Friday Discourse 231
The Ten Commandments of University Admissions
The gates of opportunity that enabled Nigerians from rural areas, like me, to attain university education are closing at an alarming rate. This is not a false alarm. It is real. The sad thing is that the Vice Chancellors may not be aware of this, for some of the universities have become so large, in both estate and management, that it is difficult for its administrators to ensure that every policy is diligently implemented. I am not offering excuses on behalf of the VCs, but I am simply saying that our bent towards selective treatment and corruption is responsible for what is turning out to be a very ugly situation.
I came to know about problems regarding university admissions recently after participating deeply in improving secondary education in Bauchi State for six years now. In the past five years, we have been producing students who are qualified for admission into any Nigerian university both by the standards of the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) and by my judgement as a lecturer for almost ten years (1983-92). However, only few of these students gained admission into universities. I did not know that things have changed so much since 1992.
What opened my eyes more was the suffering I underwent in gaining the admission of my daughter into one of the universities in 2003 despite my position as a former colleague to many lecturers there. When we finally, finally, got the admission, I asked myself this simple question: How many parents from rural Nigeria can undergo this gruesome experience to secure the admission of their wards?
The answer was obvious, and it led to the decision by the Bauchi State Government to officially pursue admissions in universities for its indigenes. I made the first round, successfully. I will get the printout of all our students from Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board's office in Abuja, and face a VC in our catchment area. "Mr. VC," I will say, looking straight into his eyes, "this is the total qualified candidates from Bauchi State who applied to your university. Now, if you intend to admit say 5,000 students this year, admitting every candidate on this list won't be out of order for we are entitled to at least so and so quota, being from your catchment area." I was glad that it worked, perfectly, in most cases.
Apart from Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, which has remained generous to Bauchi State, I must also admit the cooperation of the Vice Chancellors of University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID), Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) and Usmanu Danfodio University, Sokoto (UDUS) during my first round in 2005/06 academic session. Maiduguri admitted the whole list; the young VC encouraged us to continue with the effort. My meeting with the VC of ABU that year did not take ten minutes. Drawing my attention to a statistics he compiled on application figures of various northern states, he said, "Aliyu, we can absorb all candidates from Bauchi who have scored 160 in science, and 180 in arts. You have only 267 such applicants. Our problem is with those states with more than 2,500 qualified candidates. Is it ok?" I gladly responded, saying, "Yes sir, yes sir." UDUS received us in the same manner that year.
The year 2005/06 came and we relaxed, as a result, that year, a nephew of mine with 245 could not be admitted into history in a nearby university, for example. So I returned this year (2006/07 academic session) and the story remained very discouraging, once more. A university that admitted more than 4,400 students in its first list had only 50 students from Bauchi. Another, also within our catchment area, admitted at total of 2,400 students on its merit list, and only 28 were from Bauchi State, not even a student with 260 UME scores who applied for medicine was admitted. The third, though not from our catchment area, did not admit more than a total of 8 students on both its first and final lists. As a result we are now left with hundreds of candidates with scores of more than 200 and above who are not admitted. Clearly, the universities did not work with statistics in both this year.
All the VCs complained that we were late in our follow up. Agreed. But I thought the statistics will speak on our behalf. In any case, ab initio, the students deserve to fill their quota. And as they did not, it is clear that there are problems, as one of the VCs admitted. Meanwhile, we continue to ponder on what to do with these students on whose face the gates of the universities were slammed? What effect will it have on their juniors who are now preparing for the UME exams?
We will, as result, suffer from what is called product accumulation in chemical kinetics or economics. If what is produced is not exhausted but allowed to accumulate, the rate of reaction in the forward direction will become slow. Secondary school students, in this case, will be discouraged from working hard. Not only the students, even those of us who are exerting effort to improve education at the primary and secondary levels in educationally less developed states will be demoralised.
The above is the story of Bauchi State, but the same applies, I believe, to other educationally disadvantaged states. A lecturer friend from Gombe State, for example, failed to gain admission for his daughter who scored 245 this year; she was not admitted into the Medicine she applied for, nor was she offered another course. He called me, desperately, thinking that I can press some buttons. I said, "Sorry, I can do nothing. The VC told me that the admissions are closed."
In the remaining part of this essay, I intend to highlight eight ways of getting out of this quagmire.
One. Fight for your right. I think it is important for state governments in educationally less developed areas to copy the Bauchi example, pursuing admissions for their indigenes. They should be the voice of the helpless fathers before the Vice Chancellors, every year. Rights are not given, they are fought for. It takes little effort. Purchase a printout of all your state indigenes from JAMB, arranged according to the universities and courses they applied for. Then make a list of those whose scores you can defend before any VC. Then approach the universities, and follow up. Simple. I will here, based on experience, implore government officials responsible for this task to please know that they are handling the future of thousands of Nigerians. They must be diligent, fair, and committed. Admissions are seasonal. Once they abandon them for something else and it is late, they will have themselves to blame.
Two. Minister, conversion pays. And this is directed at the Ministers of Education, who has shown sufficient interest in improving education. There is too much demand for admissions into these universities. This year alone, over 1.5million Nigerians applied for admissions, while there is a space for 175,000 only. Whenever demand outgrows supply, man is known to recruit all his selfish survival instincts, and a loophole is thus created for corruption and injustice. There is the need, therefore, to stem up supply, using a combination of measures to increase the absorption capacity of our universities. We may never meet all the demand, but we can improve on the present substantially.
In this line, the federal government should facilitate the idea of converting many polytechnics into universities, though I believe we must retain some of the polytechnics to run specialised courses that universities may find cumbersome to undertake. The statistics are clear in proving that Nigerians, as students and employers, attach too much sentiment to university degrees.
Three. Minister, make all animals are equal. Universities of technology, such as ATBU, should have a conventional brief, not the restricted one they are now operating. In the whole Northeast zone, for example, only UNIMAID offers medicine, and it cannot allocate more than 10 spaces for Bauchi State students. It means that, except for the few others that are admitted into ABU, it will take Bauchi state 10 years to train 100 medical doctors, most of whom will run away ultimately, as their predecessors did, to greener pastures overseas. If both ATBU and FUTY would offer medicine and other 'non-technological courses', Bauchi State will have the capacity to train 100 medical doctors in just one year.
Four. Governors, Build more universities. States on their part must increase their participation in university education. They should award more fellowships for students to study abroad, in Ghana, India, Malaysia, Greece, etc. In this way, Bauchi State can train many IT experts, engineers and medical doctors within a short time in line with its demand. States MUST also establish their universities. I wonder why states like mine are stubbornly failing to do so despite numerous advices. Gone are the days when few students qualified for university admission from such states; we have many now, over 1,500 in Bauchi State alone whom we cannot place anywhere, except, of course, in the job of political thuggery and delinquency. There are institutions ready for conversion, the resources are there, but the will is lacking. Perhaps, a word from the Minister of Education will help these unwilling states to take up the challenge.
Five. Universities, be liberal, not literal. Within the present capacity of the universities, a revision of the existing regulations will go a long way in instituting justice. Admissions need to be properly allocated to states based on their quota. When every list is compiled and before it is submitted to JAMB for approval, I will be very happy if every VC will go through the list himself and find out how many students he admitted from each state. If that was done this year, some of them would not have been surprised by the awful statistics I faced them with.
Also, there is the need for universities to adopt a liberal interpretation of JAMB or NUC guidelines. Will they continue to draft their merit list simply by drawing a line on the JAMB list of every course, as they do now, or will they come up with a merit list of every state, such that the best from every state stands a good chance of being admitted? The present emphasis on overall national scores is simplistic, unjust, and, worse of all, exacerbates examination malpractice. At one of the far-Northern universities, the first seven admissions on their merit list of medicine were from Bayelsa. Bayelsa! Yes. Bayelsa. If the students were so good, why did not they apply to University of Calabar? Often, such students hardly make it in the faculties because the results are fake. But they have blocked the chance of a student from Borno or Bauchi with a genuine UME score of 260.
The universities will often claim to have quotas for their catchment states. My brother, forget it, once your son has applied for medicine or business administration and his name has not appeared on the merit list. The second and third lists are for those who have long legs to reach the Registrar or VC. I will be very glad if the three criteria – merit, catchment and educationally disadvantage quotas – are merged together. Let's agree on a quota for each state and let merit determine the suitability of each student within his state. Period. Ezekwesili, I carry my hands beg you again. Bikoo.
Six. Be kind-hearted, universities. There is the need for admission officers to develop be kind-hearted. If an applicant with 245 from Gombe could not make it on MBBS list, please let her be given an alternative course. Imagine the hardship she went through to get those high marks from an educationally disadvantaged state like Gombe. Do not send her away, please. Do not abandon her and make her shed tears throughout the year.
I must here recount the story of an orphan girl from Adamawa State who scored 199 in UME. This year she applied to a university this year to read International Relations and was offered admission. At the department she was told she needed a credit in mathematics, which, unfortunately, was not among the nine credits that she has. The department advised her to go for law. A former VC intervened at the faculty of law on her behalf for a change of course, not a fresh admission, mind you. The dean admitted that she is qualified but said he needed an order from above. The Samaritan former VC approached the Registrar, but oga Registrar flatly refused, claiming that it is too late. What is too late when students have not even been screened? If the girl were the kind that will approach oga with a seductive appearance, wallahi, the story would have been different. Oga would salivate immediately and, in the hope of satiating his libido, grant her request and that of all her brothers, sisters and friends. He would have even worked out her accommodation or maintained her in his guest house. We have seen it many times. Haba. The poor girl returned to Yola, dejected. People like oga Registrar, must not, after leaving office, come to Arewa House to lecture us on the deplorable state of education in the North because he is among the culprits. Abi?
Seven. JAMB, Do not overburden candidates. I think JAMB should abandon its syllabus and examine students only on the certificate syllabus of WAEC and NECO. Doing the contrary, as it does presently, is injustice because, by our national education policy, our secondary school students are required to master only the certificate curriculum. The total scores of JAMB is 400, yet, even last year that appeared to be a bonanza of a sort, the average of the best 1000 students, and despite all the 'ECOMOG', is around 240. It should not be so. If a student has mastered his Ababio in Chemistry, Anyakoha in Physics, Modern Biology, and has a reasonably good command of oral and written English, he should score something around 350 and 380. Faced with this intrigue, I decided to study past JAMB UME exam questions. Suddenly, I was stunned to find out that they included many topics of advanced level, topics like taxonomy in biology. I believe the over-expectation of JAMB has contributed in breeding malpractice at its examination centres.
Eight. Go for the best. There is the need to urgently ban all remedial programs. Though they fetch the universities funds, they compound admission problems because they block the chance of students who do not need to remedy anything. Thus, a weaker student is favoured because the university is earlier committed to his admission; and a strong one abandoned. Gone are the days that states like Bauchi and Taraba cannot fill their quota. Those requiring remedies should do that at home, in schools designed for that. Thereafter, they should join others in writing the UME and get admitted regularly.
Nine. Don’t abuse privilege. There is the need for some elite to reduce the way they abuse privileges. I presented to one of the VCs a list of over 400 students who were given multiple admissions. A renowned person from my state living in Kaduna secured admission for his son in three different departments, on the same list, blocking the chances of two other students from Bauchi State. This abuse of privilege is unwarranted. This can easily be avoided if the VCs will call for the final electronic copy of the admission list, sort them out by names, then identify and strike out the multiple admissions.
Ten. Tame your ambition. An advice to students and their parents. They must apply for courses and universities in which they stand the best chance of securing admissions. Over eighty percent of science students, for example, apply for medicine; none applies for less competitive course even if he knows he is below average. He should, like I were 27 years ago, content himself with reading single honours courses which are themselves excellent and productive, though less competitive. The most important thing for the chap is to be admitted into the university such that he will have the privilege of the university passing through him. Parents must shoulder this responsibility.
In the same vein, applicants must also try to restrict themselves to their catchment areas. As I was concluding this article, one of them knocked at my door to check whether he was admitted for Islamic Studies at UDUS in far away Sokoto. I checked the few names and told him no. Looking at his face, I added salt to injury, saying, "How many times have we told you not to apply to universities outside your catchment area? We can't raise our voice there on your behalf. I am sorry. I can't help you." He left disappointed. Had he applied to UNIMAID, his name would have been on the merit list.
By any measure, this article has been long, admittedly. About 3,000 words! But it had to be so because I did not want to offend my university colleagues in any way, unlike my encounter with Saddam. Diplomacy takes a lot of space and time. They have stayed on a cause from which I fled thirteen years ago; so I have no locus whatsoever to accuse them of any wrong. My intention, as it is whenever I pick my pen, was only to raise the voice of justice and common sense (which, sad to note, is no longer common). But if the different parties I called upon in this article will heed to the ten commandments of admission I cited above, the frustration that we suffer from in our effort to improve education at lower levels will be lightened. The VCs' headache will also be lighter. As for the students, I will say, "Aluta continua!"
Showing posts with label Tertiary education in Nigeria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tertiary education in Nigeria. Show all posts
Friday, May 21, 2010
The Need for State Universities in the North
The Need for State Universities in the North
aliyutilde@yahoo.com
At least seven states in the North have gone ahead to establish their universities: Benue , Kano , Nassarawa, Adamawa, Taraba, Gombe, and now Kaduna . There may be others to follow, and it will be a matter of time, political expedience, or both, before others follow suit.
The reaction from the public and especially from the academia has been negative. People think, and rightly in their own way, that our governors should start by laying emphasis on improving the standard of primary and secondary schools. It is such schools that will serve the universities with competent intakes. Secondly, the tertiary institutions in these states – polytechnics and colleges of education – are neglected. Hardly are funds allocated to them to maintain their existing structures or to meet the accreditation demands for the courses they offer. Thirdly, these states are not filling their quota presently in the federal tertiary institutions to which they serve as ‘catchment’ areas. Finally, there may not be enough funds for each state to maintain a university when some of them cannot even pay salaries.
I have not been part of the decision of any state government to establish a university, so I cannot hold brief for them. However, the above reasons, though widely accepted as true at first instance, would appear shallow at a critical look. And if a reason may be valid in the case of some states, it may not be valid for others.
I agree with the general perception that our primary and secondary schools are weak and that for purposes of mass literacy they ought to attract government’s attention most. More importantly, I also agree that even in the past five years, state governments have shown bizarre disregard and lack of initiative to improve the standard of our public schools. But the negative impact of this weakness is greater on our general literacy level than on university admissions, for universities by their nature cannot be the final destiny of every primary school child, though they are always his ultimate hope. The weak performance of our graduates could be partially attributed to this factor and to others as well, like the severe poverty level of campus life.
For admission into universities and going by the pyramidal structure of education, only a fraction of secondary school leavers are expected in any society to be absorbed into tertiary institutions, and fewer still into universities. In evaluating the way universities achieve this admission targets, we often forget the contributions of Federal Government Colleges that are located nationwide – two in every state, of private schools that are increasingly becoming commonplace, and of community schools including those run by religious organizations. Something interesting here is the fast rate at which private and community schools are increasing in number.
The products of these schools combined with the few that could miraculously make it from our public schools have yearly met the admission demand of our universities. Lecture theatres and classrooms in our universities today overflow with students, unlike in the 1970s. What is astonishing is how the contributions of these schools have, despite the collapse of standard of education in state schools, outrun the capacity of the universities to admit. Entry points and cut-off marks have to be raised in many cases to curtail the number of eligible applicants.
To this extent, therefore, the poor standard of our primary and secondary schools cannot be used as a reason to suppress the ambition of establishing state universities in the North. Secondly, the argument that there will be no enough competent students to admit in such universities has been knocked down by the evident scramble for admissions into the existing federal universities. There will be further explosion in demand once we succeed in our on-going effort to partially secularise the curriculum of most Islamiyya schools in the North.
In any case, we can look back and see how our present universities started. Ahmadu Bello University is a good example. When the decision to establish the university was taken by the Premier of Northern Nigeria, his colleague and principal opponent from the South, Chief Awolowo, sarcastically asked: “Is Sardauna going to admit donkeys into the university?” Sardauna went ahead and started the university with about 400 students in 1962, majority of whom came from former Kwara and Benue Provinces . That was a humble beginning. Today, after forty years, the university can boast of over 30,000 students, among them are many southerners, including the sons of Obasanjo – not donkeys! There is nothing that stops our state universities taking the same long way.
For fear of being misunderstood, I will repeat my stand that improving the standard of primary and secondary education should remain the highest priority of any reasonable state government. However, a priority ranked as highest does not deny the importance of other priorities, especially, as in education, where the highest priority does not stand alone but require the support of lesser priorities. How can we, for example, improve the standard of primary education without providing enough competent graduate teachers at secondary schools, teachers’ colleges and colleges of education? How do we, in turn, get enough of these graduate teachers without establishing enough universities to breed them?
The two should run concurrently. Right now we cannot find enough graduate teachers in Physics, Chemistry, English, Mathematics, History and many other subjects. We are still lagging in professional subjects: Medicine, Law, Architecture, etc. Last year, while every state in the South sent hundreds of candidates to the law school, Plateau sent about 80, Bauchi 15, and, hold on, I was told, Kebbi sent only 2, though I cannot believe it!
This strongly indicates that there is a compelling need for additional universities. The present federal universities are not meeting our manpower demands. And their structure is not helping matters. Take the Northeast zone for example. Of the three universities located here, only University of Maiduguri has a medical school. It annually admits 100 students, which is enough for a university. Anything more will be disastrous. The 100 is shared annually among the six states in the region this way: Borno 30, Adamawa 20, Yobe 15, Bauchi 10, Gombe 10, Taraba 10, other states 5, or something close this ratio. This means that Gombe, Taraba and Bauchi states, even if they would be lucky to be given their quota annually, each would take ten years before it can train 100 medical doctors. This is not because there are no qualified candidates from Bauchi, for example. There are plenty. But they cannot be admitted in Bayero University because they are not from its catchment area; they cannot be admitted in University of Jos because of religion; other universities in the zone offer only technology courses, and, impliedly, medicine, by the thought of our higher education administrators, is not a technique! For how long should we continue to rely on the federal government, only to perpetuate this backwardness? How many doctors graduate from Lagos State University annually, if I may ask?
More alarming is the class segregation that is gradually nurtured by federal monopoly over university education. Admission into professional courses has now become the preserve for the children of the rich and the ruling elite. First of all, the child of a peasant cannot leave his village and go to Jos, Maiduguri or Sokoto and spend nearly a month or two lobbying for admission. Two, when he is able to do so, he cannot not afford the N30,000.00 that some admission officers will demand. If monetary demand is not there to block his path, there will be endless obstacles to block him or a technicality to disqualify him. I cannot see, for example, why an applicant with even 2 points from two subjects in IJMB cannot be given admission into any single honours course, or why another with 6 points will be denied admission into a professional course. Why should a remedial student with a GPA of 4.6 and a UME/JAMB score of 238 and 8 credits in both WAEC and NECO from an educationally backward state like Bauchi be denied admission into a college of medicine? Why the stringent requirement on English language at University of Jos, for example, for science students today when most of us were admitted in the 1970s into these universities without it, but were given the chance to make it before graduating.
Back in the seventies many of the present professors were admitted on similar weak points without any headache whatsoever. Now many of such beneficiaries are ready to place mountains of obstacles before the students of today. In contrast, a child from a well to do family, with very much lesser grades, can receive his admission letter at home! When in school, few of his type will pay attention to their studies; and where they do and graduate, their ambition is to leave the country for a better life overseas. The poor, their conscience tells them, can go to hell with his uncountable problems.
This is not to mention the directives of JAMB for the universities in the North to admit plenty of students from the South. Candidates from Lagos or Abia are readily given admissions into both single honours and professional courses in far away places like Sokoto and Maiduguri . Reasons like this persuade us to reconsider our objections to creation of state universities in the North.
After addressing the issue of demand and intakes, it is necessary to look at the issue of finances. Existing state owned schools – polytechnics and colleges of education – are grossly under-funded. Agreed. But this becomes a point against establishing new universities only if their poor financial condition has arisen from an incapacity and not from negligence. If it is born out of negligence, as it truly is, then that does not deny the establishment of a state university. The existence of bad roads in a state, for example, does not prohibit the construction of a new one where necessary. Here, the federal government is equally guilty; it has been a hardened criminal for a long time. As far back as 1987, while I was a lecturer, I knew that my department used to receive a petty cash of N250.00 only per quarter! How many laboratories in federal universities are equipped today? How many of our lecturers attend conferences? And how many researches in the universities are funded by government?
The truth of the matter is that northern states have enough funds to cater for education at all levels. The problem of poor standard in our primary schools has more to do with poor performance of teachers and administrators than with funds. How would teachers teach when they are not compelled by inspections, reward or punishment? How could there be good standard when the challenges of promotion and common entrance examination are removed as children are told answers to objective questions in examination halls? So, reinventing education in our public schools is not money hindered; it requires governments taking harsh measures, which all the present political administrations will bluntly tell you that they are not ready for the bad blood it will generate.
Going by their allocations, northern state governments have the funds to establish universities. Right now each of them gets more than what Sardauna was spending annually in the sixties. In 1963, a year after ABU was founded, the budget of the entire Northern Region was a pound per capita, £29million pounds! I appeal to Obasanjo to sack any governor who failed to pay his workers their salaries and declare a state of emergency in the state. Ya yi!
Likewise, let us stop thinking big when we are starting a university. States today have inherited many structures from previous administrations. This will reduce the size of the take-off capital. After all, all universities started by taking over the sites of some existing colleges. Ahmadu Bello University started from the humble structures of a school of science and technology; so did Maiduguri and Bauchi.
Evidently, today each state governor stands at a better position than where the Sardauna stood in 1962. While the Sardauna had less than 30 secondary schools in the North then, today, Bauchi State alone has over 82 secondary schools and several private, community and unity schools. The difference here, we must hasten to emphasize, is that while the Sardauna was working hard to improve on his weak position, the ears of our governors have been notoriously impervious to advice on how standard of education could be improved and their hands have been very stingy in funding.
Right now, education is among their least priorities. Yet, if any of them is determined to set up a university today, from the above analysis, there is not any strong reason to discourage him. The only advice we will give them is that they should de-emphasize physical development and, instead, work hard to fund human development projects like the universities as much as possible. This must be done concurrently with taking all the practical measures necessary to improve the standard of our primary and secondary schools, no matter how unpopular they would be. Finally, there must also be legislation limiting admissions only to state indigenes or exceptions approved by the state governments. Otherwise, the universities, like the federal owned, will only be filled, as usual, by candidates from other states carrying fake results.
In conclusion, establishing state universities in the North will be a right step towards meeting our manpower demand; it will reduce our dependence on the federal government in meeting that demand and it can even serve as the sink that may trigger the improvement of state primary and secondary schools. Funding will not be a problem once the governors are determined to allocate to the universities a deserving share of their monthly revenue. Likewise, I have no doubt that each state can produce at least about 400 students to start with, the way Sardauna started the now mighty ABU. This way and God willing, each state in the North will, after forty years, have a university as big as my alma mater.
aliyutilde@yahoo.com
At least seven states in the North have gone ahead to establish their universities: Benue , Kano , Nassarawa, Adamawa, Taraba, Gombe, and now Kaduna . There may be others to follow, and it will be a matter of time, political expedience, or both, before others follow suit.
The reaction from the public and especially from the academia has been negative. People think, and rightly in their own way, that our governors should start by laying emphasis on improving the standard of primary and secondary schools. It is such schools that will serve the universities with competent intakes. Secondly, the tertiary institutions in these states – polytechnics and colleges of education – are neglected. Hardly are funds allocated to them to maintain their existing structures or to meet the accreditation demands for the courses they offer. Thirdly, these states are not filling their quota presently in the federal tertiary institutions to which they serve as ‘catchment’ areas. Finally, there may not be enough funds for each state to maintain a university when some of them cannot even pay salaries.
I have not been part of the decision of any state government to establish a university, so I cannot hold brief for them. However, the above reasons, though widely accepted as true at first instance, would appear shallow at a critical look. And if a reason may be valid in the case of some states, it may not be valid for others.
I agree with the general perception that our primary and secondary schools are weak and that for purposes of mass literacy they ought to attract government’s attention most. More importantly, I also agree that even in the past five years, state governments have shown bizarre disregard and lack of initiative to improve the standard of our public schools. But the negative impact of this weakness is greater on our general literacy level than on university admissions, for universities by their nature cannot be the final destiny of every primary school child, though they are always his ultimate hope. The weak performance of our graduates could be partially attributed to this factor and to others as well, like the severe poverty level of campus life.
For admission into universities and going by the pyramidal structure of education, only a fraction of secondary school leavers are expected in any society to be absorbed into tertiary institutions, and fewer still into universities. In evaluating the way universities achieve this admission targets, we often forget the contributions of Federal Government Colleges that are located nationwide – two in every state, of private schools that are increasingly becoming commonplace, and of community schools including those run by religious organizations. Something interesting here is the fast rate at which private and community schools are increasing in number.
The products of these schools combined with the few that could miraculously make it from our public schools have yearly met the admission demand of our universities. Lecture theatres and classrooms in our universities today overflow with students, unlike in the 1970s. What is astonishing is how the contributions of these schools have, despite the collapse of standard of education in state schools, outrun the capacity of the universities to admit. Entry points and cut-off marks have to be raised in many cases to curtail the number of eligible applicants.
To this extent, therefore, the poor standard of our primary and secondary schools cannot be used as a reason to suppress the ambition of establishing state universities in the North. Secondly, the argument that there will be no enough competent students to admit in such universities has been knocked down by the evident scramble for admissions into the existing federal universities. There will be further explosion in demand once we succeed in our on-going effort to partially secularise the curriculum of most Islamiyya schools in the North.
In any case, we can look back and see how our present universities started. Ahmadu Bello University is a good example. When the decision to establish the university was taken by the Premier of Northern Nigeria, his colleague and principal opponent from the South, Chief Awolowo, sarcastically asked: “Is Sardauna going to admit donkeys into the university?” Sardauna went ahead and started the university with about 400 students in 1962, majority of whom came from former Kwara and Benue Provinces . That was a humble beginning. Today, after forty years, the university can boast of over 30,000 students, among them are many southerners, including the sons of Obasanjo – not donkeys! There is nothing that stops our state universities taking the same long way.
For fear of being misunderstood, I will repeat my stand that improving the standard of primary and secondary education should remain the highest priority of any reasonable state government. However, a priority ranked as highest does not deny the importance of other priorities, especially, as in education, where the highest priority does not stand alone but require the support of lesser priorities. How can we, for example, improve the standard of primary education without providing enough competent graduate teachers at secondary schools, teachers’ colleges and colleges of education? How do we, in turn, get enough of these graduate teachers without establishing enough universities to breed them?
The two should run concurrently. Right now we cannot find enough graduate teachers in Physics, Chemistry, English, Mathematics, History and many other subjects. We are still lagging in professional subjects: Medicine, Law, Architecture, etc. Last year, while every state in the South sent hundreds of candidates to the law school, Plateau sent about 80, Bauchi 15, and, hold on, I was told, Kebbi sent only 2, though I cannot believe it!
This strongly indicates that there is a compelling need for additional universities. The present federal universities are not meeting our manpower demands. And their structure is not helping matters. Take the Northeast zone for example. Of the three universities located here, only University of Maiduguri has a medical school. It annually admits 100 students, which is enough for a university. Anything more will be disastrous. The 100 is shared annually among the six states in the region this way: Borno 30, Adamawa 20, Yobe 15, Bauchi 10, Gombe 10, Taraba 10, other states 5, or something close this ratio. This means that Gombe, Taraba and Bauchi states, even if they would be lucky to be given their quota annually, each would take ten years before it can train 100 medical doctors. This is not because there are no qualified candidates from Bauchi, for example. There are plenty. But they cannot be admitted in Bayero University because they are not from its catchment area; they cannot be admitted in University of Jos because of religion; other universities in the zone offer only technology courses, and, impliedly, medicine, by the thought of our higher education administrators, is not a technique! For how long should we continue to rely on the federal government, only to perpetuate this backwardness? How many doctors graduate from Lagos State University annually, if I may ask?
More alarming is the class segregation that is gradually nurtured by federal monopoly over university education. Admission into professional courses has now become the preserve for the children of the rich and the ruling elite. First of all, the child of a peasant cannot leave his village and go to Jos, Maiduguri or Sokoto and spend nearly a month or two lobbying for admission. Two, when he is able to do so, he cannot not afford the N30,000.00 that some admission officers will demand. If monetary demand is not there to block his path, there will be endless obstacles to block him or a technicality to disqualify him. I cannot see, for example, why an applicant with even 2 points from two subjects in IJMB cannot be given admission into any single honours course, or why another with 6 points will be denied admission into a professional course. Why should a remedial student with a GPA of 4.6 and a UME/JAMB score of 238 and 8 credits in both WAEC and NECO from an educationally backward state like Bauchi be denied admission into a college of medicine? Why the stringent requirement on English language at University of Jos, for example, for science students today when most of us were admitted in the 1970s into these universities without it, but were given the chance to make it before graduating.
Back in the seventies many of the present professors were admitted on similar weak points without any headache whatsoever. Now many of such beneficiaries are ready to place mountains of obstacles before the students of today. In contrast, a child from a well to do family, with very much lesser grades, can receive his admission letter at home! When in school, few of his type will pay attention to their studies; and where they do and graduate, their ambition is to leave the country for a better life overseas. The poor, their conscience tells them, can go to hell with his uncountable problems.
This is not to mention the directives of JAMB for the universities in the North to admit plenty of students from the South. Candidates from Lagos or Abia are readily given admissions into both single honours and professional courses in far away places like Sokoto and Maiduguri . Reasons like this persuade us to reconsider our objections to creation of state universities in the North.
After addressing the issue of demand and intakes, it is necessary to look at the issue of finances. Existing state owned schools – polytechnics and colleges of education – are grossly under-funded. Agreed. But this becomes a point against establishing new universities only if their poor financial condition has arisen from an incapacity and not from negligence. If it is born out of negligence, as it truly is, then that does not deny the establishment of a state university. The existence of bad roads in a state, for example, does not prohibit the construction of a new one where necessary. Here, the federal government is equally guilty; it has been a hardened criminal for a long time. As far back as 1987, while I was a lecturer, I knew that my department used to receive a petty cash of N250.00 only per quarter! How many laboratories in federal universities are equipped today? How many of our lecturers attend conferences? And how many researches in the universities are funded by government?
The truth of the matter is that northern states have enough funds to cater for education at all levels. The problem of poor standard in our primary schools has more to do with poor performance of teachers and administrators than with funds. How would teachers teach when they are not compelled by inspections, reward or punishment? How could there be good standard when the challenges of promotion and common entrance examination are removed as children are told answers to objective questions in examination halls? So, reinventing education in our public schools is not money hindered; it requires governments taking harsh measures, which all the present political administrations will bluntly tell you that they are not ready for the bad blood it will generate.
Going by their allocations, northern state governments have the funds to establish universities. Right now each of them gets more than what Sardauna was spending annually in the sixties. In 1963, a year after ABU was founded, the budget of the entire Northern Region was a pound per capita, £29million pounds! I appeal to Obasanjo to sack any governor who failed to pay his workers their salaries and declare a state of emergency in the state. Ya yi!
Likewise, let us stop thinking big when we are starting a university. States today have inherited many structures from previous administrations. This will reduce the size of the take-off capital. After all, all universities started by taking over the sites of some existing colleges. Ahmadu Bello University started from the humble structures of a school of science and technology; so did Maiduguri and Bauchi.
Evidently, today each state governor stands at a better position than where the Sardauna stood in 1962. While the Sardauna had less than 30 secondary schools in the North then, today, Bauchi State alone has over 82 secondary schools and several private, community and unity schools. The difference here, we must hasten to emphasize, is that while the Sardauna was working hard to improve on his weak position, the ears of our governors have been notoriously impervious to advice on how standard of education could be improved and their hands have been very stingy in funding.
Right now, education is among their least priorities. Yet, if any of them is determined to set up a university today, from the above analysis, there is not any strong reason to discourage him. The only advice we will give them is that they should de-emphasize physical development and, instead, work hard to fund human development projects like the universities as much as possible. This must be done concurrently with taking all the practical measures necessary to improve the standard of our primary and secondary schools, no matter how unpopular they would be. Finally, there must also be legislation limiting admissions only to state indigenes or exceptions approved by the state governments. Otherwise, the universities, like the federal owned, will only be filled, as usual, by candidates from other states carrying fake results.
In conclusion, establishing state universities in the North will be a right step towards meeting our manpower demand; it will reduce our dependence on the federal government in meeting that demand and it can even serve as the sink that may trigger the improvement of state primary and secondary schools. Funding will not be a problem once the governors are determined to allocate to the universities a deserving share of their monthly revenue. Likewise, I have no doubt that each state can produce at least about 400 students to start with, the way Sardauna started the now mighty ABU. This way and God willing, each state in the North will, after forty years, have a university as big as my alma mater.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Friday Discourse 116: Scholarship: N70,000.00 Minimum
Friday Discourse (116)
By Dr. Aliyu Tilde
Scholarship: N70,000.00 Minimum
Today, our discussion is on scholarship awards in northern states. Before looking at the figures, it is important to recall the status of such awards in the past. If we are able to cast a contrast between the past and the present, then our appeal for N70,000.00 minimum will be better understood because, as al-Motanabbi said, “things become clearer when contrasted with their opposites.”
Origin
All students of northern states, except those from the former Benue and Kwara States, enjoyed full sponsorship of their education up to the mid-1980s. By full we mean they were given adequate funds by their state governments to meet all the necessities of higher learning, including tuition fees, feeding, books, transport and project allowances. Those sponsored to undertake studies overseas enjoyed additional allowances commensurate with the condition of living in their host countries.
Also, in-service students, whether on regular or ‘sandwich’ courses, enjoyed their full salaries in addition to the allowances mentioned earlier. Postgraduate students, who might not have even joined the civil service, like architecture students, also enjoyed GL 8 salaries as well as other incentives, like car loan.
We excluded Benue and Kwara states because by 1980 their ‘bursary’ were not complete awards like the scholarships of the remaining northern states. Nevertheless, the ‘bursary’ was reasonable enough to foot a substantial portion of the scholarship bill of their students on campus then.
Thus, the poverty of a family did not stop a northern child from acquiring higher education once he was successful at the ordinary or higher certificate levels. We can confidently assert that almost all our past and present leaders benefited from this generosity of government during the former Northern region or after the creation of states. This was the system responsible for meeting the manpower demand of the North between 1950s and mid 1980s. It also assisted states in the region to fill, as much as possible, their quota in federal appointments.
Figures
Coming to figures, we may not need to recall what was paid in the 1950s or 60s using the West African pound which is unknown to most of us. The figures paid in the seventies would provide a good mean between the 1960s and the mid-1980s. For the purpose of easy computation, we will put the average scholarship awarded to northern students by 1979 at N1,000.00. This may sound ridiculous today; but then, when the dollar was simply 60k, it was a big sum: $1,666.67 or N250,000.00 today!
Fat textbooks of over 500 pages, like Biology’s Vines and Rees were only N6.00; Physic’s Nelkon and Parker, N5.00; Chemistry’s Seinko and Plaine, N4.50; etc. Buying the books was not necessary because there were many stocked in the library in addition to comprehensive lecture notes of teachers. A meal was 50k, i.e. N405.00 for three meals a day (‘1-1-1’) for the whole year. Accommodation, though available and furnished, was the most expensive – N90.00. Tuition was free. The student therefore had enough money to pursue his studies unhindered by financial constraints. He was only expected to cope with the rigour of studies.
Now the reader is in a better position to understand the frivolity of the scholarship awards that present governments in the North give to their students. Let us study the data in the box presented on this page.
The amounts ranged from the least N1,200 given to Bauchi state arts students to N36,000.00 given those of Zamfara (as monthly instalments of N3,000.00 each). Putting aside the bursary award from Zamfara which appears to be a special case, the average scholarship award from the other fourteen northern states sampled was N6,870.00 and N5,170.00 for science and art students respectively. This is only 2.75% and 2.07% of the amount enjoyed by students of the same states twenty years ago in 1979.
This shows that over the past 20 years, northern states have withdrawn their subsidy on higher education by an average of 97%. But before examining the reasons why governments took this measure, let us first look at the options and implications of their action on the students and the society at large.
Options
Essentially, the states have implicitly told the students to make a choice between three options. One, they should abandon higher education, no matter their success at lower levels. Two, they should look for an alternative source of funding. Three, they should do the impossible of depending on these insufficient amounts.
The option of abandoning higher education is not something that a region already lagging behind in education should buy. Higher education is important in manpower development at both state and local government levels. The North is crying marginalization while at the same time, by figures like these, discouraging its indigenes from possessing the basic qualification required for employment. As President Obasanjo once observed, the future political crisis that our backwardness in education portends to the nation will be enormous. Without higher education how do we get the qualified personnel to man our hospitals, construct our roads, build our houses, teach our children or manage our economy? More importantly, can we make do with permanent secretaries, commissioners and governors who are illiterates? So higher education cannot be abandoned. This option, therefore, is not tenable.
The option of alternative funding, as found in the south, is meaningful only in the context of self-sponsorship. It means that only children from materially advantaged families could attain higher education. Such children include the sons of businessmen, generals, top civil servants, etc. There is nothing wrong with such children becoming educated because they will return to serve their community and advance its cause. But there is every evil in allowing education to be solely a function of wealth. No modern society with egalitarian principles will support the condemnation of the greatest portion to its population to class exploitation, illiteracy, poverty, disease, and so on. Education is the greatest vehicle of social mobility and, as much as possible, it must be made accessible to everyone. With over 70% of northern families living under poverty, the option of self-sponsorship is simply not feasible.
The third option is for a student with the qualification and zeal to pursue higher education but who is not from a wealthy background to accept the insignificant offers of his state government and hope to struggle hard enough to manage life on campus. My findings show that such a student is only building a castle in the air. The meagre amounts quoted above have not reach the students of many states for years now. The money could be approved and released but it is often stolen by members and staff of the scholarship boards. Students from Bauchi and Gombe states, for example, have not received a dime from their N1,200.00 and N3,500.00 for the third consecutive session now! Sometimes only half of the amount is paid. For example, students of Taraba State last year had their award raised to N7,000.00 per annum. What the staff of the board did was to divide the vouchers into two (of N3,500.00 each) and ask the students to sign both. They gave them N3,500.00 and promised to return after submitting the other voucher to government for claim. They never returned. What happened to these monies in both cases is obvious. It was 419, until they are paid.
The effects of insufficient funding on the student are many. Such students often lead a malnourished life of only one meal a day on campus. Sometimes, they will only manage with groundnuts or soaked garri. As libraries are poorly stocked and such students cannot afford purchasing any textbook, they depend on borrowing handouts from their classmates in addition to the few lines of lecture notes they could scribble whenever they are opportune to attend a class. The result is delayed graduation of half-baked students with extremely weak grades. Because most of their time was spent on the struggle to survive, not to study, many have dropped out voluntarily or were withdrawn as a result of poor performance.
Reasons
I doubt if this is what any of our governors would like to see. But what are their possible excuses?
The first excuse could be that their revenue now is not as good as in 1979 to warrant paying students N250,000.00 annually. I would argue that though the naira has lost its value, the present allocations, in dollar value, remains the same as in 1979. Then, the states were getting an average of N9million which is roughly the same with what they obtain today if you consider that most of the states have been further divided into two or three. Sokoto was divided into three states while Kaduna, Kano, Adamawa, Bauchi and Borno were each divided into two. Furthermore, if we realize that the federal government now funds education, ecology and a number of other sectors, we can easily make a case that there is less pressure on the states now than twenty years ago. The excuse of under-funding is therefore untenable.
The next excuse to debunk is the issue of population. We agree that our population has doubled between 1963 and today; so also enrolment and number of our schools. However, these do not signify, at least in the North that has been performing very poorly in national GCE examinations, increase in candidates eligible for higher education. This can easily be proven from the records of scholarship boards in the North. The peak was in the early eighties. In fact, bad performance of our students in GCE is the reason for, not against, restoration of full sponsorship of higher learning to the status it was twenty years ago.
The question is: what then is happening to the resources at the hands of these governments? It will not be fair to hold our present administrations as responsible for this situation. It is a something they inherited. We need to go back and find reasons lying in the negligence of military regimes that ruled this country between 1986 and 1999. They did not match the devaluation of the naira with a commensurate increase in the value of the awards and wages. Neither was it absolutely the fault of the then military governors. The fault lied in the corrupt centre that hoarded federal as well as state allocations. States were then given funds that could barely pay salaries. This led to the entire collapse of their infrastructure and essential services. Wages also became meaningless. Corruption heightened, and as we saw desperate governors carting away with state owned heavy equipment and truckloads of furniture and cattle to their villages!
Workers, through strikes, gradually fought for increase in their wages, especially from the early 1990s. But for students the situation remained the same to date. What fight could they put? They could only resort to persuasion, a language that does not appeal to governments in this country.
Present regimes can legitimately be blamed if after three years in office they failed to do anything or enough to alleviate the suffering of our students in institutions of higher learning. Some of the states have responded, though not substantially. Thus, while some have doubled the amounts to the figures we saw in the table, some are yet to add a kobo over what they inherited from their military predecessors.
An accusation that we cannot defend the present administrations in northern Nigeria against is that of misplacement of priorities. Their predecessors in the 1970s and early 1980s placed education as their first priority. On the contrary, looking at budgets of many states today, we find rural development, transport and even tourism given shares each in multiples of that of education. (Most of peanuts spent on education goes to rehabilitation of schools that serves other purposes than learning.) The money spent on sponsoring pilgrims alone from every northern state is many times more than what it spends on scholarships! This is wrong. We have spoken against this many times before, but to no avail. How can we justify the ugly situation?
Minimum
Justice demands a quick redress. If we do not accord education the highest priority and sufficiently sponsor our students on higher education, we should rest assured that we are sowing the seeds of discord in our society. We already have enough trouble right now to contend with presently. We have benefited from the wisdom of our predecessors who made sacrifices to enable us get educated. Humanity demands that as leaders today we should rekindle the torch of that wisdom after military dictatorships have put it off. It is only then that the present students, who will come to occupy our seats in the next twenty years, whether we like it or not, would have mercy over the children we will leave behind. Otherwise, they have every reason to dismiss them, saying: “Look, your father was occupying this seat while I was starving on campus before I could pass out of the university. I was given N1,200.00 per annum. So get out.” Let us save our progenies from that painful consequence by acting appropriately NOW. The money we are busy piling will not be of any use to them.
Any state in the North which is ready to sponsor higher education must think of beginning with nothing below N70,000.00 annually for any student undertaking a degree or higher national diploma. This amount is not enough on its own but it will definitely be ameliorating. Here, we salute the foresight of Yeriman Bakura who pays his students a monthly bursary of N3,000.00. But if he can sacrifice the sponsorship of pilgrims he can still raise it to N100,000.00 per student annually. He can do it; in fact he should do it because of Shariah.
The matter is personally disturbing to me because my state, Bauchi, pays the least amount N1,200.00! But we are blessed with a generous governor who does not deserve to be second to any. I believe, on hearing about it, he will pick up the challenge immediately. In addition, we call on him to immediately rid the scholarship board of some wolves that have been preying on students’ allowances. They are more suitable living among other wolves in the jungle of Yankari.
Kano is the richest among northern states and its students had the highest scholarship awards in the early eighties under the governorship of Abubakar Rimi. Now, Rabi’u Kwankwaso, a PhD, will certainly prove his grasp of the importance of education and lead other states by following the precedence of Rimi and improving on it.
From Sokoto and Kebbi states, the scholastic legacy of Shehu Danfodio and Shehu Abdullahi – the most prolific writer of the Negro race in the 19th century – denies them the sadistic tradition of starving their students. If the Shehu were to return to Sokoto today, and Abdullahi to Gwandu, I have no doubt that they will approve the restoration of N250,000.00 for students of their states.
Borno and Yobe states have a history of warfare, generosity, scholarship and leadership that they inherited from Dhi Yadain, Dunama, Alooma and el-Kanemi – people that worked hard to build civilizations in the Chad Basin at Kukawa, Ngazargamu and Dikwa. Warfare and Civilizations are today built on education. Encouraging ignorance by paying their students N3,500.00 annually is therefore the least expected of leaders presently occupying the seats of such great ancestors. We hope they will hearken to our call and redress the injustice.
In Kaduna state, the governor has tried by offering N15,000.00 to his science students. But he is still far behind Usman Jibrin and Balarabe Musa in allocating the greatest share of his budget to education and scholarships in particular.
Katsina embraced western education earlier and better than most parts of the North. It recorded the highest number of influential civil servants. Their governor, who is reported to be honest, will undoubtedly lend his ear to our call and meet the minimum his students would need in institutions of higher learning so as to maintain that record in the future.
The Nubian (Nupe) governor of Niger State should remember that their ancestors built the famous pyramids in Egypt. Why should he fail today to build a pyramid of degrees and diplomas in Bida, tall enough to be seen by sailors on the Atlantic?
And so it is with every other state in the North. Each of them has something of pride or necessity that will strongly persuade it to wake up and realize that the future in Nigeria belongs to the educated. Why should they, therefore, condemn their indigenes to servitude by their inaction?
That is the call we are making on behalf of our present and future students in institutions of higher learning. But ours is to advise; the action is left to the administrators. May God bless those of them who are humble enough to listen to the advice and act promptly. Amen.
By Dr. Aliyu Tilde
Scholarship: N70,000.00 Minimum
Today, our discussion is on scholarship awards in northern states. Before looking at the figures, it is important to recall the status of such awards in the past. If we are able to cast a contrast between the past and the present, then our appeal for N70,000.00 minimum will be better understood because, as al-Motanabbi said, “things become clearer when contrasted with their opposites.”
Origin
All students of northern states, except those from the former Benue and Kwara States, enjoyed full sponsorship of their education up to the mid-1980s. By full we mean they were given adequate funds by their state governments to meet all the necessities of higher learning, including tuition fees, feeding, books, transport and project allowances. Those sponsored to undertake studies overseas enjoyed additional allowances commensurate with the condition of living in their host countries.
Also, in-service students, whether on regular or ‘sandwich’ courses, enjoyed their full salaries in addition to the allowances mentioned earlier. Postgraduate students, who might not have even joined the civil service, like architecture students, also enjoyed GL 8 salaries as well as other incentives, like car loan.
We excluded Benue and Kwara states because by 1980 their ‘bursary’ were not complete awards like the scholarships of the remaining northern states. Nevertheless, the ‘bursary’ was reasonable enough to foot a substantial portion of the scholarship bill of their students on campus then.
Thus, the poverty of a family did not stop a northern child from acquiring higher education once he was successful at the ordinary or higher certificate levels. We can confidently assert that almost all our past and present leaders benefited from this generosity of government during the former Northern region or after the creation of states. This was the system responsible for meeting the manpower demand of the North between 1950s and mid 1980s. It also assisted states in the region to fill, as much as possible, their quota in federal appointments.
Figures
Coming to figures, we may not need to recall what was paid in the 1950s or 60s using the West African pound which is unknown to most of us. The figures paid in the seventies would provide a good mean between the 1960s and the mid-1980s. For the purpose of easy computation, we will put the average scholarship awarded to northern students by 1979 at N1,000.00. This may sound ridiculous today; but then, when the dollar was simply 60k, it was a big sum: $1,666.67 or N250,000.00 today!
Fat textbooks of over 500 pages, like Biology’s Vines and Rees were only N6.00; Physic’s Nelkon and Parker, N5.00; Chemistry’s Seinko and Plaine, N4.50; etc. Buying the books was not necessary because there were many stocked in the library in addition to comprehensive lecture notes of teachers. A meal was 50k, i.e. N405.00 for three meals a day (‘1-1-1’) for the whole year. Accommodation, though available and furnished, was the most expensive – N90.00. Tuition was free. The student therefore had enough money to pursue his studies unhindered by financial constraints. He was only expected to cope with the rigour of studies.
Now the reader is in a better position to understand the frivolity of the scholarship awards that present governments in the North give to their students. Let us study the data in the box presented on this page.
The amounts ranged from the least N1,200 given to Bauchi state arts students to N36,000.00 given those of Zamfara (as monthly instalments of N3,000.00 each). Putting aside the bursary award from Zamfara which appears to be a special case, the average scholarship award from the other fourteen northern states sampled was N6,870.00 and N5,170.00 for science and art students respectively. This is only 2.75% and 2.07% of the amount enjoyed by students of the same states twenty years ago in 1979.
This shows that over the past 20 years, northern states have withdrawn their subsidy on higher education by an average of 97%. But before examining the reasons why governments took this measure, let us first look at the options and implications of their action on the students and the society at large.
Options
Essentially, the states have implicitly told the students to make a choice between three options. One, they should abandon higher education, no matter their success at lower levels. Two, they should look for an alternative source of funding. Three, they should do the impossible of depending on these insufficient amounts.
The option of abandoning higher education is not something that a region already lagging behind in education should buy. Higher education is important in manpower development at both state and local government levels. The North is crying marginalization while at the same time, by figures like these, discouraging its indigenes from possessing the basic qualification required for employment. As President Obasanjo once observed, the future political crisis that our backwardness in education portends to the nation will be enormous. Without higher education how do we get the qualified personnel to man our hospitals, construct our roads, build our houses, teach our children or manage our economy? More importantly, can we make do with permanent secretaries, commissioners and governors who are illiterates? So higher education cannot be abandoned. This option, therefore, is not tenable.
The option of alternative funding, as found in the south, is meaningful only in the context of self-sponsorship. It means that only children from materially advantaged families could attain higher education. Such children include the sons of businessmen, generals, top civil servants, etc. There is nothing wrong with such children becoming educated because they will return to serve their community and advance its cause. But there is every evil in allowing education to be solely a function of wealth. No modern society with egalitarian principles will support the condemnation of the greatest portion to its population to class exploitation, illiteracy, poverty, disease, and so on. Education is the greatest vehicle of social mobility and, as much as possible, it must be made accessible to everyone. With over 70% of northern families living under poverty, the option of self-sponsorship is simply not feasible.
The third option is for a student with the qualification and zeal to pursue higher education but who is not from a wealthy background to accept the insignificant offers of his state government and hope to struggle hard enough to manage life on campus. My findings show that such a student is only building a castle in the air. The meagre amounts quoted above have not reach the students of many states for years now. The money could be approved and released but it is often stolen by members and staff of the scholarship boards. Students from Bauchi and Gombe states, for example, have not received a dime from their N1,200.00 and N3,500.00 for the third consecutive session now! Sometimes only half of the amount is paid. For example, students of Taraba State last year had their award raised to N7,000.00 per annum. What the staff of the board did was to divide the vouchers into two (of N3,500.00 each) and ask the students to sign both. They gave them N3,500.00 and promised to return after submitting the other voucher to government for claim. They never returned. What happened to these monies in both cases is obvious. It was 419, until they are paid.
The effects of insufficient funding on the student are many. Such students often lead a malnourished life of only one meal a day on campus. Sometimes, they will only manage with groundnuts or soaked garri. As libraries are poorly stocked and such students cannot afford purchasing any textbook, they depend on borrowing handouts from their classmates in addition to the few lines of lecture notes they could scribble whenever they are opportune to attend a class. The result is delayed graduation of half-baked students with extremely weak grades. Because most of their time was spent on the struggle to survive, not to study, many have dropped out voluntarily or were withdrawn as a result of poor performance.
Reasons
I doubt if this is what any of our governors would like to see. But what are their possible excuses?
The first excuse could be that their revenue now is not as good as in 1979 to warrant paying students N250,000.00 annually. I would argue that though the naira has lost its value, the present allocations, in dollar value, remains the same as in 1979. Then, the states were getting an average of N9million which is roughly the same with what they obtain today if you consider that most of the states have been further divided into two or three. Sokoto was divided into three states while Kaduna, Kano, Adamawa, Bauchi and Borno were each divided into two. Furthermore, if we realize that the federal government now funds education, ecology and a number of other sectors, we can easily make a case that there is less pressure on the states now than twenty years ago. The excuse of under-funding is therefore untenable.
The next excuse to debunk is the issue of population. We agree that our population has doubled between 1963 and today; so also enrolment and number of our schools. However, these do not signify, at least in the North that has been performing very poorly in national GCE examinations, increase in candidates eligible for higher education. This can easily be proven from the records of scholarship boards in the North. The peak was in the early eighties. In fact, bad performance of our students in GCE is the reason for, not against, restoration of full sponsorship of higher learning to the status it was twenty years ago.
The question is: what then is happening to the resources at the hands of these governments? It will not be fair to hold our present administrations as responsible for this situation. It is a something they inherited. We need to go back and find reasons lying in the negligence of military regimes that ruled this country between 1986 and 1999. They did not match the devaluation of the naira with a commensurate increase in the value of the awards and wages. Neither was it absolutely the fault of the then military governors. The fault lied in the corrupt centre that hoarded federal as well as state allocations. States were then given funds that could barely pay salaries. This led to the entire collapse of their infrastructure and essential services. Wages also became meaningless. Corruption heightened, and as we saw desperate governors carting away with state owned heavy equipment and truckloads of furniture and cattle to their villages!
Workers, through strikes, gradually fought for increase in their wages, especially from the early 1990s. But for students the situation remained the same to date. What fight could they put? They could only resort to persuasion, a language that does not appeal to governments in this country.
Present regimes can legitimately be blamed if after three years in office they failed to do anything or enough to alleviate the suffering of our students in institutions of higher learning. Some of the states have responded, though not substantially. Thus, while some have doubled the amounts to the figures we saw in the table, some are yet to add a kobo over what they inherited from their military predecessors.
An accusation that we cannot defend the present administrations in northern Nigeria against is that of misplacement of priorities. Their predecessors in the 1970s and early 1980s placed education as their first priority. On the contrary, looking at budgets of many states today, we find rural development, transport and even tourism given shares each in multiples of that of education. (Most of peanuts spent on education goes to rehabilitation of schools that serves other purposes than learning.) The money spent on sponsoring pilgrims alone from every northern state is many times more than what it spends on scholarships! This is wrong. We have spoken against this many times before, but to no avail. How can we justify the ugly situation?
Minimum
Justice demands a quick redress. If we do not accord education the highest priority and sufficiently sponsor our students on higher education, we should rest assured that we are sowing the seeds of discord in our society. We already have enough trouble right now to contend with presently. We have benefited from the wisdom of our predecessors who made sacrifices to enable us get educated. Humanity demands that as leaders today we should rekindle the torch of that wisdom after military dictatorships have put it off. It is only then that the present students, who will come to occupy our seats in the next twenty years, whether we like it or not, would have mercy over the children we will leave behind. Otherwise, they have every reason to dismiss them, saying: “Look, your father was occupying this seat while I was starving on campus before I could pass out of the university. I was given N1,200.00 per annum. So get out.” Let us save our progenies from that painful consequence by acting appropriately NOW. The money we are busy piling will not be of any use to them.
Any state in the North which is ready to sponsor higher education must think of beginning with nothing below N70,000.00 annually for any student undertaking a degree or higher national diploma. This amount is not enough on its own but it will definitely be ameliorating. Here, we salute the foresight of Yeriman Bakura who pays his students a monthly bursary of N3,000.00. But if he can sacrifice the sponsorship of pilgrims he can still raise it to N100,000.00 per student annually. He can do it; in fact he should do it because of Shariah.
The matter is personally disturbing to me because my state, Bauchi, pays the least amount N1,200.00! But we are blessed with a generous governor who does not deserve to be second to any. I believe, on hearing about it, he will pick up the challenge immediately. In addition, we call on him to immediately rid the scholarship board of some wolves that have been preying on students’ allowances. They are more suitable living among other wolves in the jungle of Yankari.
Kano is the richest among northern states and its students had the highest scholarship awards in the early eighties under the governorship of Abubakar Rimi. Now, Rabi’u Kwankwaso, a PhD, will certainly prove his grasp of the importance of education and lead other states by following the precedence of Rimi and improving on it.
From Sokoto and Kebbi states, the scholastic legacy of Shehu Danfodio and Shehu Abdullahi – the most prolific writer of the Negro race in the 19th century – denies them the sadistic tradition of starving their students. If the Shehu were to return to Sokoto today, and Abdullahi to Gwandu, I have no doubt that they will approve the restoration of N250,000.00 for students of their states.
Borno and Yobe states have a history of warfare, generosity, scholarship and leadership that they inherited from Dhi Yadain, Dunama, Alooma and el-Kanemi – people that worked hard to build civilizations in the Chad Basin at Kukawa, Ngazargamu and Dikwa. Warfare and Civilizations are today built on education. Encouraging ignorance by paying their students N3,500.00 annually is therefore the least expected of leaders presently occupying the seats of such great ancestors. We hope they will hearken to our call and redress the injustice.
In Kaduna state, the governor has tried by offering N15,000.00 to his science students. But he is still far behind Usman Jibrin and Balarabe Musa in allocating the greatest share of his budget to education and scholarships in particular.
Katsina embraced western education earlier and better than most parts of the North. It recorded the highest number of influential civil servants. Their governor, who is reported to be honest, will undoubtedly lend his ear to our call and meet the minimum his students would need in institutions of higher learning so as to maintain that record in the future.
The Nubian (Nupe) governor of Niger State should remember that their ancestors built the famous pyramids in Egypt. Why should he fail today to build a pyramid of degrees and diplomas in Bida, tall enough to be seen by sailors on the Atlantic?
And so it is with every other state in the North. Each of them has something of pride or necessity that will strongly persuade it to wake up and realize that the future in Nigeria belongs to the educated. Why should they, therefore, condemn their indigenes to servitude by their inaction?
That is the call we are making on behalf of our present and future students in institutions of higher learning. But ours is to advise; the action is left to the administrators. May God bless those of them who are humble enough to listen to the advice and act promptly. Amen.
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