Options on the titanic ASUU/government battle, By Jibrin Ibrahim

NIRSAL AD

Given this culture of academic corruption, should the Nigerian government decide today to grant all the financial demands of the universities, there will be no fundamental improvement in their quality because of the internal rot that has destroyed them from within. The failure of ASUU is its refusal to start addressing these internal problems of academic corruption and collapsed standards.
The problem around the titanic ASUU/government battles is that it has been reduced to a ASUU Charter of Demands, much of which is about money. Government has not raised issues it should have about the rapidly declining fall of standards in our universities. The fall is closely associated with rising corruption in the academy. Academic ethics have taken a hard blow as lecturers exploit their students through the sale of hand-outs and sexually harass their female students. The academic principle of peer review has declined and a significant part of university professors are promoted on the basis of self-publication. So many “academic” journals in Nigeria that are supposedly peer-reviewed, demand and receive upfront monetary payments from prospective authors. So many Nigerian “professors” have very few, and many have no citation counts in professional academic measures of quality. It is easy for ASUU to pick on Minister Pantami but how many professors would survive the checks they applied to the minister. It was this crisis of academic standards that led my good friend, Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano of Bayero University to announce that the Nigerian university system has collapsed beyond redemption to ‘Super Secondary Schools’ and there is no hope for recovery.
Given this culture of academic corruption, should the Nigerian government decide today to grant all the financial demands of the universities, there will be no fundamental improvement in their quality because of the internal rot that has destroyed them from within. The failure of ASUU is its refusal to start addressing these internal problems of academic corruption and collapsed standards.
The Nigerian elite have demonstrated their lack of confidence in the university system by sending their children abroad for tertiary education. A few send their children to private Nigerian universities. This means that the children of the poor are the main beneficiaries of public university education and they are not competitive, in comparison to the foreign trained children of the elite. Essentially, the Nigerian state has abdicated its responsibility for the qualitative development of the children of the masses and created a situation in which social mobility has been cut out for them as a result. Increasingly, high-paying jobs are open mainly to foreign trained Nigerians. This larger conversation about declining quality in our universities and class discrimination against the children of the masses must be added to the charter of demands.
A professor of Political Science and development consultant/expert, Jibrin Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Democracy and Development, and Chair of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES.

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