NUC’s CCMAS loopholes and the business of governments

By  Oluwatosin Adeniyi

This piece makes intervention on two critical issues of national development. First is the recent curriculum review undertaken by the Nigerian Universities Commission (NUC) which has created more contradictions than it may have been designed to solve. Second, is to push against the claim by professional economists in Nigeria and Africa that government has no business in doing business. I show how this statement has created weak and if you like, infantile Governments at the National, state and local government levels in Nigeria. let us now start with the first issue. The Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards for the Nigerian University System (CCMAS) is a fairly recent attempt by the main regulator of the higher education sector in Nigeria, the Nigerian Universities Commission (NUC), to broadly standardise the teaching and delivery of undergraduate courses across Nigerian Universities.

   Through a process of engagements, especially with consultants and subject experts, the NUC had come up with 70 per cent of the content of the curricular across academic disciplines and public higher institutions in the country. Following the completion of these initial phases, the Commission is presently working with universities who are supposed to make up the 30 per cent balance of curriculum content. A careful reading of the anecdotal evidence gleaned from online sources (such as WhatsApp groups of academics) and physical meetings between individual institutions Senate Curriculum Committee’s and subject teachers (lecturers) quickly makes a number of tensions and contradictions clear.

One, most of the faculty with extensive years of teaching and research experience on specific subjects have expressed displeasure about their exclusion from the inception process of arriving at the 70 per cent. Some have even made claims that the so-called subject experts contracted by the NUC neither have the competence nor experience to engage in such sensitive activity. Two, there is also quite widespread concerns about the displacement of courses or outright misalignment in few instances. Speaking of misalignment, in the CCMAS, a compulsory first year course to be taken in Departments of Sociology nationwide had the following description, SOC 104: Introduction to Psychology. That is just to cite an instance in the Social Sciences that I am a bit more familiar with. Three, and this is personal to me, there are cases of erasure or mutilation at best. For instance, I teach two courses in the third- (300L) and fourth-year(400L) on History of Economic Thought (HET).

The initial version of the CCMAS I encountered completely omitted any undergraduate courses in HET. This is a potentially problematic route to travel on as the history of any discipline offers the compass with which to navigate and continuously engage in the renegotiations of the fundamentals of the discipline. It is equally important to historicise ideas in order to take vital lessons from the past and also avoid repeating mistakes from that same past.  However, I later encountered what looked like an updated version in which there is one single course in the third year (300L) and this mutilated course covers just about 40 per cent of the usual content of the two courses I alluded to previously.

It will therefore be important that further iterations on the CCMAS must accommodate HET as well as Economic History courses without which lecturers of Economics become incapacitated with regard to guiding our students through the evolution of the ideas that lie at the core of their chosen field of study.

The second issue of concern is on infantilising nation states with neoliberal logic. Mainstream economic thinking is predicated on key notions such as market efficiency, rational choice, optimality/equilibrium among others. The underpinning logic for all these is the idea that economic agents are atomistic and rational and that their independent actions work to serve the overall good of society eventually. Implicitly, this suggests the imperative to allow room for the expression of diverse forms of human individualistic tendencies including selfishness and greed. Hence, no government should take any action which may limit the scope for displaying these tendencies. The economy is under these terms construed as self-regulating through adjustments that are made by market forces. This theoretical structure has become the canon in economics and its counterparts have found their ways into empirical work and policy making in diverse ways.

It is not unusual therefore to hear experts in economics and/or public policy make statements such as the following: “government has no business in business”; “private sector is the engine of growth”; “government should facilitate by creating enabling environment” among others. These mantras work to actively decimate the capacity of governments to make the critically needed investments in improving their own internal processes and systems. For instance, government who take these prescriptions seriously may not see the need to invest their resources in better procurement rules, socially responsive budgeting etc. Such governments hence remain infantile are therefore not able to mature into the kind of developmental states that some development scholars have eloquently demonstrated to be required and effective in poorer climes like Africa. The rapid rise and economic development of some Asian Tigers especially South Korea and Singapore has been rigorously linked with the developmental state approach imbibed and actively relied on by both countries.

Along the foregoing lines, and relatedly, there has to be a serious rethinking of the subsisting emphasis on “economic efficiency”. As a collective, our reflections should encapsulate issues around “economic resilience” and “economic justice”. The recent COVID-19 episode which the global economy experienced clearly exposed the magnitude of unpreparedness even in the most advanced economies. During the earliest months of the pandemic, images of strained health infrastructure even in countries like the USA, Italy and the UK were commonplace. Since future pandemics and other natural disasters may be inevitable, there has to be in place modes of caring for ourselves and nature beyond contemporary economic efficiency-driven solutions. The adverse effects of climate change, to highlight an instance, will be more devastating if economic systems with built-in resilience are not imagined and realised as a matter of urgency. To achieve all of the foregoing, governments need to play an active role within their economies over and above merely creating the so-called “conducive environment” which is needed to attain economic progress.

Dr Adeniyi is the Acting Head, Department of Marketing and Consumer Studies, University of Ibadan ([email protected])