New Universities or Glorified Secondary Schools

New Universities or Glorified Secondary Schools

By Ibrahim Musa

The recent announcement of creation of nine new universities by the federal government of Nigeria was largely appreciated in some quotas considering the dearth of space for higher education in the country and the prospect of alleviating this anomaly. Initially, I also thought it was a bright idea coming from someone Nigerians considered too incompetent as a captain. However, this morning on my way to workplace, I listened to a radio program with an activist and the question he raised really disturbed me. I thought it wise to share some of those reservations for further engagement with the intellectuals in this forum.

The sum of thirteen billion naira was earmarked as the takeoff grant for these nine new universities. On average each would receive a paltry amount of 1.5billion naira. This amount would be used to build the structures to accommodate a brand new, first rate university and buy sophisticated equipment including an IT compliant library and laboratories for research and teaching. The same federal government that budget such ridiculous sum for the new universities has chosen six first and second generations universities to give them a face-lift in order to boost their already lost image and improve standard of the Nigerian universities. And each of the six universities was provided with 3 billion naira as a stimulus via ETF. The contradiction here is apparent to anybody with a discerning mind. The selected old generation universities need not to build any structure or laboratories since there are some in existence. They don’t have to worry about recruitment of staff or going through the rigors of accreditation panels, but they were given twice the amount given to a virtually starting from the scratch university. It seems the federal government is only interested in creating glorified secondary schools in each state at the end. May be this is our warped way of getting to the top 500 universities in the world.

I am not against building new universities but we should get it right in whatever we are doing. What is the benefit if these “high schools” ended up not adding value to the quality and productivity of the sector? It is laughable, if the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would budget nearly a trillion equivalent of Nigerian naira to build and equipped the recently opened King Abdulaziz University, but Nigeria fits only provide 13 billion for the whole nine glorified village high schools. What a modest system!

In the last few weeks, I was opportune to tune to Freedom FM and listened to the Vice President Sambo. He was articulating an educational policy that would provide access to education to millions of almajirai. He claimed that every year the federal government will build 100 comprehensive integrated schools with laboratories, hostels and social amenities to accommodate all the almajirais in this country. If I may ask Sambo and his cohorts of policy smith: what is the state of the existing unity schools in the country? Are they in good shape with all the aforementioned amenities? You see, the government that failed to fund and take proper care of its unity schools is now promising heaven on earth to almajirais. Nigerians have this preponderance of jumping from one project to another without really seeing to the conclusion of the existing ones. We tend to emphasize creating new policies and projects with every change in government while relegating sustainability to the background. Our precedence lies only with whatever trash we were able to dish out in a particular dispensation. I guess, as Baffa aptly put it, it is just a political gimmick. At the end may be none of these will see the light of the day because we refused to ask the right questions at the right time. We may just wake up and found ourselves as victims of April fool by the same people we ordinarily labeled as fools based on their intelligent quotient score!


NB: I wrote this article on 24/07/2011 and published it on a listserv: raayiriga@yahoogroups.com

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