The amazing working conditions of the Nigerian university lecturer.
During my PhD at the University of Leicester, myself and a colleague- a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) in the High Voltage lab experimentalist (technical staff) were discussing the 1st year students during a coffee break. He was like; the number of engineering students is getting much. I asked how many they were. He responded 120. I smiled and told him that I had taught almost 800 engineering students in a single class in my university in Nigeria before coming to Leicester. My colleague was like; 800 what? In a single class? That is crazy.
That is the “crazy” job we do in Nigerian public universities. One has to teach hundreds of students in a single class, examine them, mark thousands of assignments, continuous assessment tests, exams scripts, and still have to create time for research in order to qualify for promotion. With the coming of IPPIS, you will expect massive employment in public universities to fill the gaps. But that was not the case. Instead, there is an embargo on employment in universities, and the funds that the university council used to utilize to hire visiting and adjunct professors was considered as savings. Do you save from an inadequate workforce? So we have more number of students to teach now and examine. But guess what? The number of students you have taught and still teaching, the number of scripts you marked do not count for promotion but the output from the research that you’ve got no time and resources to do.
In academia, you are primarily hired to do research and then teach. That is the reason why research output is the major criteria for appointment and a major component for promotion. You must have heard of the statement: “publish or perish”. That is referring to the publication of your research work. Your research output is measured with the number of published journal papers, patents, and papers presented at conferences. No matter the number of years of teaching experience in the university, you can remain as Lecturer I till you retire if you do not have a PhD and the required publications. There are quite a number of lecturers like that in our universities. From the promotion criteria, it simply means that the university is meant to be a research hub that it is not in Nigeria.
To be a research hub, resources must be available to do the research and come out with useful output. The research is meant to help solve societal problems and it must be funded by someone. You are definitely not hired to do research with your salary. But who should fund research? Until recently, thanks to TETFund intervention, there was very minimal support for research in the Nigerian Universities.
One of my PhD students was working o nanofluids and was trying to prepare his samples sometime in 2016. In materials physics, we do a little chemistry on the material before the physics. So, he needed to do what the chemists call “epoxidation”, a process to modify the chemical structure of carbon-carbon double bond.
To achieve that, he needed to pass water through a reflux condenser connected to a reaction flask. Since there is no continuous water flow in the tap, he had to improvise by placing a jerrican on a stool above the reaction flask, fixed a tap to the jerrican filled with water, and connect a hose to the condenser on the reaction flask. The reflux condenser worked fine but he has to use a small bucket to be refilling the jerrican till the end of the reaction. The reaction is continuous and could last for 7 hours.
While the chemical reaction was ongoing, DISCO struck and the power supply was seized. The ongoing reaction just had to wait until electricity was restored. I left him in the lab around 6pm of that day without the electricity restored. That was the tough environment and the state of research activities in our universities (supposed large research hub) for the country. Such chemical reactions will have to be discarded and start all over when electricity is restored.
With such challenges, a few Professors were able to make significant scientific contributions that are visible on the scientific database on the web. The salary of these professors at the bar was equivalent to about 3,000 USD (1USD to N165) in 2010 and in 2022, the value of their salary has dropped to about 722 USD (1USD to N575). You can then imagine the worth of the salary of the other categories of lecturers below them.
Nigerians are blessed people. Very intelligent, talented, innovative, and hardworking. This talent is a waste if there is no enabling environment to showcase it. We’ve got a large workforce that is not utilized. While we have in our universities individuals that have got no business with academics, we have a lot of brilliant and hardworking guys in academia. All they need is just to be given the right environment to produce the desired output. We need to start believing in ourselves and our potential. An example is the UTAS developed by academics. They accepted IPPIS without integrity test because it was imported but don’t want to accept the homegrown UTAS that they have tested and performed better than IPPIS because of vested interest. You definitely don’t expect such from the same government is preaching local content. So, how do we grow?
It is obvious that the current education setup cannot provide a knowledge-based economy. As we are taking loans to build roads and bridges, why can’t we take a loan to revitalize our education system to provide the bridge for a knowledge-based economy? Don’t you think it is easier to recover the fund injected into education than the money used to build bridges? There is money to be made from a standard education system that is attractive to foreign students and foreign investors.
Meanwhile, the greatest beneficiaries of the ASUU fight are the students and their parents. But some of them are of the opinion that ASUU is irresponsible for going on strike. You can’t blame them. You can’t be happy going home after 5 weeks of lectures. They want to graduate as much as their parents want them to graduate, even if quarter-baked. If the government insists that they can’t fund education, ASUU negotiators should suspend the no-tuition talk for now and ensure that at least, an equivalent of the value of the 2010 salary of university lecturers is negotiated and implemented and we get back to class.
Many that received free education from Nigeria from BSc to PhD have argued that education should not be free and that only tuition can solve our funding problem in the university. At the moment several students have not been able to pay the slight increase in registration fee 6 weeks after the resumption. Imagine what it will be if just like Kaduna state university, tuition of 150,000 naira is introduced.
I read somewhere that FG wants to give a 1 million naira interest-free loan for education and ASUU rejected it. I also read on another platform that FG wants to give a student loan of 1 million naira per year at a 3% interest rate. You will be paid 20% of the loan for your upkeep and 80% will be given to your university as your tuition. To study sociology, that will be 4 million naira debt before graduating. How they wish to recover the loan for sustainability should be their problem. Meanwhile, jobs are for sale these days. It seems to have become an open market business during this administration. I heard it can cost like 1.5 million naira or more. Add that to the loan + interest. The purchased government job has a salary of about N70,000 per month. If you spend N50,000 on yourself and your family and service the loan with N20,000, it will take you 25 years to repay the loan.
What amazed me most is the hypocrisy of the Nigerian elites. It is so bad that we can’t hold our leaders accountable for their words and actions. The December 2020 FG/ASUU agreement and the suspension of the strike was widely reported and celebrated. I remember reporters having sleepless nights in an effort to be the first to break the news. But they didn’t bother to monitor the implementation of the agreement, report accordingly, and question the insincerity of the government on the state of education at all levels. ASUU is always at fault and should change tactics. If going on strike is madness according to a young elitist doing PhD in the UK, the destruction of education at all levels by political class should be sanity.
I want to plead with ASUU leaders and the negotiators to stop opposing the government’s intention to introduce tuition fees in public universities. Keep mute on that. Education loan is a huge burden in the US and UK that is always our reference point, especially from contemporaries that have gone there to study on a Nigerian government scholarship. ASUU should leave the tuition fight for the students. If they wish to take the loan of 1 million per session where N200,000 is given to them for upkeeps and N800,000 for the university as their tuition, take another loan to buy a job and use the rest of their active working life to work for the bank to pay the loan, that should be their problem to sort.
If the government refuses to send a visitation panel to checkmate the activities of the University authorities, that should be their headache. Let’s focus on salary renegotiation and UTAS. My salary needs to take me home and even beyond the home. The minimum acceptable limit should be the worth of lecturers’ salaries in 2010.
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©Amoka
