The nice tragedy of Nigerian tertiary schooling is the debasement of its professoriate.
When, final month, the Educational Employees Union of Universities (ASUU), the umbrella physique of Nigerian college lecturers, forwarded a proper twenty one-day strike notice to the Federal Authorities (FG), it raised the specter of additional disruption to a tertiary schooling system that, over the previous twenty 5 years, has seen one industrial motion too many. Inside that interval, ASUU has gone on strike no less than sixteen occasions, and should achieve this but once more if ongoing negotiations with a particular committee arrange by the Minister of Training, Tahir Mamman, come to naught.
ASUU shouldn’t be the one union inside the system with a grievance. Non-academic workers underneath the aegis of the Non-Educational Employees Union of Academic and Related Establishments (NASU), the Senior Employees Affiliation of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), and the Senior Employees Affiliation of Universities, Instructing Hospitals, Analysis Institutes and Related Establishments (SSAUTHRIAI), have all downed their very own share of tools over time, usually in lockstep with the lecturers.
The lecturers are in little doubt as to the basis explanation for the collapse of tertiary schooling within the nation: insufficient funding. Whether or not it’s taking the FG to process for its obvious “failure to honor the 2009 renegotiated agreement” or particularly demanding “enhancements in welfare,” there isn’t a denying the sincerity of ASUU’s conviction that underfunding is the prime explanation for the system’s decay, and consequently its expectation that elevated public funding will translate into higher instructional outcomes for the colleges.
Whereas one could have reservations as to the last word sustainability of this top-down funding mannequin, the declare that Nigerian universities are grossly underfunded stands. At 5.4 percent in 2022, down from a excessive of 8.4 % in 2019, annual funds allocation to tertiary schooling in Nigeria is reportedly among the many world’s lowest. The much-lamented bodily decrepitude of the general public universities tells a narrative that mere numbers can’t do justice to, and based mostly on this alone, ASUU’s clamor for extra money—for its members, if not for the system as a complete—can hardly be faulted.
Official response to ASUU agitation, whereas not probably the most cordial, nonetheless appears to acknowledge the essential justice of the demand for elevated funding. The Tertiary Training Belief Fund (TETFUND), a scheme established in 2011 to bolster the sector with mandatory contributions from the non-public sector; and the newly launched Nigerian Training Mortgage Fund (NELFUND), which goals at “eradicating the monetary barrier to greater schooling for Nigerian college students,” are mainly an admission that the system may do with larger money injection.
All issues thought of, then, and for all their obvious antagonism, one which has seen a number of makes an attempt by the FG to abolish ASUU, it will appear that each side do in actual fact agree that the fitting stage of monetary infusion is all that’s wanted to take the beleaguered system out of its present doldrums.
What this consensus elides is the opposite—and, it appears to me, extra believable—risk, which is that the issue with the colleges is much less about funding, and extra concerning the professoriate, particularly its debasement. If this postulate is accepted, the vital process is to clarify how the demotion of the professoriate got here to be and point out how the method could also be reversed.
The central paradox of the devaluation of the Nigerian professoriate, a precursor to the broader degradation and lack of authority of the Nigerian intelligentsia, is that it occurred totally because of a social course of set in movement by none aside from the professoriate itself. Pressured by an ascendant militariat to justify its raison d’être as a category other than the remainder of society, the professoriate as an alternative doubled down on an egalitarianism that will have been noble in intent, and most undoubtedly endeared it to the remainder of society, however, in the long term, was deadly to its personal identification and amour propre. In the end, the extra it tried to withstand the antics and intrusions of a militarizing state, the extra it felt pulled into the vortex of in style politics and the imperatives of solidarity throughout class traces, and the extra it sacrificed its personal distinction as an aristocracy of motive constituted on the idea of benefit. For the Nigerian academia, the price of reaching throughout class traces to awaken consciousness within the service of social transformation is the erosion of its personal status; its proletarianization, to place it much more provocatively.
Thenceforward, as the road separating ASUU as a union of intellectuals from different unions primarily motivated by bread-and-butter points steadily blurred, it grew to become more and more troublesome for the college lecturers to make the case for their very own distinctive remedy. Not solely that, having failed to differentiate itself from its ideological allies, the professoriate grew to become regularly indistinguishable, and for all sensible functions socially undistinguished. When, in the present day, non-academic unions throughout the college system insist on “equal pay for equal work” as a result of, in any case, their wives and youngsters “store in the identical market” because the professors, they’re merely affirming a precept of “equality” of which ASUU has been the chief exponent down via the years.
Whether or not college teachers have introduced themselves all the way down to the extent of non-academics or pulled the latter as much as their stage, the fabric impact is similar: by way of what issues probably the most to mental life—comportment, discernment, reserve—ASUU and NASU have roughly merged right into a single entity.
For the professoriate, the implications are notably telling. Stripped of its former status, a college appointment is now simply one other job, one thing to be sought solely as a final resort, and solely when all different choices have did not materialize.
Moreover, having misplaced its mojo, the professoriate is now not in a position to execute its core mission as a middle of intellection that offers form and context to the main questions and concepts of the age. It comes as no shock that, when determined for steerage on any topic (e.g., the financial system, politics, social mores, and many others.), it’s the determine of the pastor and comparable pseudo authorities that, more and more, the Nigerian public turns to. As a matter of reality, insofar as the identical public acknowledges a Nigerian college professor nowadays, it’s sometimes as a public-facing activist, somewhat than as an skilled on a specialised department of data. If there’s something worse than the fatigue that the Nigerian public feels on account of ASUU’s repeated strikes, it’s the lack of regard for college lecturers. The surge within the variety of Nigerian college students searching for instructional alternatives overseas is partly on account of this case.
Whereas the state of affairs may be reversed, it’s troublesome to see any progress being made till the professoriate turns into absolutely conscious of the truth and that means of its demotion, accepting that it is a state of affairs for which it’s culpable, and one that might not have occurred with out its full acquiescence.
For the Nigerian college system to have a combating probability of reclaiming its outdated glory, the Nigerian professoriate should grow to be elite once more.
Supply: Council on Foreign Relations