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Pius
Adesanmi
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In
this interview with GBENGA
ADENIJI, Professor of English, French, and African Studies at Carleton
University, Ottawa, Canada, Pius Adesanmi, speaks about the challenges facing
university education in Nigeria among other issues
What
do you think is the problem with the education system in Nigeria?
There
is a fundamental disconnect between leadership and followership in this country
in terms of what education means. For the irresponsible political elite that is
determined to sustain Nigeria as an example of how not to run a country, there
can be no greater threat than the sort of informed citizenry that qualitative
public education produces.
To rig elections or steal public funds on a
stratospheric scale that suggests mental illness, to acquire unquestioned
impunity, you do not go about investing in qualitative public education.
Useable mass ignorance and poverty are the raw materials you need to
manufacture a followership ready to defend your perversities to death on the
basis of ethnicity or religion.
If you receive high quality education, you will
no longer go and dance in gratitude whenever President Goodluck Jonathan
decides to tar a road with remnants of your money that have thankfully not been
stolen. You will demand and expect performance as routine. The need to manufacture
largely ignorant masses explains the perverse consistency with which successive
generations of political leaders have waged war on public education.
The
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation says any
country that wishes to become part of the 21st Century should be devoting 30-40
per cent of her total annual budget to education. You will weep for Nigeria if
you knew how much these guys are currently devoting to education. Then you jump
up in the middle of all that rot and start nine new federal universities,
locate one nepotistically in your own village, and begin to partially fund it
with hostel donations from your mother. For ordinary Nigerians, education means
the exact opposite of what it means for the ruling elite. For us, it is not a
threat. It is empowerment. Sadly, only the elite have the means and the
resources to impose their own meaning of education on Nigeria. Hence, they
underfund and destroy it while sending their kids abroad to acquire that which
they deny the people at home.
As
a student in UNILORIN before becoming a lecturer abroad, what were the
challenges you noticed in Nigeria’s school system which still exist today?
Where
does one begin? There were overcrowded hostels and lecture rooms, dilapidated
infrastructure, libraries with no new books and zero subscription to
world-class journals, underpaid and under-motivated lecturers, incessant aluta
(students’ protests), and police brutality. I do hope that the police have
improved upon the standards of their brutality when quelling students’
demonstrations. I recall one aluta we had in 1988, we picked up teargas
canisters that the police had used and some of them had expiry dates all the
way back to the early 1970s. I hope they no longer use expired tear gas on students
these days.
As
someone who earned a First Class in his graduate degree, how would you advise
those planning to attain such academic feat?
My
case was a little peculiar. I acquired a lot more erudition at home under my
father’s supervision than I acquired in the formal school system. Classroom
instruction was always a supplement to the extensive reading I did in our
family library. So, in a way, the road to that First Class started at home. I
was the sort of student who, answering a 100-level question on a novel by
Cameroonian writer, Mongo Beti, could reference a very broad range of literary
and theoretical traditions.
At 100 level, I could cite the sources and
references that my lecturers were using. However, I did not take that
background for granted. Your First Class is made in the first semester of your
first year. From the beginning, I studied as if my life depended on it. I was
never content with what was in the syllabus. I did twice, thrice, as much
reading as was required. Hard work and long hours in the library, aided by
coffee and kolanuts, worked for me then. They’ll still work for anyone aspiring
to earn a First Class today.
What
are the differences between education in Nigeria and Canada?
Well,
there are the obvious differences between the First World environment of Canada
and the 10th World environment of Nigeria. These differences have two names:
facilities and resources. Obviously, resources and facilities in Canada are
vastly superior to what we have in Nigeria. But, be careful, superior resources
do not necessarily make for superior students.
First World excess tends to
breed indolence and laziness. You have students who want to be spoon-fed and
have to be motivated to read anything longer than a tweet by professors who,
increasingly, must be dramatists and performers in class. You have to make
class sexy and cool otherwise your students lose interest and migrate to
Facebook and Twitter within the first 10 minutes of class. If they get low
grades, they challenge your marking and you are compelled to review things.
How
best do you think Nigerian universities can attain full autonomy?
‘Lack
of university autonomy’ has become a default nomenclature for just about any
kind of grievance. Some of the problems plaguing our universities devolve from
internal university culture. What has autonomy got to do with the plague of
gerontocracy, a situation which allows for a thousand obstacles to be thrown in
the path of younger and ambitious junior colleagues? In Canada, there are ways
I interact with my university president, dean, and other key senior university
officials which allow debate and free airing of views, without intimidation.
Can a young assistant lecturer with superior ideas just jump up and begin to
speak in the presence of his vice-chancellor or much older professors in our
system? Who born you? The university has to look critically at its own
culture from within. That’s the important struggle, not autonomy.
Some
see an average Nigerian student as ‘half-baked,’ is this true in the light of
students you have taught abroad?
Given
the conditions in which the Nigerian student is instructed, to sign up for
university education is to sign up to be half-baked. The error, however, is to
think that students in the developed world are necessarily less half-baked.
There is a peculiar crisis of education occasioned by First World excess in
terms of indulgences on the part of the student and a near-criminal withdrawal
of modes of control and regulation by university authorities wary of law suits.
Increasingly, university authorities in the First World treat the student like
a customer. Students order knowledge like pizza delivery and faculties are
under tremendous pressure to capitulate to their every whim. When students can
order what they want, that’s a perfect recipe for producing half-baked
students.
What
do you think is the missing link in Nigerian university education?
We
have lost the university idea. A state governor wakes up, builds a gate in
front of a secondary school in his village, adds a motto in Latin, and a new
state university is born. Somebody lands in Aso Rock and a university is born
in his village the following day. Somebody collects enormous tithes, buys a
private jet, and the next emblem of his arrival in the crème de la crème of prosperity
Pentecostal pastors is to start a university. A sitting Senate President finds
sufficient time to tuck in the construction of his own private university.
These things can happen only in a country where the university idea is dead.
Some
stakeholders have argued that there are bad lecturers as there bad students.
What is your position on this?
Of
course, there are bad students. There are bad eggs in any system. As for bad
lecturers, you don’t want Nigerians to hear from Adesanmi’s mouth that the king’s
mother died yesterday.
Source: The Punch
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