point here, but until ASUU relaxes on some of those promises, there will be serious unhappiness  in the National University System (NUS) in many years to come. On the other hand  the state and Federal  Governments must significantly commit to improving the municipal infrastructure of our universities (water, electricity, telecommunications),  and negotiate a  new cost sharing formula with all stakeholders of the NUS. 

By the way, salary issues may return, because the previous argument was demand for some movement towards international salary standards.

Fourthly, it was because NUC felt that there were many undesirables and non-academics in the NUS that it required at least 70% or more with PHDs in the system  and as new hires.  We achieved that at Otuoke, as our accreditation exercise confirmed.  However, there are PHDs and there are PHDs, so that is just a prima facie requirement. 

Finally, Moses, there are a lot of resets to be done in our NUS:

  (1)  in student-centering of  its entire internal purpose.  After all, students are the essence of education. 

   (2) in  national-development-centering of  its curricular offerings. Unemployable and unemployed gradyates reflect very badly on the Academy, a notion that appears alien to many of my Nigerian colleagues. 

   (3)  in the recruitment of staff worthy of and accountable to the Academy

    (4) in the availability of universe-ity teaching, learning and research facilities commensurate with unuverse-al standards. No students at any level should be learning under trees, not to talk if university students... 

  (5) in a financing model in which all stakeholders  - particularly Government and parents - "pay their fare share, and finally

  (6)..in a governance structure in which VC-ship is not acrimoniously politicized and not  made to serve so many masters and mistresses simultaneously (GC, NUC, FME, Tetfund, NASS, AuGF, FCC, etc) , in which the Governing Councils are not a drain on the University purse ,, in which the Unions - including Student "Government" - do not  wish to have a veto power over the Senate and GC,  in which the University Senate truly plays its assigned roles, and in which in general the inmates do not take over the asylum!

This requires strong political will from the very top  but we lost a big opportunity during the Yaradua - GEJ period when two academics werevatop our political pyramid.  GEJ attempted some resets with the establishment of twelve new universities with definite mandates of equity, access, quality, regional focus and Diaspora input, but it may have been too much to bite in one chew - or to chew in one bite.  I see no commitment yet in this GMB-Osinbajo administration to this reset  - in fact I see some measure of confusion and setback, being a victim myself  - but maybe they are working on it? 

We shall see.... 

And there you have it, as I bow out this thread for now..... Nuff said. 


Bolaji Aluko


On Sunday, August 13, 2017, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
Bolaji,

Thanks again. I'll defer to you on the structural and governance issues since you experienced them firsthand as VC. I am limiting myself to issues of academics' accountability in teaching and research, the primary missions of the university. I agree though that all these issues are intertwined and are deterministic of one another. You demonstrate the connections quite well, the most graphic illustration being that learning is difficult under poor infrastructural conditions.

Two observations. The first one has to do with the salary issue. As an academic myself, I am all for lecturers getting more remunerative motivation. However, it should be noted that academics are not paid at the top strata in any society. Academics enjoy what they do because of the satisfaction of teaching, research, service, and mentorship and because of the reverence with which society treats them. I routinely teach undergraduates who graduate and go on to out-earn me on their first jobs. So do academics everywhere. Those looking for financial prosperity ought to look into other professions. That said, I think academics should be able to afford a comfortable middle or semi-middle class life.

Which brings me to the salary chart you posted. That chart does not include numerous earned allowances. It also does not factor in the fact that the power of that salary should be measured not in abstract dollar and international terms but in terms of local transactions. Lastly, it should be evaluated in terms of what similarly qualified Nigerians earn in other public sector jobs. When one considers all these factors, the salary is not as terrible as it looks.

Despite my statements above, I will concede that we may be back to square one on the salary issue, as Naira devaluation and inflation has eroded the gains of the past two decades. The problem though turns on two issues:

1. Before inflation rubbished the improved salaries, what did Nigerian lecturers do to justify and truly earn the improved salaries, since pedagogy and research actually deteriorated as salaries increased?

2. How can they come to government and look Nigerians, students, and parents straight in the eye and demand improvements in their reward structure without accepting some accountability measures to ensure that they are doing their jobs and earning their pay, and when previous salary increases were not reciprocated by commitments in research and teaching beyond the abysmal levels of the years of suffering?

These, for me are the issues working against the case for further remunerative reform, and why there may be little buy-in among the public and in government. Salary increases without the ASUU mafia conceding to performance related evaluations and merit-based remunerative systems tend to sow inertia and laziness among the rank of lecturers in regard to their core professional duties. Which tells me that there is a significant attitudinal component to the problem, a refusal or unwillingness on the part of many lecturers to simply do the work for which they are paid.

This problem, in my opinion, is not a problem of poor salaries per se but one of poor or absent commitment, which in turn begins with how lecturers are recruited, retained, and evaluated. 

On the recruitment front, we can all agree that many people have been recruited into the Nigerian academy for purely nepotistic and political reasons and do not possess the skill, intellect, and temperament to function productively in academia. Academia is not for everyone. Nigerians do not seem to have grasped this. So many people just see it as another way to make a living. The truth is that I would never recruit even some members of my own family to become lecturers even if I could do so because I do not believe they have the passion and intellectual drive to succeed in it and would become an unproductive member of the profession. In Nigeria, VCs and other academic big men and women recruit relations, friends, and acquaintances into academic positions simply as a way of dolling out favors, as a form of patronage. This practice has ruined the Nigerian university system, burdening institutions with many lecturers who have no business in the profession but who cannot be dismissed from their positions and replaced by competent and committed people.

When folks are recruited, the research requirements they are expected to meet to make progress in their careers place emphasis on quantity over quality, leading to the current phenomenon of many Nigerian lecturers patronizing junk, predatory "journals" and publishing trashy papers that contribute nothing to knowledge. Yes, that piece you referenced is the one I wrote about, but na you post their names o. Nor be me!!!

The regulator, NUC, also does not set any teaching standards or formulate metrics for evaluating teaching performance. These are governance and regulatory issues, unrelated to the issue of salary. Without addressing the governance and regulatory aspects, any increase in remuneration will only worsen the problem of non-conmitted and non-performing academics.

I like this paragraph in your post. I LOVE it.

First, scholarship is like athleticism:  you must train constantly to be stellar in performance.  After many years of not learning the best teaching tools, or being up in research in your field, it can be ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to just pick up as if those wasted years had not happened.  Secondly - and most devastatingly - many of those teaching-cum-research-deprived staff  had now necessarily MOVED up in the hierarchy of "management" in the universities to become heads of departments, Deans, even Vice-Chancellors - while some moved into ASUU.  You cannot give what you don't have; you cannot motivate what you were not motivated about.

This, for me is the crux of the matter. In your statements above is a clear-eyed, pragmatic, and compelling analysis. No defensiveness and no denialism. I agree with you that a culture of unproductive academic life has become entrenched, with many people having had their careers nurtured by the negative ethos that took root in the days of poorly paid lecturers, the days of suffering as you called it. I agree that this has lingered, persisted as old habits are difficult to break and as these habits then trickle down to younger generations while older ones move into management to set the agenda, further ossifying the culture of impunity and non-performance.

 I would add that some of it is simply attitudinal, and that this culture has persisted in part because over the years we have turned university employment into an extension of the civil service, where anyone with demonstrable average or above average intelligence can secure employment as a lecturer, guaranteeing them a job for life even if they teach poorly and publish crap in predatory, commercial journals. That's why the culture is difficult to break despite the years of suffering passing away and giving way to modest, if precarious, gains in compensation.

We need a new recruitment and retention charter, one that insists on the possession of credentialed and non-credentialed skills; one that also rewards quality teaching and research and punishes poor teaching and research. That's how the culture will be broken and a new generation of motivated and committed academics will replace the old order. The problem is, will ASUU come along, and will the NUC be visionary enough to set the agenda?

On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 5:25 AM, Mobolaji Aluko <alukome@gmail.com> wrote:


Moses:

Thanks for yours below.  Despite your best efforts, I will seriously resist your "temptation" to spill my beans before I am ready, but I will respond briefly to some of your observations below, and leave the rest until much later.

First, infrastructural funding is extremely important.  Students have to live in hostels befitting of young adults and not in pistyes, receive instruction in classrooms conducive to learning, have access to  libraries to study in-between classes and refer to alternative books for their classes and journals for their research, and laboratories conducive to repeatable experiments, and where necessary have transportation to be able to move between hostels and classrooms without "sufferance", all of these desirables within the context of of  adequate water , reliable electricity and sewage/waste disposal and trusted security services  Ditto for staff, whether teaching or non-teaching, if you substitute housing for hostels, particularly where such staff live in communities -  say "rural" like Otuoke - that do not at their current stage of social development support the level of housing and social living commensurate with university-level achievement.  (As an aside, even after many years, many universities are so insular that town-and-gown interaction does not improve the rural nature of their immediate surrounding - topic for another symposium.)

There is a hierarchy of importance, no doubt, but a university is so tightly woven that any short-changes in any of these desirables are bound to negatively impact the institution in a remarkable manner, particular when university administrators, either under mandate or under the illusion of increasing internal generation, allow their "carrying capacities" to be exceeded significantly i.e unsustainable ratios of students to hostels, or to classrooms or to teaching staff etc.   It is not elitism to state that it is in universities that you have the greatest concentration of the best minds, both WILLING and CAPABLE to learn but also eager to impart knowledge, but the proper environment must be provided for them to be ABLE to learn and to impart knowledge.

So Moses, certain inabilities in our university system should not be confused with unwillingness or some innate incapabilities.

Secondly, staff salaries are important because, as citadels of higher learning, there is both a social and internal expectation that universities should also be citadels of higher EARNING!  Four major things should determine salaries:  your level of educational attainment; your experience at the work itself; and the (economic) nature/value/responsibility of the work itself; and whether it is public service or private service.  I know that there are always exceptions to the rule, but a PhD graduate who has worked commendably for a long time at a job valued by society should earn a decent living and should retire reasonably comfortably.  For university lecturers, they have the added burden of being ROLE MODELS.....students should be able to look at you and say, "You know, I like to be like my professor; he enjoys his work and he is not doing badly!"

But when - during the period of pain for Nigerian university lecturers that you talked about -  they were seriously under-paid, and looked scruffy, dejected,angry etc.,, teaching outsize classes in stuffy classrooms and under-equipped laboratories, and "catching danfo" to go to work, looking emaciated with sagging coats and trousers and soiled ties,  who would want to be like them?  Those who could go abroad went abroad in droves;  those who could not cut all kinds of corners at home; and those who were supposed to return to join them remained abroad despite all the money the country had paid on their education "overseas."

And then, according to you, salaries INCREASED, but - according to you - nothing materially changed!  You did not state how many years  that the "suffering" years were, and what IMPACT it had had on the intellectual psyche of those in the system.  First, scholarship is like athleticism:  you must train constantly to be stellar in performance.  After many years of not learning the best teaching tools, or being up in research in your field, it can be ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to just pick up as if those wasted years had not happened.  Secondly - and most devastatingly - many of those teaching-cum-research-deprived staff  had now necessarily MOVED up in the hierarchy of "management" in the universities to become heads of departments, Deans, even Vice-Chancellors - while some moved into ASUU.  You cannot give what you don't have; you cannot motivate what you were not motivated about.

That is part of the echo that we are observing today. 

 In any case, what really are those new salaries, when you look at them at NATIONAL and INTERNATIONAL standards?  The table below gives a summary of the CONUASS II  Table for academic staff - I put it in this form myself;

 

CONUASS Level

Designation

No. of Steps

Step 1 Salary

Top Step Salary TS (Naira)

TS (US$ at N140 to $1), Feb. 2011

TS (US$, at N500 to $1) Feb 2016

TS (US$, at N360 to $1) Aug 2016

1

Grad Asst

6

       1,274,177.00

            1,458,567.00

              10,418.34

            2,917.13

         4,051.58

2

Asst Lecturer

8

       1,461,861.00

            1,765,702.00

              12,612.16

            3,531.40

         4,904.73

3

Lecturer II

8

       1,660,309.00

            1,990,440.00

              14,217.43

            3,980.88

         5,529.00

4

Lecturer I

9

       2,090,705.00

            2,694,810.00

              19,248.64

            5,389.62

         7,485.58

5

Senior Lecturer

13

       3,102,305.00

            4,460,306.00

              31,859.33

            8,920.61

       12,389.74

6

Associate Prof/Reader

10

       3,779,021.00

            5,015,550.00

              35,825.36

          10,031.10

       13,932.08

7

Professor

10

       4,591,149.00

            6,030,906.00

              43,077.90

          12,061.81

       16,752.52

VC

Vice-Chancellor

1

    12,061,812.00

          12,061,812.00

              86,155.80

          24,123.62

       33,505.03

Registrar

Registrar

1

       6,030,906.00

            6,030,906.00

              43,077.90

          12,061.81

       16,752.52

 


I want you to stare at those salaries, and state whether we might not be back to Square One in terms of the INTERNATIONAL disposition of salaries of our university academic staff, especially when you read some of the INORDINATE LOOTING that is reported in our country Nigeria.  Personally, among many other reasons, social and political,  I would not take a permanent VC job now in ANY Nigerian university today that I agreed to take in February 2011, certainly not a public one whose salaries are so fixed.  I am much wiser now.


As for the two agencies NUC and TetFUND, I have so much to write about them, but not now.  Suffice it to say that the NUC is burdened beyond its stipulated regulatory function, descending too much into the university arena; TETFUND is a model funding agency in Nigeria, but wracked with internal capacity problems and external pressures;  and respect in the university system for who heads both institutions - and their relationship to both the Presidency and the Ministry of Education -  is key to their success.    Peer review respect is also critical.


I have worked with the NUC off and on for over 15 years - long before I became VC at Otuoke - and had to work intimately with it during my tenure.  But I spent more time at Tetfund than at NUC during my tenure, to ensure to obtain whatever funds were allocated to Otuoke in a timely manner -  Tetfund was our major benefactor, funding (among many other things), Otuoke's first research journal, see below - so I know of what I will write about both institutions.



http://fuotuoke.edu.ng/news/2015-07/fuo-unveils-maiden-journal




Finally, with respect to improving research there is good news, even in what you wrote, when you ended with Prof. Bamiro indicating that there was a rise of proposals from 100 to 817 in 2015 to 1846 in 2016.  We await some information on quality and impact, but the Nigerian University system has demonstrated some resilience by winning 10 of 19 African Centers of Excellence awarded to West and Central Africa not too long ago:


   http://nuc.edu.ng/project/ace/


QUOTE


ACE UPDATE OCTOBER 2015

AFRICAN CENTRES OF EXCELLENCE (ACE)

The ACE project was launched in 2013 by the governments of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo, with support from the World Bank. The objective of the ACE Project is to promote regional specialisation among participating universities within areas that address particular regional development challenges and strengthen the capacities of these universities to deliver high quality training and applied research.

The project consists of two components; the first is to build capacity in competitively selected institutions to produce in-demand, high skilled, labour and applied research. The second component will facilitate the regional impact and benefit of the strengthened Africa Centres of Excellence through talent and labour mobility and higher education services.

Under the ACE Project, grant awards are made to lead institutions to address specific regional development challenges primarily focusing on the following priority fields:

  1. Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)
  2. Health Sciences
  3. Agricultural Sciences

The first selection process produced 19 Centres of Excellence that were approved for the West and Central African sub-regions, out of which Nigerian Universities won 10.

The Universities from Nigeria that won the grants and their project titles are:

  • Redeemers University, Ede, Osun State (Africa Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases, ACEGID);
  • African University of Science & Technology, Abuja (PAN African Materials Institute, PAMI);
  • Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta(Center for Agricultural Development & Sustainable Environment, CEADESE);
  • Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (Center of Excellence on Neglected Tropical Diseases and Forensic Biotechnology, ACENTDFB);
  • University of Jos, (Phytomedicine Research & Development, ACEPRD);
  • University of Benin (Center for Excellence in Reproductive Health and Innovation, CERHI)
  • University of Port-Harcourt (ACE Center for Oil Field Chemicals,CEFOR)
  • Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife (OAU Knowledge Park, OAK-Park)
  • Bayero University, Kano (African Centre of Excellence ACE in Dryland Agriculture, CDA)
  • Benue State University, Makurdi (Centre for Food Technology and Research, CEFTER)


UNQUOTE


So all is not doom and gloom, Moses.


Finally, finally:  you wrote about a particular paper as "purportedly an analysis of metered billing practices of Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN). Not only is the "article" a mockery of every rule of academic publishing, the SOLE basis of the paper is the electricity bill of a Benin resident!!!!"   


Were you referring to this article (which I found by just entering some key tags based on your "objection");


  http://www.akamaiuniversity.us/PJST11_1_138.pdf 

  The Impact of the Pre-Paid meter on Revenue Generation in Nigeria. Emmanuel A. Ogujor, Ph.D. and Paul O. Otasowie, Ph.D.*      Department of Electrical/Electronic Engineering, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria. * E-mail: Potasowie@yahoo.co.uk 


If you are referring to this article - and I strongly believe you are, unless you state otherwise - first, it is addressing an issue VERY PERTINENT to the Nigerian situation (electricity reliability, billing, etc.), so the authors should be commended for relevance.  Secondly, it must have passed muster the requirements of the journal in which it was published, resident at "Akamai University, Hawaii, USA".

But on second thought, I visited the website of the journal, and notice that 99% of the articles featured there were of Nigerians:


with weird titles like:

  

Lord have mercy!   Nigerians have taken their "publish or perish" mentality to Hawaii!  And I do not know how many times I have told Nigerian academics not to include the names of their villages in their paper titles!


And there you have it.



Bolaji Aluko
Having a belly laugh


On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 7:09 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
Bolaji,

I really look forward to reading about our experiences as VC in FUO. I am particularly interested because as you said, unlike most other VCs you did not come up through the ASUU system and therefore had no loyalty to the outmoded and stifling orthodoxies the union has fostered over the years. You presided over an institution without ASUU. I also would like to read your experiences from the perspective of an outsider-insider, which is what you were, for lack of a better term.

I agree that funding is an important aspect of the problem. As part of any profound reform of higher education in Nigeria, a sustainable formula of funding and cost sharing has to be in play. 

My main grouse is that the funding issue is often advanced as both a solution to all problems, which it is not, and an excuse for problems that have little or no bearing on funding. Everything gets blamed on poor funding in the ASUU rhetoric, which everyone nurtured in the ASUU tradition then uncritically repeats without interrogating the legitimacy and limits of it.

Furthermore, many Nigerian-based colleagues and administrators understand the issue of funding in a rather narrow sense--funding for building campus infrastructure. That is reductive, of course. Every time I go to a Nigerian university campus, I see shiny new buildings funded by TETFUND, ETF, NUC, or some other government intervention agency. You always see these impressive structures, completed or under construction. They have become permanent features of higher education in Nigeria. Yet, standards have collapsed even in the midst of this "funding" and infrastructural boom. Certainly, funding, understood in this narrow sense of throwing money at public institutions to construct infrastructure, has not yielded the most desired objective of expanding access and RAISING STANDARDS.

The other popular (popular with ASUU) understanding of funding is the one that translates to better remuneration and financial rewards to academics and administrative staff. I have nothing against paying workers the wage they deserve or as a way of motivating them to give more effort and demonstrate more commitment. However, in the Nigerian university system, efforts to boost the pay of academics have actually had the undesirably negative and unintended effect of causing further deterioration in standards--both in pedagogical and research terms. Let me illustrate this point with a semi-personal story.

When I was in my first year in my undergraduate program at Bayero University, Kano, the pay of my lecturers was abysmal. Many were struggling to feed and afford transportation to work. even as students, we could see the problem and knew that our lecturers were poorly motivated. We identified with their grievances. When ASUU went on strike in our second semester (I think), we as students wholeheartedly supported them. This was the famous Jega-led strike.

When the strike was resolved, the pay of lecturers was significantly boosted, and several allowances and entitlements were approved and paid to them. accumulated arrears meant that there was a dramatic transformation in our lecturers' personal economies. We could tell because many bought new cars, lived better, furnished their homes (we knew the homes of some of them), and became generally happy. One particular lecturer of mine, who had had to take a a tutoring job with a Korean expatriate family in Kano, left that job, changed his car and the furniture in his home and confided in us that his financial situation was now significantly better.

We students were happy for our lecturers. We also supported their subsequent strikes when government reneged on some of the terms of the agreement reached,  and I recall even publishing an Op-Ed in the defunct National Concord newspaper in ASUU's support. But we students also expected that our lecturers' pecuniary satisfaction would translate to a better attitude towards their primary job of instruction. Boy, were we wrong. We were utterly disappointed to observe that in fact the lecturers' hard-won pecuniary benefits and remunerative improvements caused many of them to be disdainful of their teaching duties and to look upon students with contempt. Lecturers, already haughty tyrannical snobs, began to behave like typical Nigerian big men and women. Teaching became a nuisance to many of them, who now wanted to enjoy their new financial resources. To our dismay, the lecturers who never showed up in the days of terrible pay or who showed up only a few times a semester continued in the same attitude. What was their excuse now that they were better paid? Some of them even became worse. Lecturers who had been showing up in the days of intense hardship now began to absent themselves from class. 

Improved rewards had become a curse, at least to the pedagogical enterprise in our university. This was a shocking outcome of the struggle, an unintended fallout of ASUU's success, one that has been repeated several times over the years and one that ASUU honchos are yet to reckon with. The paradox of increased funding (in the narrow sense of increased salaries and benefits) leading to poorer teaching complicates the funding-as-a-solution rhetoric.

I cannot speak to whether that burst of remunerative funding led to an improved research culture, as I was not attuned to the pre- and post-strikes research culture in my university and others. However, there is now ample evidence, accumulated over many years, demonstrating yet again the same correlation between improved funding and deteriorating standards. Everyone agrees that subsequent strikes by ASUU has led to a remarkable increase in infrastructure, remunerative, and research intervention funding. Yet the research output from Nigerian universities remains depressingly poor and is getting poorer. 

Over the years, I've been alerted to published "articles" of professors that would not make the cut as a first year undergraduate paper. Lacking original research, an argument, and any attempt at analytical rigor, these "articles" are published in pay-to-play predatory journals and are proudly displayed on CVs and parlayed into promotional evaluations. Nor is the problem simply one that afflicts the humanities and the social sciences. Bolaji, you're a professor of Chemical Engineering, so this one is right on your alley. The other day, someone forwarded to me a published journal "article" written by two UNIBEN professors of engineering. It was published in a junk, zero-reputation, pay-to-publish journal. First of all, the paper has nothing related to engineering in it. It is purportedly an analysis of metered billing practices of Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN). Not only is the "article" a mockery of every rule of academic publishing, the SOLE basis of the paper is the electricity bill of a Benin resident!!!! I have archived several other scandalous examples, including one written by two professors of mass communication that is written in sixth grade English and riddled with unpardonable errors of elementary grammar. 

My point is that the research culture in Nigerian universities has waned even as funding for research has become more available. Between TETFUND, the NUC, and other agencies, there are now pots of money running into billions of Naira for Nigerian academics to access for research purposes. Yet one of the recurring stories related to these interventions is the failure of Nigerian academics to even apply for these research funds. 

Why should they apply when research--original research--is virtually dead in the Nigerian university sector? Why should they when they can become professors without conducting a single piece of original research and can conduct derivative research and/or plagiarize their way to professorships? For those who worked heard to earn their promotions and ranks, what's the incentive to apply to these funds by crafting rigorous and compelling proposals when quality research is not a prerequisite for promotion or distinction and will not attract better remuneration to them as a way of recognizing and rewarding their research efforts?

I came across this story today. Read it below and weep for the Nigerian university system. The funding that we often harp on is  available, at least in the research sphere, according to this story, but there are either no applicants or the applications are poor and unfindable.





90% of lecturers' research proposals very poor and unfundable, says TETFund

August 10, 2017 by Yekeen Akinwale in Featured News, iNews · 1 Comment

 

Baffa

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