ASUU and Abuja: ‘No agreement today;no agreement tomorrow’ (2) - WHEN I wrote those series I had no idea that twomonths down the line ASUU would embark on aparalysing strike that would do serious violence tothe academic calendar. One doesn’t need to beprophetic, Godspower Oyewole-style, to see our public universities are headed for the rocks. Their problems which daily stare us in the face willnot and cannot be resolved by the fast increasingprivate universities, many of which invariablydepend on academics from their publiccounterparts to fully meet their accreditationrequirements. Those who imagine the private universities cansucceed where the public universities have failedare only taking a short time view of the situation.Although much more business-like and oftenbetter managed and maintained, they are by far toofew and too expensive to take care of the educational demands of the armies of schoolleavers matriculated every year. While one believes that there is too much emphasison university education at the expense oftraditional technical education of the sort providedby polytechnics and trade guilds, it is a matter oftime before the private universities many of whichappear prone to lower standards in order to attract more applicants and generally tend to shun out fartoo many first class graduates- it’s a matter of timebefore they too get overwhelmed by the pressureof demand. That’s even in the unlikely event thatmost Nigerians can afford and therefore preferthem to the publicly-owned institutions. Until the middle class and society as a whole getsricher enough to afford private education for thosequalified, university education would still largely beprovided by public institutions. Which is why thepublic universities have to be better resourced. Andthis is not a new thing. Some of our universities like Ibadan, then Ife, Nsukka and ABU used to beamong the best in the commonwealth with scholarsfrom every part of the world. A number of my teachers in the public secondaryschools I attended were foreigners, from England,India, Pakistan and the Philippines, etc, to saynothing of Ghana. At the university, it was normalto see many of these scholars from other countrieseither as permanent staff or visiting researchers. This is no longer the case. It is a measure of howlow we’ve fallen out of the league of countries thatprovide meaningful university education that ouruniversities today suffer from the most despicableand pernicious form of in-breeding. The politics ofsurvival and ethnic and/or political balancing determines which students are offered admissionand which lecturers are hired. It’s even shaping thecurriculum in certain instances! Most of the students, teaching and non-teachingpersonnel in Nigerian universities today, are fromthe local communities. But for reason ofdesperation due to severe shortfall in availablespaces which forces some to move out of their‘catchment areas’, it is increasingly difficult to find people going out of their immediate localities toseek university education to say nothing of fillingteaching openings where such are available to‘non-indigenes’. This is nowhere helped by the violent campaignagainst so-called Western education in many partsof the North. You have to be a son or daughter of‘the soil’ to make your way in the treacherousterrain of contemporary academia. In the privateinstitutions, you must profess particular religions or belong in particular denominations in the eventyou can afford the relatively high fees to gainadmission. Many of today’s universities lack and cannot affordthe facilities available in Nigerian secondary schoolsof the 1970s and 80s. The cliché that theseuniversities are glorified secondary schoolsdeserves close examination to appreciate theenormity of the problem we are faced with. The near-total collapse of infrastructure with itsmanifestation in laboratories that are almost bare,shorn of necessary equipment and chemicals and/or reagents to perform experiments; library shelvesthat are coated in dusts, mildewed and outdatedliterature; poorly ventilated offices and lecture rooms (nobody talks of theatres anymore) withdamaged roofs that expose their occupants to theelements- noisy offices and classrooms withpuddles of rainwater mixed with human andanimal faeces, powered by noisy generators thatemit noxious fumes that make any meaningful research or study impossible- this is the picture ofrot that pervades our universities. Electricity is rationed and is available for less thanten hours in a whole week. A vicious circle thatsucks alike brutal and brutalised lecturers andstudents into its vortex is created. Lecturers have been reduced to mere classroomteachers. Salaries are delayed or irregular; researchfunds are grossly inadequate where they areavailable and lecturers are compelled to obtainbank loans to fund their own research and attendconferences even while carrying killing workloads involving students crammed into classes meant fora fifth of the population in it. Aside all of this, they still have to face the indignityof appearing before very disrespectful and uncouthforeign embassy staff that routinely deny themtravel visas to attend international conferenceswhere local conferences are rare and are oftenconvened by cronies with an eye to meet the demands for promotion. There is hardly time for relaxed study or sustainedreflection, the kind that gives birth to profoundinsight and discoveries. Scholarship is now a questfor survival, an economic struggle to recouppersonal funds invested in academic activities. Thus after working non-stop for six or more yearsin the very deplorable environments of ouruniversities, lecturers look forward to theirsabbatical. But sabbaticals are no longer what theyused to be, a break from the demands of regularwork routine, time to regain spent energy and engage in easy research, reflection and maybe lightteaching. Now, sabbaticals are opportunities for fully paid butvery rigorous teaching engagements in equallyparlous local university environments. This is thepractical demand of individual economy. At the endof such sabbaticals, academics return to theirregular jobs nowhere improved but more spent, enervated and on edge than they were before thesabbatical. The campus environments are like open marketbazaars. There are only dirt roads and footpaths,no paved roads. A concrete jungle of uncompleted,collapsing or collapsed buildings with cracked,unpainted walls that are grimy from lack ofmaintenance. The grasses are shaggy, there are no lawns andwhere they exist they have since turned wildbushes of thistles and thorns. Nobody talks ofrecreation facilities where libraries and laboratoriesare empty. The only recreation available is the dangerous kind:prostitution and cheap sex that often trigger bitterand violent confrontations among studentterrorists called cultists and local bandits. Robbery,rape and binge drinking are commonplaceactivities here.