A renowned think tank, Agora Policy, has stressed the need to reposition Nigeria’s public universities for national growth and competitiveness.
In Nigeria, universities are governed by the National Universities Commission (NUC), whose Establishment Act of 1974 gives it controlling power over the university education system, including what departments or academic units they run and what they teach; what funding they receive, and how; what personnel they hire and the conditions of service attached to such personnel; what their research needs are; and “carrying out such other activities as are conducive to the discharge of its functions under this Act.”
However, the think-tank, in a new report published yesterday, argued that many university administrators and lecturers regard the NUC as a major impediment to innovation and creativity in universities.
The report titled, “Repositioning Nigeria’s Public Universities for National Growth and Competitiveness”, said global trends also suggest that less government is better for universities and that universities function best when they are self-governing.
The report noted that while many countries still struggle to achieve the goal of universal education, a strong consensus has emerged over the years that although basic education is important, no country has achieved growth on the back of mass literacy alone.
Agora Policy said the endemic corruption, inefficiency, ineffectiveness, inequity, and lack of accountability that characterise the system merely thrive on a fundamental failure that cannot be addressed by interventions that merely target any of the symptoms in isolation.
“What we require is a system-wide reform that addresses the three critical elements of governance, funding, and quality assurance based on a rethinking of the entire public university education itself as a driver of national development objectives,” the report said.
It added that the compelling argument for greater investment in university education, relative to other levels of education, flows from the strong evidence that better graduates have greater positive impacts on economic growth as well as the realisation that the 21st-century global knowledge economy requires more than literacy.
It said the transformation of Nigeria’s public university system where 94 per cent of the undergraduates within Nigeria are enrolled should therefore be integral to the vision of economic growth and competitiveness.
Agora Policy said the promise of national development must reflect in the commitment to transform the public university system to make it more efficient and able to meet the skills, knowledge and research needs of the country now and in the future.
In seeking to realign the public university system with the national development objectives, it said four critical questions must be asked which include.
It listed the questions to include: “What are our development goals over the next 15 years? What human resources would we need to achieve these goals? How many of our citizens of university-going age would we require to have degree-level qualifications in the identified areas of need within the same period? What research priorities do we need to pursue and promote in order to meet these goals?”
It added that attempts to answer these questions will highlight major problems in the current attitude to public university education which in turn has conditioned how the nation will structure, operate and fund the system.
On rethinking the governance of public universities, it said the central issue in governance is that of efficiency and service delivery.
The report reads in part: “What kind of governance regime is best suited for the kind of services that the public universities are expected to provide? At the heart of this question in Nigeria is the issue of autonomy: the degree to which each university has the freedom to operate independent of the government authorities that set them up and fund them.
“In Nigeria, universities are governed by the National Universities Commission (NUC), whose establishment Act of 1974 gives it controlling power over the university education system, including what departments or academic units they run and what they teach; what funding they receive and how; what personnel they hire and the conditions of service attached to such personnel; what their research needs are; and “carrying out such other activities as are conducive to the discharge of its functions under this Act.
“Many university administrators and lecturers regard the NUC as a major impediment to innovation and creativity in the universities. Global trends also suggest that less government is better for universities and that universities function best when they are self-governing.
“Lant Pritchett, a professor at Harvard University, used the spider and the starfish to illustrate two kinds of systems. The spider system is one in which all organs and parts of the body are centrally controlled, while the starfish allows for a level of control but grants freedom to each of the limbs to operate with significant autonomy. A pure spider system, Pritchett says, pulls responsibility for all functions to itself, especially through financing; whereas a starfish system creates local operation which pulls apart all of the many functions and activities and allocates those across the system such that the local component of the system provides a constant stream of innovation and new ideas and can use the local nature of the operation of the system for thick accountability…while the national level provides a framework for standards and monitoring and evaluation performance.”
The report further said the starfish approach will fit squarely within a system of embedded autonomy which allows the university the flexibility to explore and establish local and international relationships and partnerships while government involvement is scaled back to quality assurance and monitoring compliance with national regulations.
The report said another major advantage of the starfish system is that by granting autonomy to the local components, it also ensures that a problem with one of the components does not cripple the entire system.
“By granting autonomy to each of the universities to negotiate contract terms with its staff based on its unique capabilities and local conditions, the government would have addressed the problem posed by the principle of collective bargaining which has turned the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) into a disruptive force over the years.”
“Of the eight identified issues that have formed the basis for ASUU’s perennial strikes, five are directly related to issues of conditions of service and remunerations. Granting autonomy to the universities along this line will not necessarily save the government money, but it will achieve three things.
“One, it will bring stability to the university system; two, it will ensure that the lecturers are competitively and equitably remunerated; and three, it will enable the government to focus on her quality assurance functions as an objective arbiter,” it said.
It further noted that the argument for more equitable remuneration of lecturers is central to attracting and retaining the right calibre of lecturers and professors.
It said the current system that pays lecturers in different contexts and with different quality of outputs the same salary just because they are on the same “salary scale” is wrongheaded and suboptimal.
The report, however, said this can only be corrected if each university is at liberty to negotiate salaries and other benefits with its lecturers.
It said university lecturers should be employees of their universities not those of the federal government or the state governments.
“Essentially, what we require is a system that fosters high-level competition for resources and even for students. Under the current governance system, the universities lack the incentive to do anything differently. Neither the funding they get nor the students that come to them depends on the quality of what they offer to students either in terms of learning or living experience or the quality of their research outputs. Autonomy will create the condition for each university to develop at its own pace, based on real accomplishments in research, in teaching, and in their contributions to national development goals.
“It is interesting to note that “university autonomy and academic freedom” has been one of ASUU’s key demands. Their desire is to free the universities from what they consider as the stranglehold of the NUC. The obvious implication of this, however, is that the NUC must undergo its own reform to enable it to repurpose itself for its coordinating and monitoring role in a new governance system,” the report said.
In changing how public universities are funded, it added that two factors need to be considered, including whether they are being adequately funded and whether the funds are being spent on factors that are directly relevant to delivering the best results, especially in the core task of teaching, learning, and research.
The report lamented that the current funding system does not meet either of the criteria.
“The chief source of funding for public universities in Nigeria is the government, whose intervention however accounts for only about 44 per cent to 60 per cent of what is required to run a university effectively. This means that at any given time, the funding deficit is between 40 per cent and 56 per cent.”
On allocations to federal universities in the 2023 budget, the report said between 86 per cent and 96 per cent of the federal allocations of universities go to personnel costs alone.
“This leaves a range of 0.7 per cent to 1.4 per cent and 2.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent for overhead and capital respectively.
“What this means in essence is that our federal universities exist mainly to pay salaries, with hardly much left for the other operational costs and provision and maintenance of infrastructure for teaching, learning, and research.
“Funding effectively and efficiently would require a major paradigm shift in how we view public university education generally and how we fund it. If we take the budgetary allocations to the universities as standing in lieu of tuition, this should be regarded as subsidy,” it said.
It stressed that what the government has done over the years is to subsidise the personnel cost of the universities, rather than the students who should enjoy the subsidy.
The continued: “A major step-change that is required here is to target the subsidy payments around students’ enrolments rather than the administration of the university. What this does is to place the students at the center of the university planning, with all other expenditures, including personnel, overheads, and physical development, now revolving around the students and their needs.
“This also ensures an objective parameter for allocation of funding, one that is focused on output rather than the current input-based approach.
“Running a university costs a lot of money. Costs are incurred almost on a daily basis. One Vice Chancellor reported spending about N40million monthly on diesel alone to keep the generators running; this is in addition to the cost of the main electricity supply.
“The university, therefore, spends up to N100 million on power supply alone in a given month. Infrastructure and vehicle maintenance, fueling of vehicles, re-agents and other consumables for the laboratories, sporting activities, all these are covered under the overhead costs, which are released to the universities on a month-by-month basis. However, interaction with several university heads reveals that while the budget for personnel is released 100 per cent, they hardly get more than 50 per cent of overhead allocation in a given year.
“However, even if all the overhead allocation is released, it is hard to imagine how it could meet the monthly cost of running the university. For example, the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) with an overhead allocation of about N203 million in its 2023 budget has a population of 36,000 students. To start with, it means that UNN has an allocation of N16.9 million per month for overhead. But more interestingly, it means that, minus personnel costs, the university has only N5,638 available in a year as running cost per student. Even if this amount is added to the fees charged by the university in a year, the total available per student will be about N67,000 or $145. This applies to all federal universities in Nigeria”.
On the fallacy of tuition-free education, it said the two organised ‘vital constituencies’ for government in producing education are the students and the lecturers.
