‘Irregular funding makes planning impossible in varsity’

Professor Adewale Omololu

Professor Adewale Omololu is the pioneer Head of Department, Human Nutrition, University of Ibadan, and one time Deputy Provost, College of Medicine, University College Hospital (UCH). He recently celebrated his 80th birthday. In this interview with Kehinde Adio, he shares his views on univeristy education in Nigeria. Excerpts.

What is your assessment of uni versity education in Nigeria, past and present?
One has to look at it from the people concerned. You know that at the begining, it was an elitist training. The people who went to university were very special and very small in number but now the demend has gone up and we have a much larger numbers.

One of the things that is funny in Nigeria is that everybody wants to attend university.

Again, in the past, every university received subvention annually and oftent knew what would come to the university in the next three years or more. On this knowledge, the university could plan their programmes ahead of time without stresse.

During this period, the government would tell the university categorically that this is how much you are getting this year, next year , and you get so much the year after. So, we can then plan for ten years. But nowadays you get it every month.

“This development makes planning impossible.
In this regard there is no planning for the future and this has not worked well for a university that has gone to plan for the future. You see that is one of the reasons federal university has gone down even also the state universities.

Unfortunately, the other reason is that the university is the future of the country and we are now putting mediocre in places.

Moreover, admission of students and recruitment of staff in any university should be based on merit. while whoever is a professor should have been known universally not in Nigeria alone.

How could one became a professor?
There used to be three ways of becoming a professor; One is by promotion in which case you promoted from senior lecturer to a reader and then professor. The other one is they send your papers to three assessors. usually from Japan, Cambridge and America who will assess the applicantsand then give their recommendations.

The other one is that they advertise the post internationally and people will apply all over the world. There is a group of people in London who will assess them and also recommend them.

I remember when I had to assess somebody, who submitted about sixty publications. Forty of them were very good, but the last twenty were very poor. And I told him that if he would remove that last twenty, I would recommend him but if he would not remove them, I will not recommend him.

You see, your publication has got to be mainly your research, what you have found out.

What is your comment about the university admission process in NIgeria?
The situation is not very good. when we are talking about the number of posts, the federal universities have got a limited number of spaces because the governmentdoes not release adequate fund.

During my time at the UCH, the college used to plan for 50 to 55 medical students, during General Yakuvbu Gowon’s regime he asked the university to increase the intake. We started and over the next two or three years, we increassed the number. But government could not increased the teaching facilities to meet the increasing number of students.

If you go to university of Ibadan today, you find that most of the medical students are sitting on windows or listening outside becasue no facilities for them. The same thing in UCH, it is only now that they are extending UCH, they weren’t enough beds. So you cannot just say increase number without giving the facilities. There must be laboratory facilities in the pre-science subjects, and the lecturers that are going to train them.

When the government says okay “I am refurbishing UCH, and I am spending N1m. It is senseless without running cost.

In those days we had Higher School Certificate (HSC) but now it has been scrapped out. What do you think about that?
Is a question of corruption. HSC and A’ level were recognised not only in Nigeria, or West Africa but all over the world. You can pass your A’ level in Nigeria and go to Britain, America and elswhere to further your studies. It was a standardised certificate.

When I was at the UCH in the college of medicine, we had cut-off point sometimes it could be 260 sometimes it could be 270.

But sometimes we would get two or three students who would come with 320 score and of course we would take them, only later to discover that it was not what they claimed be that they were. Something must have happend somewhere.

If you were to advise the Minister of Education, what would it be your advice concerning teaching hospitals in Nigeria?
The medical school has got to be well funded, the fund must be there, that is the first thing. Secondly, he have to appoint qualified people. When I say qualified person I also mean experience. Not just anybody because he is from Ibadan or somewhere else, but because he is good. And we must have exprienced people who would be known internationally not just by the minister or the Head of State.

Once we have all these things; the fund, well qualifed persons, giving them the right environment to operate, things will be okay.

Other thing is that trained doctors in Nigeria should spend at least six to twelve months working in the rural areas. This should be compulsory not a matter of choice. If NYSC will take them to rural areas then it will be sensible. They must spend at least six months in the rural areas and know the rural people. If they don’t, they are going to be bad doctors in the future.

Private institutions in Nigeria. How do you see it?
It’s a phase. The cost is very high. the universities are using most of the federal and state universities lecturers who are poorly paid as teachers. So, it is not that the lecturers are not good but they cannot get enough good lecturers. So that’s why I say it’s a phase, it is going to stabilise sometime.

What’s your dream for Nigeria in term of Education?
Nigeria has got a very great future if we don’t introduce corruption and politices into it.

We need to re-invent university system - Prof. Egbokhare

Prof. Egbokhare

Professor Francis Egbokhare is the Director, Distance Learning Centre, University of Ibadan. In this interview with Sulaimon Olanrewaju, he speaks on the rationale behind the establishment of the centre, which is to increase access to higher education to Nigerians. He speaks on other front burner issues. Excerpts.

What is the essence of having a distance learning centre, considering the fact that the University of Ibadan has enough courses for its regular programme?
Let me start by giving you some indications on why it is very important for any country to use distance learning as a mode. Let’s take China. If China were to create the number of universities that the United States has per population, China would need 18,000 universities in the least. The resources to do that are beyond the means of any country today.

Nigeria’s university density is one of the lowest in the world. A country like Bangladesh that has a population about the size of that of Nigeria has about 7,000 universities. The truth is that there are not enough universities in Nigeria per population. The question is; is the solution to recreate infrastructure and to multiply universities? That is not the solution. If you look at the kind of universities that Nigerians are creating now, even the private universities, you will see that they are not like the University of Ibadan, ABU, University of Benin, the kind of universities that we were able to create in those days. Obasanjo’s regime thought that the solution to the problem of access was the multiplicity of private universities. As of today there are about 92 universities in Nigeria, more of these are private. Look at the population that they have been able to admit, it is still about 20 per cent of the total of those who are qualified. The progression rate from the basic level to the university level in Nigeria is still very low. It is about six per cent. What happens to the others?

That tells us that we need the kind of system that is a democratization of access so that it is only those who do not want access to higher education that will not have access to it. That is the essence of distance learning because it leads to the multiplication of access, multiplication of skills and knowledge. This is the age of knowledge. We are no longer in the age of mining. No matter how much oil you mine now, it is exhaustible. In another 10, 15 years, unless new fields are discovered, Nigeria’s oil will have gone, at least on the offshore. This tells us that we cannot rely on oil. We are in the age of brain power. 75 per cent of the resources of modern nations is a function of knowledge, while natural resources account for about 25 per cent. This tells us that as we fight over the oil in the Niger Delta region, we are only killing ourselves over 25 per cent of our potential resources while we do not at all address the remaining 75 per cent.

This means that to maximally benefit from the potential resources, we have to create access for higher education to everybody. We need to create an opportunity for that village boy with brain power but without access to regular higher education to have access to higher education because the economy of this country in the future may depend on that boy. That is the whole basis for distance learning.

What distance learning creates is not just access to higher education, it is whatever it is that can lead to improvement of knowledge, continuous education. Somebody is sacked from one job, he needs opportunity for re-training to get another job, or there are new skills, for instance, in manufacturing and you want individuals to quickly adapt to that so you want to train them etc. These are called open distance and e-learning. People can study from home or anywhere.

Part time study is not distance learning. What they do in part time is that the same standards that are used for evaluating regular studies are used for part time. If you are doing 45 hours of a course, the part time students will also have to distribute their time such that they still have 45 hours on that course. Distance learning is studying at your own time and your own space, your convenience. In this sense, distance learning is not part time. It strictly identifies the individual’s capacity, peculiarity and propensity and gives him flexible environment to study so that you can go at your own pace, at the power of your resources and at the power of your intellect.

Won’t distance learning compound the problem of the falling standard of education in the country? Let’s not forget that education is far more than parading a certificate. With the modus operandi of the distance learning programme, how do you ensure that your students are exposed to the same thing that the regular students are exposed to as a way of safeguarding the standards?
From the days of my mother, we have always complained about the falling standards of education. The standard of education will continue to fall in the sense that we are unable to measure. What is this falling standard? How do we explain it? I hear that the employers are complaining about the quality of students. Perhaps they are complaining more about their communication skills, we need to know. If the problem is their inability to achieve a particular level of skills in the modern economy we should know. My suspicion is that Nigeria has failed to advance towards the modern economy and the universities also have not been able to produce the kind of students that will engage in modern economy. In that case, we have a frozen standard. The standard has remained at a particular point in history, maybe in the 1970s or 1980s. The question is how do we reverse this? So, we have a general problem both at the level of the regular and level of the distance learning.

If you look at the last 30 years, the education sector in Nigeria has experienced a lot of turbulence. There are some Nigerians in their 20s and 30s, who never went to school but have certificates. When they were in primary school, teachers were always on strike. You know the business of going on strike started at the primary school level. They later passed the baton to secondary school teachers before it got to the universities. For almost 30 years, we had a very unstable school system. There were people, who, unfortunately, went through the system and they are the ones in various sectors now working. They had no education, they just have certificates.

How does distance learning compound this problem? It is because of the Nigerian factor. People are running all kinds of programmes through satellite campuses and all that and there is no attempt, for instance, to be able to define a minimum, of course there will be problems. It is not necessarily because it is education but because that is the way Nigerians do business generally. They have no respect for rules and regulations. What I am saying is that it is not distance learning that created the problem of standard, it is the human factor. Distance learning is supposed to use technology and technology is supposed to enhance standards.

We have to address the problem of the human factor. What distance learning allows you to do is to create mass access.

Given the state of the nation’s human capital development would you say that the university system has failed the nation?
It will be unfair to say that the university system has failed the nation in the sense that the university system does not exist outside the cultural context. In a sense, you could say that the university system has not lived up to expectation because the academia should drive the direction but the Nigerian system is not normal. Even in the context of education itself, people deride you for your abilities.

There is an anti-intellectual culture in our country that drives both the politics and the economy. In an anti-intellectual culture that we have, what do we expect the university system to do? That has led to the gradual destruction of the intellectual psyche.

In countries where things are done properly, people look up to the university system for direction in terms of ideology, technology and political consciousness.

But this is not the case in this country. What has happened is that in the years of the military, there was a deliberate attempt to create intellectual paralysis. They succeeded to a large extent in doing that. So, rather than the university system dictating, the university is behind the society in terms of development and consciousness-such that practices, which the larger society has given up, are found in the university. For instance, the universities have started giving honourary degrees to criminals in order to raise funds. The universities have become so sectional that they even fight over positions, people now use ethnicity as a consideration for getting university positions. You find out that there is a rotation of positions in the university system even when the political system is not favourably disposed to the idea of rotation in the polity.

In a sense, one can say that the university system has failed. But we have to ask what kind of people are in the university system today? It is not the same kind of the brightest individuals as it was in the past that you have in the universities now. Sometimes now, it is the worst elements who find their way into the university system because appointment is based on ethnic considerations not intellectual considerations. So, the universality in the university concept is not there. Universities are nomenclatures, an agglomeration of interests. Most people in the universities don’t know why they are there. It is a place of employment. What we need to do is to re-invent the concept of the university in order for the universities to become instruments of development that can catalyse the kind of changes that we need in the society.