BY UCHE NNADOZIE
To be honest, I still can’t understand why we run our schools the way we do them. The worst of them is the university system. We deliberately run them in a way to create ethnic and religious bias right from the day the foundation of the schools are dug. I don’t know what is wrong with us, but what is wrong with us is killing us. Yet we are not giving up and not looking back. As we speak, Nigerian lecturers are on strike. But that is not the point I have come to make. Reading what the Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, (NUC) stated recently corresponds with what I have always complained about. He said some universities were losing their universal character by assuming tribal and ethnic colourations. I dare say most universities in reality.
Speaking further, the commission’s head said it was unfortunate that some universities had turned choice of Vice-Chancellorship into an ethnic, religious and tribal battle. The Executive Secretary of NUC, Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, stated these when the Governor of Bayelsa state visited the headquarters of the commission in Abuja. The governor was at the commission to present documents to the ES and also to seek approval for the establishment of Bayelsa Medical University, Yenegoa. The NUC boss said universities would continue to have problems unless they agree to play by the rules. Listen to him: “The universities commission is very pleased with the actions and activities of the Governor of Bayelsa state. Governor Dickson, as I said truly, is showing the light, is showing the way of how to build a university.
“What the governor is doing is what we have been calling for and it is one of the cardinal points of our reform. We have to reinvent our universities. We have to accept that the university – the most important word there is the universe. What is unfortunate for us in this country today is that many of our universities are losing that universal character and this is very unfortunate.
They are assuming some tribal, regional, ethnic or religious colourations and it is dangerous. We often complain here in NUC when we see communities fighting over who should be the Vice-Chancellors whether it comes from our local government or not or a federal university fighting that somebody must be from the state where the university is sited or must be from the local government where the university is cited and all these are unknown to university governance and university administration in other parts of the world. Unless and until we agree to play the game according to the rules we shall continue to be bedeviled by some of these problems.”
This kind of behaviour has bugged our nation for a long time. We seem to move on as if nothing has happened. I do not understand why communities must insist that vice chancellors must come from their communities. Does it mean that every company cited in a place must have the Managing Director coming from that place? Does it mean that if you have a ministry headquartered in Ilorin then the commissioner and permanent secretary must come from Ilorin? If we have the capital of Nigeria as Abuja does it then follow that all presidents and heads of MDAs must be from Abuja. Whoever started bending the rules to accommodate primordial sentiments must be a terrible individual. These days, you find communities fight among themselves which part of the community must produce a vice chancellor of a university and whose turn it is as it were to produce the registrar or bursar.
Where these clannish tendencies are not adhered to, the appointee will suffer severe sabotage all through his or her tenure. If this level of debasement can happen in a citadel of learning, what exactly are we plotting to instill in our next generation. This is so because these schools are the breeding ground for these kids who will grow up with the mindset that right from school, our divisions have been normalised in such a way that people move on without looking back. Nobody is ready to challenge this anomaly. Instead, everyone is waiting for their turn. Even if our politics is polluted, our school system shouldn’t.
Before now, they used to fight over which state the vice chancellor is originally from, now they fight at local government or community level and of course, which religion the appointee professes. As a matter of fact, it goes beyond that. If the individual is a Christian for example, questions will be asked if he or she is a catholic, Anglican or protestant.
There has to be something that can be done. I think beyond bemoaning this obvious malady, we can go a step ahead and completely stop it. The right institution that can do that is the NUC. We can start by embargoing further appointment of vice chancellors from the state where the school is located. I will suggest that a school like University of Ilorin should have a vice chancellor that originally comes from Borno or Cross River state. University of Nigeria, Nsukka should have its Vice Chancellor from somewhere far away, like Lagos or Sokoto State. The rotation can continue but not anyone from Enugu or Ilorin as the case may be. I may also suggest that lecturers and other workers within the university system should get at least two transfers in the course of their employment.
If you are a federal worker, you can be transferred anytime; I wonder why workers in universities owned by the federal government don’t go on transfers. They should move around. This will help stem the (indulgent) convenience of stationary employment. This will also open up the system for us to see what is going on. The openness of the system will help prevent whatever it is that makes communities think that leadership is best provided by the “son (or daughter) of the soil. I vote for rotation of federal staff. State governments will find what is best work for them. A federally owned university, polytechnic or college is funded by all of us, so all of us should have equal right to run it, not communities where they are located alone. That’s not what education teaches. The fact that the university is cited in your place alone is an advantage. Don’t be unduly self-centered.
