Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why Do Nigerians Contribute so Much to the West through Educational Migration?: Painful Facts

"I spent many millions of naira, tens of thousands of 

pounds, in that educational pilgrimage. "Toyin Adepoju

Where are your  credentials from this

long expensive journey - that would enable you

to get a lecturing job in a Nigerian 

university, whether private or public?

Did your UK hosts deny you such credentials-

and if so, why would these wonderful 

people  and institutions do such a thing? 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, January 14, 2022 5:40 PM
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why Do Nigerians Contribute so Much to the West through Educational Migration?: Painful Facts

 

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Why Do Nigerians Contribute so Much to the West through Educational Migration?: Painful Facts

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

I'm one of those part of the statistics who moved from a Nigerian university to study in England in the early 2000s.

Can I be described as a member of the elite who left because of massification of public universities or even beceause of ASUU strikes, the stance I understand Jibrin Ibrahim as developing in his recent essay on the subject, his response to the recent conference on public and private universities in Nigeria?

I had been a lecturer in the same system and a branch ASUU executive.

I had been so proud to be a lecturer at the University where I graduated.

Why did I leave?

The BA had been very good but the graduate program was dogged by orientations unhelpful to growth.

The graduate program, which I was a part of and the relationship between senior and newer academic staff which I experienced as an academic in the department at the  same university  where I was studying  and from which I  had graduated, was not developed in a way conducive to maximizing of potential.

Corrosive politics was the norm. Domination of those newer to the system was the culture.

I had earlier vowed never to study in the West so as to contribute to breaking it's epistemic hegemony, but here in my own home land, I could hardly breathe in my effort to discover myself as a scholar. 

The BA was very good but most of the academic managers of the system in the department I worked and studied in were not committed to the greater independence for students and the creative leadership required to run an empowering graduate program or to the creative leadership required to help newer academic colleagues grow.

From the analyses on this subject of such as Moses Ochonu on this forum and elsewhere, my experience is not unique, even till the present day.

I can hardly imagine what would have happened to me if I had not been blessed to do graduate study in England.

The opportunities I was exposed to, the empowerment I enjoyed, transformed my creativity, setting me on a flight forever rising. 

Those dreams I had nurtured in Nigeria, the seeding of my mind by Nigeria's inspirational capacities, the thorough  education I had received but which I needed to build upon and go beyond, potencies my university and to some  degree, my country, were inadequtely equipped to help me maximise, were creatively exploded into fruition through the enablements of the former colonial power, which was hurtling into the future at light speed while the educational system it had built in it's colonies, which though based on the model of that in the colonising nation, was nowhere near the progress of the originators, and in some cases, had even regressed from the glory days of Nigerian education and scholarship in the 70s to 80s.

The Western universities and their larger  societies are so far ahead of us as a nation, talk less our educational systems, we may be seen as a village outpost in relation to their metropolitan centrality.

Who, with the opportunity to worship in the great mosque at Mecca, the ultimacy of Islamic architecture and splendor, where the world converges, is likely to insist on remaining forever at his village mosque?

By the time one compares the enablements of the Western societies, the emowerments of their universities, amplified by the potencies of the most exceptional of those universities, such as Cambridge, equivalent to various universities in one, hosting cutting edge seminars and conferences in the entire disciplinary spectrum day after day, almost 365 days in a year, one realises  those people are in a different world, a world defined by differences of orientation as much as of material resources.

People gravitate to where quality is to be found. Most students in Nigeria universities would migrate to the West if they could.

Class emerges here  in terms of relative ability to fulfill such dreams.

It's not a matter of snobbery, what I see as Jibrin's second reason for educational migration from Nigeria, along with ASUU strikes.

Before the 20th century Germany was the centre of graduate education in Europe, to the best of my knowledge. Their command of the heights of the humanities and perhaps the social  sciences  and certainly the sciences was obvious, their Nobel prizes visible to all.

US scholars visited Germany and adapted the German model in their own country. The rise of Nazism and WWII led to the flight of top scholars from Germany to the US.

The rest is history. We all know the role US graduate education and scholarship now enjoys on the global scale.

What are we going to gain from our own Diaspora concentrations?

Without a significantly improved, secure, equitable country that is truly modern in striving for the best achievable by humanity, the exodus will continue.

I spent many millions of naira, tens of thousands of pounds, in that educational pilgrimage. 

If I spent the same amount of money in Nigeria, I wonder what scope of what I gained from the pilgrimage I would get.

A country where there are few libraries, small output of books, talk less serious non-fiction, among other inadequacies, such as inconsistent electricity supply, cannot be a knowledge power, a force in the knowledge economy.

How innovative, how up to date are our learning systems, curricula and educational orientations?

To what degree do we identify with the substance rather than the letter of educational culture?

We have a long way to go. We should acknowledge it and pursue the journey doggedly. The world waits for no one.

--
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