Much has been said and written about public universities. I am going over this with the hindsight of the journey so far and what to look up to in the upcoming dispensation. This is crucial as the president-elect seems to have an agenda for the continuous running of the university system, devoid of wild cat strikes.
After a prolonged strike, public university campuses are bustling with life. Students are busy crisscrossing one another in the effort to secure a meal ticket. Labour unions are keeping a deafening silence, possibly nursing the wounds from the last strike.
From the last walk out, increase in wages was not achieved; excess workload remains a burden; revitalisation was thrown off the table and yet, university staff went home with half salaries. For all these, the universities are but dormant volcanoes with unpredictable eruption time.
This is an unnecessary confusion with its great degrading repercussions for the citadels of learning and character moulding. The confusion is due to warped knowledge of what a university is, personal ego trips of the political class, poor political will to owning a university and deliberate efforts to starve universities and university workers of funds. Even those in policy positions with the highest degree are ignorant of the university system.
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A popular idea is to say the university is part of public services since it is funded from the public treasury. This is significantly incorrect. The university is not a civil service organisation. And universities are not in contest with normal civil service.
The university system is far too complex to fit into conventional civil service. The president-elect must understand this from the word go. The complexities are far from mere funding.
The university is a world of its own. It belongs to an investor called a Visitor. The Visitor to all federal universities is the President of Nigeria. The Visitor appoints a council to oversee the administrative and financial well-being of the university. It is only in the universities that scholars internationalise through fellowships, sabbatical leave, conferences and collaborative academic activities.
The council is guided by university statutes. The Council, with powers to hire, discipline and promote workers is only answerable to the Visitor. Suddenly university employment became issues of the National Assembly, Head of Federal Civil Service, Office of Accountant General of the Federation and the Federal Character Commission. If there are approved budgets and establishments for the universities, these offices have no contributions to university recruitment and promotion.
The Visitor monitors the well-being of the university through visitation panels. The panels are constituted and sent to the universities at five years intervals. The panel reports guide the Visitor to take some decisions and communicate them to the universities as white papers.
Yet, the Visitor sends visitation panels with great difficulties. The last time the Visitor did, it was at the instance of the problem child, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).
The vice-chancellor sits between the council and other organs of the university. The vice-chancellor is the chairman of the Senate, the highest academic policy-making body of the university. Though the Senate monitors the administration and finances of the university, its main role is academic, including the award of all degrees.
Other units below the Senate are the faculties and academic departments. In the faculty, the dean coordinates academic activities of the departments. The dean works with the departments on all matters of the Senate and those of the council particularly, appointments and promotions.
The university mode of appointment is far from the civil service. Even if the application is addressed to the vice-chancellor, the process commences from the departments’ Appointments and Promotions Committee (A&PC) on to the Faculty and Complex A&PC before it is presented to the Central A&PC. Ditto for promotions. This process is undermined by the situation where the vice-chancellor has to take appointment cases to the federal agencies.
The vice-chancellor should be able to hunt for international scholars, pay their salaries and allowances at the speed of light. That is the ideal and had hitherto been done. This will increase the international content of the universities.
The frustrations of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) need to be dismantled in the universities.
The resource control and welfare in universities is unique. It is only in the universities that the most senior and eldest professor travels in public transport. The professor has no university utility vehicle, or messenger and must type their own manuscripts. This also is unlike the civil service.
In the civil service, the number of staff that report to an officer and that the officer appraises for promotion grows as the officer moves up the ladder. The same can be said of resources and facilities at the disposal of the officer. The structures and operation of universities are not amenable to these civil service modes of conduct.
I hope the Head of Civil Service understands these and keeps the universities out of territorial expansion.
In addition to these, the universities are increasingly becoming localised, far from international and national. A good chunk of teaching and non-teaching staff of universities are from the immediate communities. This implies high rate of inbreeding and informality in official processes. This is dangerous for institutions that claim universalities as core values.
Furthermore, the host communities, wrongly or rightly, are craving for governance positions in the universities regardless of qualifications and competence. This is aggravated by the processes of appointing principal officers of the universities.
It is now easy to work from answers to the problem. Adverts for such positions list criteria that only make it possible to select a particular candidate. This has not augured well for the institutions.
Finally, there is the hullabaloo of the mode of salary payment. The IPPIS has eroded the morale of civil servants, university teachers and workers. For one, the public workers are so short-changed by this and yet cannot obtain redress. There is no foreign academic that will yield to the pain of Nigeria’s mode of IPPIS. A university hired a foreign staff to fill expertise gap, the staff left after five months of oscillation between the campus and office of IPPIS and without salaries!
Concluded on www.dailytrust.com
Yunusa is of the Socioeconomic and Environment Advocacy Centre Zaria
Certainly, the Nigerian authorities have mistaken the platform for a central pay point. The IPPIS is a database that is used to monitor the in and out flow of cash of agency accounts. Universities need to be empowered to pay, to manage their salaries and wages.
Universities should not be allowed to close again. We require a rethink of the entire university system. To successfully do this, universities must be detached from the apron strings of the civil service. Short of this, let’s forget it and wait for the eruption.
Your Excellency, President-elect, jumping at school fees is a far cry from the solution. Student loans or grants will not save the universities. You must resolve to give life, sustainability and offer the youth sound opportunity to learn and acquire skills in a robust and boisterous university system.
The ray of light indicated in your acceptance speech should give life to the universities as well-lighted places.