Ever since I concluded that Brian Acton and Jan Koum who started
WhatsApp in 2009 could not have imagined how some Nigerians would use it, I paid little attention to most messages on the platform. If you are not being added to groups without your consent, folks will be asking you to send particular messages to others for their own kind of blessingsB
utose fault is it that our universities don’t have enough professors? Since the National Universities Commission is a political organ at a level, could ASUU please tell us who are the members of accreditation committees, which regularly vet courses in our universities? Are they not the ones that have consistently shut out professionals who could serve as professors of professional practice as commonly done in other parts of the world through insistence on possession of PhDs before you can be recognized as a university lecturer? Who are those involved in the practice of allowing their profiles to be on private universities’ staff lists to fulfill accreditation criterion even when they are still serving in public schools?
The shenanigans that accompany appointments of vice chancellors cannot make any politician respect our lecturers. Issues like ethnicity; quota system and religion are regular features in such moments so much that vice chancellors become attenuated on assumption of office. The point is that our campuses are not different from what we have outside and so expecting the situation to be
different is a tall order. Good enough that the federal government had admitted that it was in the wrong regarding previous agreements, it is up to ASUU too to admit that the way our universities are being run now cannot guarantee good products. Our lecturers seem insulated from cutting edge thinking needed for this century. Issues like appointment of governing council members who can position the universities better and not the usual crowd of politicians we have presently deserve attention.
A way of bridging the funding gap is better alumni relations but this has not been explored fully. People graduate from universities completely alienated from the institutions based on what they experienced as we no longer produce ‘total person.’ Dissent is no longer seeing as a mark of freedom in the academia and students are regularly hounded because of their union activities. A result of this is the lack of intolerance permeating our country in political debates and low civic education. We can take our universities back and return them to their glorious days, but ASUU members should keep their house in order first by removing the log in their eyes.
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