17th August, 2017
By: Amir Abdulazeez
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ast year around October, the Senate passed a
bill seeking to stop sexual abuse of female students in Nigeria’s tertiary
institutions. The bill, titled: “Sexual Harassment in Tertiary Education
Institution Prohibition Bill, 2016” sponsored by Senator Ovie Omo-Agege,
prescribed a 5-year jail term for lecturers and educators convicted of sexual
harassment of their male or female students. The bill also recommended
expulsion or suspension for students whose claims of being serially abused by
lecturers or educators are found to be false by any competent court. In the
alternative, the bill also proposed a fine of N5 million in the event that the
accused person is convicted by a competent court of law even as it made
provisions for lecturers and educators who may be falsely accused by their
students to seek redress.
Now, that a condition overwhelmingly exists
which warrants the passage of a bill like this one is very disgraceful not only
to the Nigerian academia, but to the Nigerian morality in general. But, the
worst part of it is that the bill may never be able to address the smallest fraction
of indecency and sex abuse going on in our tertiary institutions. In fact,
students-teachers sex relationship driven by both silent and open threat is
gradually and subconsciously becoming normal and legal in our universities.
The general reactions from the Nigerian
academia when this bill was passed were at best silence, and at worst condemnation
towards the bill and its sponsors. At the moment, there is hardly any place
dirtier than Nigerian universities and other tertiary institutions when it
comes to sex scandals. Our institutions have been turned into hallmarks of
prostitution and sexual harassment. The integrity of the system has been eroded
to the extent that even its topmost hierarchy is guilty of this. These are some
of the issues you seldom or never hear ASUU vigorously fighting to correct. The
very system the union is seeking external intervention to correct infrastructural-wise
is already internally rotten moral-wise. Again, ASUU is on strike for the same
old but many reasons, but the moral degradation imposed by some of its members
on the system isn’t one of them.
“Our members across the country were getting
increasingly frustrated, distracted and disenchanted” were the reported words
of the National President of ASUU, Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi when declaring the just
commenced nationwide strike. While briefing journalists, Ogunyemi listed ASUU’s
outstanding issues with the Federal Government to include; payment of
fractions/non-payment of salaries; non-payment of earned academic allowances,
non-releases of operational license of NUPEMCO; non implementation of the
provisions of the 2014 pension reform act with respect to retired professors
and their salaries, removal of universities staff schools from funding by
government and funds for the revitalization of public universities among others.
Problems like moral degradation of the system,
internal socio-administrative corruption bedeviling universities, many
lecturers’ nonchalant attitude towards their jobs, inadequate or non-existent
monitoring and evaluation of lecturers’ performance mechanism, unethical
academic practices, nepotism and favouritism in employment are not among the
major problems ASUU is concerned with. These are problems caused and promoted by
lecturers, many of whom are also ASUU members as well as by university
administrators who once were or still are. The union must make efforts within
its control to see that we first have a cleansed system, before we can talk of
improving it.
As is common with many government agencies,
universities are now some of the most visible symbols of financial corruption
and mismanagement. The little scarce resources sent to the universities from
the government are not well managed by the university administrators from top
to bottom. It is very common these days to hear of vice chancellors, bursars
and other university principal officers standing trial for corruption cases. Stories
of lecturers collecting bribes from students and their parents to award marks
are also heard everywhere. The union must emphasize on internal honesty, transparency
and accountability which is largely lacking. Senior academic staff are imposing
their incompetent sons, daughters and cronies as lecturers into the system and
the trend is continuing at an alarming rate.
ASUU should also be concerned with how many
universities are hiding under the excuse of inadequate funding from the government
to introduce aggressive and in many cases, easy, dubious and exploitative
revenue generation methods with little or nothing to show for it. Some of these
methods tend to portray the universities as revenue generation agencies rather
than institutions of learning. In a bid to bridge the wide funding gap, many
Nigerian universities have resorted to charging exorbitant and in some cases
ridiculous application, processing and registration fees for their
undergraduate and more significantly post-graduate programmes. Such exorbitant
fees are been hiked regularly with any slight opportunity. In some
universities, students are forced to pay high sums for the use of facilities
which are built and maintained by public money. With these sorts of easy,
unearned and exploitative revenue generation policies, many Nigerian
universities are tilting towards commercialization.
ASUU should be concerned with the quantity of our
universities. The number of federal, state and private universities operating
in Nigeria and registered by the Nigerian Universities Commission stands at
about 135 which rose from 51 in 2005. While ASUU members are busy taking
advantage of the large number of universities to serve as visiting lecturers,
the union itself appears to be indifferent to this. The union still wants
efficiency and at the same time it doesn’t discourage its members from picking
up visiting appointments in 2 to 3 other places apart from their primary places
of work thereby largely neglecting their primary universities and
underperforming in their visiting ones. The union should discourage state
governments from flouting political universities and the Federal Government
against issuing licenses to many of the private universities largely considered
incompetent.
Isn’t ASUU worried that in a university system
boasting of more than 2500 living professors, academicians are still hiding
under the guise of inadequate government sponsorship for their failure to produce
any ground breaking research of the Nobel-prize nomination grade over the last
30 years? With the decent amount of external and non-governmental research
funding coming into the Nigerian university system plus the little government
intervention, how much have we even came close to achieving that?
Granted that all ASUU demands deserved to be looked
into and we must put substantial part of the blame on the Federal Government
for the stagnation of our education system, but in all honesty and sincerity,
how much have Nigerian universities themselves able to achieve, initiate and
innovate to compellingly motivate government enough to invest more? How much of
a potential have they shown to attract private and corporate national and
international organizations to invest in them?
How much value has our academia independently added to our society? Do
we really think that the strongest universities in the world were actually made
what they are by their governments?
Nigerian academic researches conducted by some ASUU
members are dominated by plagiarism and other violations of ethical and
professional considerations. The union will do a great job if tries to address many
of issues like this.
ASUU have been seeking a rise in education quality
from without more than it is seeking it from within. Isn’t the union aware of
how recruitment of lecturers has now been dominated by nepotism and
favouritism? While this has resulted to the system becoming replete with
incompetent hands, how much has the union tried to stop university
administrators from doing this? How is the union working towards mounting a
mechanism that will expose the incompetent members among its ranks who are the
main drivers of poor quality education in the country due to their poor
teaching?
Our primary and secondary education systems are more
than rotten; they are ten times worse than our tertiary education system. If
ASUU’s objective is quality of education, it must also be concerned with this
as there will be no proper tertiary education without a solid foundation from
the bottom.
ASUU should also be concerned with how many of its former
members opportune to serve in government in various positions and at various
times have largely failed to make a significant impact either on the education
sector in particular or the general progress of the country in general. Lest we
forget, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan and Professor Yemi Osinbajo are former ASUU
members.
Twitter: @AmirAbdulazeez
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