A CALL TO ACTION:
CHALLENGING THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE POWERS OF THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITIES
COMMISSION (NUC)
1.
We, the undersigned, were all, at one time or
the other in the past, associated with the Nigerian university system as
students and\or as teachers. Our current
sojourn away from Nigeria has not made us unconcerned with or indifferent to
the fate of Nigerian universities at the present time. It is precisely our concern with the current
state of the university system and our belief that urgent corrective measures
are called for that have motivated us to write this open letter to all who have
a stake in the present and future well-being of tertiary education in Nigeria.
2.
At different times in the past, we each, and in
conversations with one another, have expressed misgivings regarding the role of
the National Universities Commission (hereinafter NUC) in the current sorry
state of our universities. If we had any
doubt that the NUC is part of the problem of the tertiary education sector in
Nigeria, recent developments have served to extinguish that doubt. We refer specifically to the recent
announcement by the NUC that it had suspended the licenses of seven private
universities for an assortment of alleged infractions. We are aware that some of those licenses have
been restored. But, as will be clear
presently, restoring the licenses does not address the fundamental problem that
this write-up makes clear. The suspension
of licenses was merely the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back
for us. Such naked exercise of power, in
suspension or restoration of operating licenses, it matters little, by an
unelected body over the fate and fortunes of hundreds of thousands has no place
in a democracy, properly conceived and practiced. Nor does it augur well for the future
well-being of our society insofar as we desire to be a knowledge society.
3.
We would like to submit that it is time to
DISBAND the NUC and constitute regulatory institutions that reflect (1) the
federal structure of Nigeria and, (2) the democratic tenor of our polity as at
present constituted. Our reasons follow.
4.
The NUC is a relic of military rule. It was the military that transformed an advisory
Higher Education Division of the Federal Ministry of Education into a
hydra-headed executive monster that now lays down policies for the
institutions it regulates; policies that they have no option of refusing! Its powers owe to the centralizing tendencies
of military organization that originally spawned it. The centralization of control and the
concentration of power in the NUC is one of the worst distortions of life and
thought wrought by military rule. It is
past time it was undone.
5.
Here is why.
Nigeria operates, in however distorted a manner, a federal political
structure. Education is on the
Concurrent List and is therefore fit to be legislated on\for by state, local
and municipal governments; and private participation is neither excluded nor
encumbered. This means that nothing
constitutionally confers on any federal institutions, such as the NUC, the
power, prima facie, to expressly permit or preempt the participation of state,
local, and municipal government as well as private interests in the sphere of
education at all levels or make the latter instantly subordinate to federal
authority, however constituted. Yes, we
know too well that the civilian regime validated the military decree that
founded the NUC. The constitutionality
of the law is ripe for challenge and that is what we are calling for.
6.
In light of (5), when or whether the federal
position should prevail in any dispute within the sphere of education cannot,
in a constitutional order, be determined by the say-so of one party to the
dispute. It should be for the courts to
decide. Now, it should be obvious that
Nigerian states, not to talk of municipal authorities and private parties have
been battered into ceding their rights by decades of authoritarian military
rule and the failure by our political authorities to dismantle this essentially
military structure that continues to wreak havoc on our governance structures
under putative civilian rule. That our
states are not really states and their governors and lawmakers, including private
proprietors, all legitimate entrepreneurs in the education industry are unaware
of or unwilling to claim their powers does not make the military-inflected NUC
power grab legitimate.
7.
It is time to take the constitutional order
seriously and undo the damage done in the area of higher education by military
rule. We look forward to a brave private
proprietor or a consortium of private proprietors willing to challenge, on
behalf of the rest of us, the constitutionality of NUC’s powers. It is a preeminently constitutional
issue. We affirm that the existence of
the NUC is incongruous with the federal structure and is out of tune with the
democratic tenor of these times.
8.
Beyond its suspect constitutional status lies
the NUC’s destructive impact on the university system in our dear country. If nothing else, the evidence is overwhelming
that the decline of our universities has accelerated as the powers of the NUC
have grown under successive administrations, civilian and military. As it morphed from an advisory into an
executive body, it did what all bureaucracies do: arrogate more power to itself
while denuding the institutions it regulates of all meaningful powers to govern
themselves, set their own directions and, generally, carve a niche for
themselves in the competitive world of global higher education. The NUC’s overreach has effectively made it
impossible for Nigeria’s universities to be meaningful in this global
competition to make an impact on the world of knowledge.
9.
Before the emergence of the NUC, each federal
university carved its own identity in competition with the others and, later,
with regional universities, all under the guidance of their respective
governing councils. It is easily
forgotten that before 1976, there were only two federal universities! As
befitted a genuine federation, the highest authority a regional university
answered to was the Premier of the region and the regional legislature. Everyone now says that that was the golden
age of tertiary education in Nigeria.
Decentralized control did not mean diminution in the quality of the
institutions and their products.
10.
Military rule changed all that for the
worse. It made federal all the state
universities—mind you, without compensation—and began to centralize the
business of running them. This legacy of
centralization is carried on by the NUC’s commandist structure, unwittingly
abetted by state authorities and private proprietors. As a result, the Nigerian university system
is now in the vise grip of uniformity, characterized by the absence of
imagination that is palpable in the one-size-fits-all template of the NUC. Now all BA’s look the same; all departments
have the same name; plans are afoot to turn out so-called benchmarks for MA’s
and Ph.D.’s and we all go along as if this madness is not taking place. Of course, the homogenization is smuggled
under the innocuous-sounding euphemism of ‘benchmarks’. The more uniformity NUC has imposed on our
universities, the faster has been their decline and the more nondescript they
have become as institutions. We can’t
even talk of the kinds of innovations that, for example, the University of
Nigeria, Nsukka, brought with it at its inception: the Cumulative Grade Point
Average system of scoring; the Course Unit Model; the semester system,
etc. As one of Nigeria’s foremost
scholars recently put it: “Uniformity cannot yield excellence.”
11.
We know that there are many academics in Nigeria
who share the sentiments in this letter and have expressed them at different
times and in different contexts. But the
fact that many have gone along with the present unsavoury situation that we
have been describing does not make it right.
Given the excessive battering that Nigerian academics have endured these
past forty years from the depredations of military misrule and its legacy of
which the NUC is an integral element and a sad reminder, it is understandable
if people have become numb to the fallacies and incongruities that characterize
the founding instruments and operations of their institutions. What is more, we now have such limited
institutional memory that many young operators in the university system have no
recollection of a decentralized system: they think the present order is natural
and inevitable. Needless to say, the
system rewards the conformists in order to perpetuate itself. Such is the logic of systems.
12.
For the much-needed rebuilding of the university
system, a condition for the rejuvenation of the education sector in Nigeria,
the NUC must be disbanded. The
governors who are fond of sermonizing on the need for true federalism must
seize the bull by the horns and assert full control over the institutions that their
legislatures have chartered. Private
proprietors must come together as a group to challenge the constitutionality of
the powers that the NUC, via the military, has usurped. For the rest, the
market should be allowed to determine—as
it did with the earlier generation universities—whether the products of their
institutions are worthy of the tasks society expects them to accomplish for the
latter’s progress. All must prove their
worth in the market and none should use the instrumentality of the state to
cartelize the education sector.
13.
To those who wonder what should replace the NUC,
we leave that open to the outcome of the debate that should follow the
acknowledgment that something is amiss in our present arrangement. We have different opinions in our ranks and
we, too, jointly and severally, cannot wait to join with our respective
individual suggestions on how we can assure that our universities become great
again. Realizing a need for a new
beginning is the minimum requirement for this process to move forward.
Signed:
Name Institution
Wale Adebanwi University of California, Davis, CA
Adeleke Adeeko Ohio
State University, Columbus, OH
Adewale Adekunle Forum
for Agricultural Research in Africa, Accra, Ghana
Akin Adesokan Indiana
University, Bloomington, IN
Revd. Fr. Iheanyi Enwerem, O.P. University of
Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Femi Euba Louisiana
State University, Baton Rouge, LA
Olubunmi Fatoye-Matory University
of Massachusetts, Boston, MA
Ebenezer Obadare University
of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
Tejumola Olaniyan University of Wisconsin,
Madison, WI
Olasope Oyelaran Kalamazoo
College, Kalamazoo, MI
Tola Pearce University
of Missouri, Columbia, MO
Olufemi Taiwo Seattle
University, Seattle, WA
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