By Professor Anosa, FAS, a Pathologist at Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike. 08033214985
I make this contribution in view of the logjam between the Nigerian Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities.
I have been privileged to serve in two Nigerian universities
for an unbroken period of fifty years (1972- 2022), at Ibadan from July 1972
until retirement in 2010, and as a full-time Contract Professor from 2010 –
2022 at Umudike.
In between, I spent sabbatical and research leaves at
Maiduguri, Nsukka, Awka, and Umudike, as well as at Davis, California and
Giessen, Germany. I went to Ibadan on a Federal scholarship in September 1964,
became a university scholar in 1965, and graduated in 1972, in part because my
course, veterinary medicine, took five years after A Levels; the Civil War
stole three years of my youth.
My path to Ibadan was made possible because sitting in the
famous November 1961 University of Cambridge West African School Certificate
examinations in my Anglican secondary school at Aba, I came top of my class
with six As and one credit, an aggregate of 12, and a division one certificate.
I spent 1962 and 1963 for the Higher School Certificate at
the famous Government College, Umuahia, and also topped my class with A, B, B
and A, A, B passes in the Universities of Cambridge and London examinations,
respectively. Ibadan studentship was tough and demanding, but I also excelled,
passing out with three distinctions and winning several prizes.
I joined the academic staff at Ibadan as Research
Fellow/Lecturer two weeks after graduation, got a master’s degree from Glasgow
in 1975, a PhD from Ibadan in 1977, and rose through the academic ranks to
become Professor in October 1983.
I am not advertising myself as I am well aware that our
abilities come from God, and we should not be proud or arrogant about our
endowments. My point is that my profile resembles closely the profiles of most
Lecturers and Professors in the generations before me, in my generation and
thereafter. The idea of the university grew out of the Church grammar schools
in thirteenth-century Europe and was then called studium generale or
universitatis, a place where educated elite from many countries gathered in Paris,
Oxford, Cambridge, etc, to teach, in Latin, bright students selected from all
over Europe.
The practice in universities worldwide then and today is
that the best graduates especially those with first and second-class upper
degrees in each class are encouraged and enticed to enrol for higher degrees
and thereafter to join the academic staff as Lecturers.
When I came to Ibadan, such graduates were awarded
postgraduate scholarships to study in Nigeria and some of the best Universities
in the world, and on completion of their Ph.D.s were employed as Lecturers.
This is because universities worldwide recognize that the
brightest students make better postgraduate students, better researchers and
Lecturers. Second-tier graduates with third-class and pass degrees are very
valuable elsewhere in the industry, government administration, and secondary
school teaching.
In the colonial and
immediate post-colonial years, Professors in Nigerian universities earned 3,000
pounds consolidated annually while Permanent Secretaries earned 2,750 pounds.
The Permanent Secretaries and Professors had equivalent
perquisites of office. During the Civil War, the Permanent Secretaries worked
themselves up the relevance ladder while the soldiers were on the war front.
As the war ended, the soldiers became the de facto rulers of
Nigeria for decades and often employed some Lecturers and Professors as
ministers, advisers and commissioners.
With time, the soldiers elevated themselves above everybody,
and Permanent Secretaries, led by the super permanent secretaries of the war
period, also manoeuvred themselves ahead of the Professors who had no one to
appreciate them, not the Permanent Secretaries most of who did not smell first
class or second upper degrees, not the ministers who came from different
academic backgrounds, and not the soldiers most of who left secondary school
with lower grades of passes in school certificate examinations while some, in
the early years, did not even pass school certificate.
The soldiers and civil servants shared the same grudge
against academics, and may have said to themselves: “you, our former mates,
were feeling superior, but now we are in charge”.
There were no strikes in Nigerian Universities from 1948 to
1973 until August 1973 during my first year of service at Ibadan.
Following a dispute with Lecturers and Professors, General
Gowon did the unthinkable: rather than negotiate, perhaps under the advice of
civil servants, he asked the Lecturers to pack out of their university
residences. It was somewhat gratifying to see him start as a first-year
undergraduate in England after he was overthrown!
The non-stop military regimes of Buhari, Babangida,
Abdusalam and Abacha dealt devastating blows on the universities in two areas:
degradation of research and teaching facilities, and pauperization of workers
generally including academic staff.
While some of them said they were giving their today for our
tomorrow, they actually took our yesterday and tomorrow.
In 1980, my salary as Senior Lecturer was N770 per month
which was $1,500 (N1.00 = $1.90), it was N1,500 ($2,250; N1.00 = $1.50) in 1985
as Professor. By the time Abacha finished with us, my salary as Professor after
15 years in that position had plummeted to N8,500 per month in 1998, a mere
$100 since he pushed the naira to N85 to $1. It was under this situation that
ASUU embarked on a seven-month strike in 1996.
Abacha ignored ASUU, conceded nothing, and later broke the
strike by following Gowon’s example by asking the pauperized academic staff to
pack out of their university residences within 24 hours or face forceful
eviction.
It is instructive that I made two short time research visits
to an international research institute in Kenya in 1992 and 1993 where I, the
same me, was paid $3,000 tax-free per month, with free furnished accommodation
and a car after work daily!
The consequences of the decay in the university teaching and
research facilities, and the poor pay which made it impossible for academics to
pay their bills and so trek about the campus during the Babangida years and
worsening during the Abacha years, led to a massive brain drain of academics to
Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, USA, and Saudi Arabia for the medical personnel;
indeed anywhere they could earn dollars, as small as $1,000 or less per month
for Professors.
Four of the five Professors in my small department with a
staff strength of eight academic staff emigrated, three of them to the USA. My
departmental colleagues and others who left were some of Nigeria’s best brains,
mostly trained abroad with Nigerian money, and over 98% of them never came
back.
To rub in the disdain that Babangida and soldiers had for
academics, he gave out subsidized cars to all categories of public servants,
including soldiers, policemen, customs men, and civil servants, but none to
Lectures and Professors. Fortunately, President Obasanjo hiked Professors
salary to N100,000 per month (referred to as gbim gbim by my colleagues) in
2000, thereby effectively terminating the brain drain.
A second unsavory consequence of the poor salaries paid to
university workers and the poor research and teaching facilities was that the
career choices of the brightest graduates changed; instead of their traditional
return to postgraduate studies on the campus as proud prospective academic
staffs, they poured into the private sector where they earned some N30,000 –
N50,000 per month, compared to the paltry N8,500 paid to their Professors.
In Ibadan, the Department of Economics produced six
first-class graduates in one session and all of them went to the private
sector. Since the brightest students refused to return to take up academic
jobs, the university had no alternative but to lower the standards by bringing
in less qualified graduates to fill the vacancies that arose.
As Head of my Department in 1988, I pleaded with the best
graduate who led the class consistently to take up one of the three vacant
positions created by the resignation of four Professors in the Department. I
had to descend to her, a fresh graduate because there were no applicants with
masters and PhD around.
She bluntly refused to cite poor pay and scanty research
grants and facilities, and I could not persuade her by reminding her that
gifted persons have a duty to the nation to return to the campus and teach
future generations.
A third consequence is that whereas Nigerian universities
attracted students and academia from the international community in the sixties
to the early nineties, you can now hardly find one international students and
academic even in our so-called first-tier universities today that once
attracted many of them. Our universities cannot today be rightly called studium
generale or Universitatis in the real sense of the names, but rather studium
locale.
Fourthly, based mainly on my research publications funded
mostly by international organizations derived from my periods in Glasgow,
California, and Kenya, I was admitted to the fellowship of the Nigerian Academy
of Science (FAS) whose first members included titans like Chike Obi, Awojobi,
Ezeilo, Bassir, Oyenuga, etc, and which still remains an elite club for
Nigerian academics.
The FAS enabled me to contest successfully for the
fellowship of the World Academy of Sciences (FTWAS) in 2012; this academy
embodies top scientists from the whole world with the exception of Europe and
North America.
Attendance of conferences of TWAS in Buenos Aires, Argentina
in 2014, and Vienna, Austria in 2016, made me realize, most sadly, that
Nigerian science is now, unlike before, lagging far behind those of China,
India, Singapore, Malaysia and even South Africa based of the quality of papers
presented.
Democracy brought legislators into the fray, and they are
carting away a large chunk of national wealth by using threats of impeachment
of the Executives at state and federal levels as a potent weapon. Their
salaries run into millions monthly, and Senators awarded themselves some N25
million monthly as constituency allowance that they don’t need to account for.
I imagine that their wardrobe allowance is more than the
N450.000 total monthly salary paid to a Professor at the bar today! Since you
need a school certificate to be a Senator and even President of Nigeria, our
Senate and House of Representatives are full of persons who would not qualify
to stand before university students.
Nigerian universities have always effectively managed their
funds judiciously as academics can never tolerate corruption, in part because
the rigid hierarchy in the civil service or armed forces does not exist in the
university as Professors see the leadership as equals.
The imposition of IPPIS on the universities, which is a
major factor in the current dispute, is a gross mistake. Can you imagine all
the universities in England or Canada receiving their salaries from one
organization? When it was introduced, I saw it as a portal for monumental
corruption.
The civil servants, soldiers and politicians have combined
to control the politics and economy of Nigeria, and have conspired to rubbish
the Lecturers and Professors who are undoubtedly the best brains in any country
including Nigeria.
The success of Britain in colonizing many countries and now
creating a massive Commonwealth of over two billion persons derived from the
contributions of the graduates of Oxford and Cambridge since the thirteen
century.
Japan, China, Taiwan, Israel, Singapore and Korea, with very
few natural resources, have soared economically because of the solid education
given to their citizens; they have recognized their brightest citizens, giving
them adequate pay and funding for research for national development and to
teach their students.
Nigeria is now the poverty capital of the world and has the
largest number of children not in school in the whole world despite huge
natural endowments, has abundant petroleum but cannot refine ordinary petrol
and so imports all the petrol needed by citizens at great costs all because our
rulers do not appreciate education and merit.
Crucial jobs are given to those who have the preferred names
and belong to the same religion as the rulers, while the geniuses in our midst
are ignored. A Professor, with all his intellect and learning, should not be
paid less than N2 million a month, still, a pittance compared to a Senator’s
emoluments.
This will encourage many bright youths to aspire to become
Professors. With good lecturers and professors, and adequate laboratory and
teaching facilities, our universities will return to their past glories of the
sixties and seventies when our degrees compared well with those of the best in
the world.
Unless the government wakes up to its responsibilities,
another wave of brain drain, from now on, will destroy our universities
irreparably. As the universities decay, Nigeria, what is left of her once
beautiful possibilities, will decay into insignificance.
Professor Anosa, FAS, is a Pathologist, at Michael Okpara
University of Agriculture, Umudike. 08033214985
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