Dr. Ugwu, a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University, made the remarks during an exclusive interview with Rudolf Okonkwo on 90 Minutes Africa on Sunday.
“The university is now fixated on getting staff to publish in the best journals in the world. So people have taken this challenge, and it has compromised the teaching quality,” the Lecturer of Anthropology at UNN said. He argued further that those who taught his generation at UNN were mostly trained abroad, and their replacements, most of whom are products of the institution, seem not to have done well for the system.
The guest lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s School of Population and Global Health also explained why Nigerian universities don’t make the list of top-ranking universities worldwide. He said education will inevitably suffer neglect in any society, like Nigeria, where political actors will still have money to spend irrespective of whether there is knowledge production or not, simply because they only depend on natural resources.
“Nigeria is not a knowledge-driven country but a natural resource-driven one caught up in Dutch Disease,” the Fellow of Harvard University’s African Humanities Program stated. He said, “Any society that is not knowledge-driven will not have excellent universities.”
“In the Nigerian context, there are some natural resources that the political actors are fixated on and so they don’t care about what becomes of the education of the society.”
Against the common belief that there is a shortage of lecturers in Nigerian academia, the university don explained that the problem is not the number of lecturers, as there are more than enough, but their quality. He revealed that unlike in the past when the best-graduating students were recruited into the university system, the situation is now different as the best students no longer want to take up an appointment in the university because of the poor remuneration. The university is now manned mostly by “those who think they have no other choice.”
According to him, when these unqualified individuals are employed, they “find a way to grow in the system by finding people to help them to write and perhaps put their names here and there to get them published.”
“A number of those who have been employed in the past few years are not the quality you would like to have,” Dr. Ugwu revealed.
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