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‘Black
Market’ Universities
By Sun News Publishing
Sunday,
May
11, 2008
Professor Julius Okojie, the Chief Executive Officer of the
National Universities Commission (NUC), has raised a fresh
alarm over the deepening crisis in the educational sector
in this country. Opening a retreat organized for the senior
staffers of the Achievers University, Owo, Ondo State, Okojie
deployed the ‘black market’ syndrome to capture
the appalling rate of spread of unapproved Universities, satellite
campuses and other centres for acquiring University degrees
through the back-door by students who may have failed the
Universities Matriculation Examinations but who are desperate
to own University degrees.
Okojie, whose NUC had, a few years ago, outlawed sattelite
campuses, expressed his deep anguish over the violation of
the law, especially by older generation Universities in the
Southern part of the country who absorb a total of 81, 000
unqualified students into the irregular programmes.
This practice, he observed, will further aggravate the declining
fortunes of academic standards in the University system. It
will also exacerbate the decaying culture in the Nigerian
educational sector. Besides faulting first generation universities
like the University of Ibadan for establishing unapproved
centres, he blamed state Universities which accommodate greater
number of part-time students than regular students in their
Universities.
The implication of Okojie’s belated and ineffectual
alarm is grimmer than he may have portrayed it. One, it is
an open fact that most of the approved—old and new,
Federal, State and private—Universities today are criminally
under-staffed in the academic departments on their main campuses.
How is it then imaginable that they would have skilled academic
manpower to spare to teach either on satellite campuses or
part-time, distant learning and sandwich programmes? The great
temptation here is that lecturers may find it more rewarding
to spare direly needed term-time of their regular jobs to
teach and conduct shabilly conducted courses and examinations
in the informal institutions in order to earn a little more
to augment their inadequate take-home pays. To speak of distraction
of these lecturers from their main duties is to grossly understate
the case.
Satellite campuses, the way they are structured today, are
incompetent and incapacitated to grow a proper university
culture, in terms of teaching, delivery and reception.
Most of the students who enroll in these irregular programmes
have little or no concern for sound and proper education,
once they can acquire their degrees with little or no stress.
There are allegations that students on these programmes virtually
purchase the degrees they acquire from these programmmes where
very little teaching and learning inadvertently take place.
Given this sordid state of affairs, it is a matter for regret
that the Executive Secretary of the NUC, which has oversight,
supervisory and monitoring responsibilities on all Nigerian
Universities, and who promulgated the no-satellite- campuses
law in the first instance, now indulges in escapist lamentation
over the rampant abuse of the laws by some Universities. A
law that cannot be implemented is as good as an institutionalization
of chaos. The NUC should immediately confront the challenge
of implementing the law and set about proper supervision of
the University system in all its ramifications.
The business of restoring standards, ethics and discipline
into the University system, in this knowledge- driven, global
age cannot be over-emphasied. All the satellite campuses ought
to have been shut long ago and erring Universities who have
been allowed to act as sacred cows, promptly brought to book.
If the NUC requires any legislative enabling instrument to
terminate these campuses, then it should seek one without
further delay.
Okojie will only be indulging in revolutionary rhetorics in
the University sector if all he can do is to sound palpably
overwhelmed about the lack of focus and derailment of vision
and establishing objectives of the Universities. One of the
principal mid-wifing functions of the NUC is to establish
benchmarks and minimum standards in curriculum, teaching,
research and infrastructures in all Nigerian Universities
and to deny institutions which fall short of these criteria
access to accreditation and operational permit. The real alarm
therefore is that Okojie is raising alarm when he should deploy
his enabling powers to redress the situation and restore stature
and integrity to the degrees obtained in Nigerian Universities.
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