By Professor Niyi Akinnaso
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| Niyi Akinnaso |
When I applied for admission to the university in
the 1960s, I knew nobody. There was no godfather or godmother. Neither my
parents nor my older siblings could assist me, because they were all stark
illiterates. As the first person in the entire Akinnaso lineage to ever go to
school, I was virtually on my own. Without any guidance whatsoever, I applied
for direct entry admission to the University of Ibadan and the University of
Ife, after passing the required General Certificate of Education (Advanced
Level) papers at the end of my first year of the Higher School Certificate
class. I was admitted by both institutions, each one acting independently and
without recourse to a superior authority. Ife, then, was a regional university,
while Ibadan was federal. I chose to go to Ife to read English. The rest is
history.
I told my admission story to a senior female
civil servant, who approached me last year for assistance in getting her
daughter admitted to study law at the Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko.
She listened attentively to my story and replied: “That was then, sir. The
country has changed. You have to know somebody who knows somebody in order to
get things done.” I’m sure she did not like my next statement: “It’s people
like you, who beg around, that caused the country to change”. She was not done:
“No sir, it’s the system”.
There really is plenty of blame to go round, just
as there are many sharers of the blame, including the students and their
parents; the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board; the universities; the
Federal Government; and the society at large. But my focus today is the
government, which is now like that wild elephant, reported in the media
recently, which killed an admirer who wanted to take a selfie with it.
The Federal Government has been known to be the
enemy of quality tertiary education in this country. It has earned that
status by (1) over-centralizing the institutions, procedures and regulations
governing the activities of the universities and then starving them of the
resources needed to carry out those activities. Even where some resources are
available, such as the tertiary education funds, the procedures for accessing
them are again over-centralized.
In a distinguished lecture, titled ‘Education
sector in crisis’, given by Professor Ladipo Adamolekun at the Joseph Ayo
Babaloa University in 2012, over-centralization was one of the three major
causes of the crisis in the education sector, the other two being
implementation failure – due largely to inadequate funding – and the
de-emphasis of the value of education, including quality decline in the
teaching profession.
Adamolekun gave five examples of over-centralization,
namely, the Universal Basic Education programme; the establishment and
operations of the unity secondary schools; the centralization of the labour
unions; the establishment of the National Universities Commission with its centralizing
functions; and the allocation of the lion’s share of the nation’s resources to
the Federal Government.
Adamolekun rightly traced these developments to
over 30 years of military dictatorship, which began its stranglehold on the
nation’s universities by federalizing erstwhile regional universities. Today,
however, perhaps the most controversial centralizing agency is the Joint
Admissions and Matriculation Board, empowered to conduct the Unified Tertiary
Matriculation Examinations and oversee university admission. Enough
controversy was generated recently between the Director of JAMB, Professor Dibu
Ojerinde, and the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, to send significant
ripples through the university system.
There are three knotty issues. First, who or
which institution should admit students to the university? It normally should
be the Senate of the university, which often delegates the authority of
processing the necessary papers to the admissions office located within the
Academic Affairs Unit in the Vice-Chancellor’s office. That was the case when I
was admitted to the university.
Today, however, JAMB has taken over this
function, while the admission offices of the various public universities are
being used as clearing houses. After weeks of controversy as to how this
function should be performed, Ojerinde issued this clarification recently: “The
public and all tertiary institutions should note that admission will only be
approved by the board after appropriate screening of the candidates by the
institutions”.
Yet, the Education minister still believes that
this does not “in any way affect the statutory role of the Senate of any
university or the academic boards of any tertiary institution conducting its
admissions.” It would appear that what the minister understands as the role of
the Senate is reduced to shortlisting. According to him, the universities will
shortlist the candidates, using the agreed guidelines and return the
shortlisted candidates to JAMB for verification of compliance to the
guidelines. JAMB will subsequently issue admission letters to the
shortlisted candidates.
The said guidelines appear to be the minister’s
main target and it is the second knotty issue. According to him, the admission
exercise rests on the tripod of merit, catchment area and educationally
disadvantaged states. The last two criteria are intended to trump merit so that
low-scoring students from particular localities or states could be admitted.
This is not only an affront to the Senate’s ability to control standards in its
admission; it also questions the business of the Federal Government in the
admission of students to state universities. What should my state government
care about admitting low-scoring students from another state because that state
is educationally disadvantaged? How is educational disadvantage measured and
who measures it? Wasn’t this kind of admission policy the killer of the unity
secondary schools, where standards plummeted because many under-performing
students were admitted?
The third and final knotty issue is university
autonomy. The Federal Government and two of its agencies, namely, JAMB and the
National Universities Commission (NUC), have killed whatever is left of university
autonomy. The truth is that it is JAMB which admits students, while the NUC
regulates everything else from the accreditation of courses to curriculum
guidelines and the classification of degrees. The Federal Government completes
the process by appointing Council members and ratifying the appointment of
Vice-Chancellors. Little wonder many a Vice-Chancellor spends substantial time
in Abuja these days.
To the extent that Nigerian universities are run
like extensions of the ministry of education, to that extent will they continue
to rot away like that ministry where there is neither institutional memory nor
policy consistency. True, this problem is not peculiar to the administration of
President Muhammadu Buhari. Nevertheless, there are genuine concerns that his
administration has yet to have a grasp on education.
This university admission is the administration’s second major foray into education. The first, the school feeding programme, has yet to take off. With the lacklustre handling of this year’s admission procedure so far, it is unclear what the future of education holds in the administration. Certainly, the present Minister of Education has yet to begin the bend in his learning curve.
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