“Unfortunately, we have so many institutions now being licensed to operate. Many of them have no business to be in education. All they want is money”.
-Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, Registrar of the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, The Nation, Tuesday, April 13, 2021.
Policymaking remains a black box brimming with many unanswered questions, riddles, irregularities and abnormalities in this country. This becomes clear when you ask such questions as, how is the policy agenda constituted or in simpler terms, what or who decides, what matters come up at for example, the Wednesday meetings of the Federal Executive Council? You can also ask what the quality of discussion and debate is at such meetings and what factors predominate in policy choices and output.
This is perhaps one way of relating to the mysterious and hard-to-explain approval by the Federal Government of 20 new licences for private universities. Is it not enigmatic, for example, that the registrar of JAMB, an effective and innovative gate keeper for university admission, Oloyede was not carried along regarding the making of such a momentous decision? Unsurprisingly, Oloyede as the opening quote shows took time to distance himself and to lambast a policy that can only be regarded as a blunder.
As this columnist has repeatedly argued (see for example: Private university licences and policy vacuum, The PUNCH, Friday, December 22, 2017), we already have a glut of undercapitalised; undersubscribed, poorly clad private universities in a context where the student population of private universities is below 10% of the entire population of our universities. Mark you, there is nothing wrong with the concept considering that the public universities are afflicted by a crisis of underfunding, acute resource shortages, staccato calendar, among other woes; it is just that we are holding the wrong end of the stick and going about it in a very unhelpful way. The jaded excuse that private universities are being replicated in order to widen access to higher education does not stand close scrutiny because the spaces in the existing ones are far from being filled.
Besides, how much monitoring beyond the predictable and shallow accreditation have we done about the existing private universities as a way of generating genuine feedback for policymaking? As with many things in this country, my feeling is that those who have made money and are eager to make more, have successfully persuaded the policy establishment to grant them licences for starting new private universities, irrespective of whether they will add value to what we currently have. Notice for example that one of the lucky new owners is Mrs Maryam Abacha who is not famous for educational exploits and whose late husband’s name continues to be associated with an outsized loot starched away in foreign banks. No, that does not take away her fundamental human rights except that nobody has offered convincing reasons for the award of a licence for higher education to her and several others on that list.
This writer has suggested elsewhere that one way of bringing something original to a congested table is for the proposed universities to offer courses that are distinctly different from the existing menu of courses offered by virtually all the private universities. As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that any of the newly approved ones have done this. That apart, we do not have a culture in which the rich undertake to subsidise higher education in order to make it more affordable so there is no question of whether any of the upcoming universities will dramatically lower tuition fees in order to widen access. Seriously speaking, you cannot be talking of widening access where tuition is priced far above the pocket book of increasingly impoverished Nigerians.
Merely reproducing the extant architecture of high rise soar away fees of private universities, in order to provide justification for continuous increase does not show any originality but rather betrays the suspicion that as Oloyede mentioned the objective may be to make money at any cost. If we had a sound educational policy in which the establishment of new private universities is a subset of that policy, then, we will demand of these proprietors that they establish clear niches in their marketing logo and philosophy such that there will be measurable indices in the journey towards qualitative education.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa, once wrote about executive irresponsibility while discussing the practice of state and federal governments establishing new universities without adequate computation of resources, human and material as well as infrastructure. Sadly, this logic or illogic is being recycled in the domain of private universities. If as several reports have told us there is a dire shortage in the number of university lecturers that have doctorate degrees, then one is bewildered concerning how the new multiplying universities are going to source lecturers. It would have been more rational to invest in closing the human resource gap in the existing universities before embarking on the degrading voyage of multiplying the deficiencies of the existing ones. The most that can be said for what appears to be no more than vanity fairs staged by some well-connected individuals is that it seeks to associate or rebrand their names with respect to the educational sector. But that is a personal project and certainly not a national one and should not have been adopted as policy.
A year or two ago, we were informed by the executive secretary of the National Universities Commission, Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, that the organisation had received close to 300 applications coming from those who wished to establish private universities. Given that, the 20 new approvals may merely be the preliminary batch of an inventory that may lengthen exceedingly to the point of absurdity. Who then will take responsibility for the resulting decay in higher education since in this country the buck does not stop anywhere; it is only thrown back to the hapless citizens or previous governments while the commotion goes on.
To be sure, there are a few private universities that stand out above a mediocre and publicity-seeking crowd. Even those ones can do better for themselves especially in the areas of technology, competent lecturers, and genuine academic ethos. The private university initiative is not anywhere near what private universities are in other parts of the world where in some cases they outshine public ones and are more devoted to knowledge. Their ongoing mushrooming suggests that the current degeneration is likely to be carried to the extreme whereby certificates offered by them will not be worth the papers upon which they are written. Is this the direction we want to travel?
Remedially, the NUC and cognate institutions should carry out an audit of the health of the subsisting private universities especially those that got their licenses in the last six or seven years. This ought to tell us a story which will read like, place an embargo on the approval of private university licenses, focus on increasing the quality of higher education, have a few universities that can compete in the global economy and stem the exodus of young Nigerians to universities abroad.
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