…I HAVE been talking to the ideals on how to get to where we need to be in 21st century where education is fast changing the dynamics of development. The policy experts and scholars here and all of us need to understand that founding and funding a university isn’t for the fainthearted. Visitors who hold the fort for public universities constantly claim that they don’t have enough to fund education the way we want it in this same 21st century. In other words, if we look into the seeds of our education development times, what we will see now is that the education sector at home isn’t good and governments are only declaring emergencies whenever they want to hold general elections.
We are talking at a time when most education leaders are again suggesting policies that will take us to where we can internationalise higher education again. That was the theme of my convocation lecture at the Adekunle Ajasin Univesity, Akungba, Ondo State in December 2023. But from the way we daily read from the book of lamentation about funding of higher education at this time of economic crisis, where will we get on the road to internationalisation of higher education?
Isn’t it a time to interrogate Professor Wole Soyinka’s suggestion some years ago about the expediency of closing down all the Nigerian universities for a year or two with a view to restructuring them into “Ivory Towers”, citadels of learning and centres of innovation that they should be? I asked a similar question at the Akungba 2023 lecture. But the answer has continued to blow in the wind.
Again, this paper is not a seminal paper on the role of the university in a developing country. Nor is it a research topic on the role of public intellectuals in development. Rather, it is a thought-provoking discussion point on why all our representatives in government, all our duty bearers should halt the “hollow rituals” called licensing of new private universities and the federal government’s own obsession with political project called federal universities in all the states of the federation. This is a time to tell them to pay attention to better rather than more universities whose products cannot contribute to national development, no thanks to poor funding.
It is a time to call on the elders of the land, notably those that had enjoyed ‘the good old days’ in this same country when universities were universities to support a motion that governments at all levels should stop all priority projects and declare genuine emergency on education with a view to investing in them consciously and sincerely.
This means there had been good times here when even some Americans were applying to read even English studies at the University of Ibadan. As I have noted in some presentations, in 2008, I met an African American, in Miami Florida who claimed to be a classmate of now Professor Gordini Gabriel Darah at the University of Ibadan where she did her PhD in English/Literature in the early 1980s. The woman gave me a note to give to her radical classmate, G.G Darah. She was at that time President of a University in Florida. That was internationalisation at the Nigeria’s premier university college when an American could read about a great university in Nigeria without the Internet. There were stories of foreign students in the universities of first generation when there was indeed a universe in the universities. How do we regain the paradise lost when we can be part of the universe again?
The highway universities without universe?
What is more horrible than a situation whereby most Nigerian universities have become mere factories for producing unemployable graduates at all levels? All the major highways in parts of the country have become attractions for private universities, most of which are alleged to be just for ways of laundering money for some crooks who can no longer hide such slush and stolen funds abroad because of the danger in illicit money transfer now that we have the Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU). But sadly, most of the lecturers of the mushroom universities cannot allow their children to be admitted into most of the institutions where they teach. I know many of them, who would still have to struggle through thick and thin to send their wards abroad where they think real learning takes place.
But let’s reflect on this classic. According to Gasset (2005) on the Mission of the University. Why University Must Be Primarily: the University; Profession and Science. This is important for our leaders, policy makers and university owners.
(A) The university consists, primarily and basically of higher education which the ordinary man should receive.
(B) It is necessary to make this ordinary man first of all, a cultured person: to put him at the height of the times. It follows then that the primary function of the university is to teach the great cultural discipline namely:
1. The physical scheme of the world (Physics)
2. The fundamental themes of organic life (Biology)
3.The historical process of the human species (History)
4.The structure and functioning of social life (Sociology)
5 The Plan of the universe (Philosophy)
(C) It is necessary to make the ordinary man a good professional. Besides his apprenticeship to culture, the university will teach him, by the most economical, direct and efficacious procedures intellect can devise, to be a good doctor, a good judge, a good teacher of mathematics or of history.
The specific character of this professional teaching must be set aside, however for further discussion.
Whether it is local or ‘glocal’, the university should be equipped enough to play its primary role of turning the ordinary man to be what he wants to be: professional. But can the university in Nigeria play this role today in this age of digital technologies? We can’t and that is why the Artificial Intelligence Centre of Google has since 2018 been in Ghana. The Google AI experts were in Nigeria then to look for a well-equipped university out of our more than 200 then to be the host of the technology giant’s AI Centre in West Africa.
They couldn’t find any and they went to Ghana with about 15 national public universities and 11 private universities and found a well-equipped school of computer engineering that could play host to their AI Centre. What a giant in the sun! You aren’t a giant of a nation if you can’t excel in STEM subjects in the 21st century. Where will development flow from when your universities aren’t producing young engineers in today’s world like those young tech giants helping the Trump administration to disrupt the allegedly unclean bureaucracies of the United States through the independent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that the globalists and liberals don’t want to see in the United States?
Again, where are our leaders at all levels including the state and national assemblies at this critical time? Why are our leaders and representatives concerned about only the next election without caring a hoot about the next generation of leaders who are supposed to be products of our universities? Are the suffering, malnourished and ill-equipped students of today not going to be the leaders of tomorrow? How many of the more than two hundred million people would have the resources to send their children to the so-called good schools abroad as our leaders are apparently doing today?
Are our leaders aware that most of our university lecturers in science and technology schools are relocating abroad in search of greener pastures? Does the education minister tell the president and some Labour Ministry’s arrogant negotiators with ASUU members that most serious nations, especially some in Nordic countries pay teachers better than other public officers because they believe that only satisfied teachers can produce better graduates?
Aren’t they aware that in the United States, which is still proud of its exceptionalism on all fronts, public officers including policy makers are still concerned about the fact that their American children (students) are well outside the top-ten international student rankings in reading, science and mathematics apart from the nation’s position of leadership on everything from the economy to the military to issues of moral authority? They (Americans) are beginning to argue that their rating “will continue to plummet unless we take dramatic action…”. Michelle Rhee, a former chancellor of Washington D.C., public schools from 2007-2010, now a driving force behind American education reform, has already written a classic on this development, titled, ‘Radical: Fighting To Put Students First’. The founder and CEO of StudentsFirst has drawn attention to the fact that although the United States is well known as a world leader in innovation, boasting of brilliant thinkers and trendsetting companies, yet there is a fact that, that status is at grave risk because American children are getting outside the top-ten international student ranking.
Come with me to South East Asia. The power behind Samsung, a global brand is South Korea, with a population of about 51.7 million. They have more than Samsung to export to the world because of the power that quality education that they take seriously has given them. They are among top-five countries with excellence in Research and Development (R&D) funding in global context. That is their power. You can make the same claim of Singapore. The economic power of Singapore isn’t tied to any extractive industry. It is only linked to their intellectual power. Yes their brainpower through education quality their legend, Lee Kuan Yew bequeathed to them. There are more examples of these powerful countries.
How many times shall we write that there is a nexus between the economic power of South Africa and the quality of its universities? It is not by accident that the best university in Africa in all global ratings is the University of Cape Town. Is it not also true that of the top ten universities in Africa, most of the times, six to eight are in South Africa? What we are saying isn’t about setting up technical universities, agriculture universities, medical sciences universities, maritime universities, police and army universities that are underfunded and ill-equipped. This isn’t about the number of graduates in the country. It is about the quality of the graduates. It is about the capacity of the graduates to solve 21st challenges in this age of the high-tech, digital disrupters….
*This is an excerpt from (9, 307 words) lecture titled, ‘Can The Universities Trigger National Development Amid Economic Challenges? I delivered last Thursday March 6, 2025 as the 11th Distinguished Lecture of the University of Medical Sciences, Ondo City, Ondo State.
To be continued…
- Oloja is former editor of The Guardian newspaper and his column, Inside Stuff, runs on the back page of the newspaper on Sundays. The column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Mondays.