The immediate past Deputy Vice Chancellor (DVC) in charge of Administration, Prof. Ezekiel Olusola Ayoola, has written an open letter to President Bola Tinubu on the plight of university lecturers and the need to rescue deteriorating Nigerian universities.
The letter below:
AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT BOLA AHMED TINUBU
ON THE LOW MORALE AMONG ACADEMIC STAFF IN THE NIGERIAN FEDERAL UNIVERSITIES
By Ezekiel Olusola Ayoola
Let me join other Nigerians to congratulate His Excellency President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for the successful completion of two years as the Executive President and the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, running the affairs of Nigeria. We thank the president for his recent approval of release of funds for revitalisation and for payment of Earned Academic Allowances (EAA) for academic staff of federal universities. We do not take this gesture for granted.
Although there are some biting challenges and hardship across the land, there have been notable achievements of the government in the last two years. One of the achievements is the ability of the government to summon courage and boldness to address the issue of fuel subsidy and the appropriate valuation of the naira. It is needless to say that these policies have their unintended consequences on the populace. The policies have many daunting multiplier effects on virtually all segments of the society.
In the positive sense, the policies have among other things, translated into multiple incomes for all tiers of governments, local and state and Federal governments, and members of the National Assembly through a substantial increase in their allocation for constituency projects and their monthly personal and running allowances as confirmed by members themselves. We also observed that some professionals and technocrats have attracted the attention of the government through the approval of significant multiple increases in their salaries and emoluments in the last two years.
The primary purpose of this letter is to call the attention of our distinguished president to the plight and condition of service of academic members of staff of Nigerian public universities in this dispensation. The morale among this category of staff has never been this low since I was hired as an academic staff member at the University of Ibadan in 1989 some thirty-six years ago.
The passion to teach effectively and to do cutting-edge research has seriously gone down. I believe it is the president only that can intervene like he did in the case of judicial officers and military personnel recently. The gains that our universities have recorded through the efforts of our past heroes in academia must not be allowed to go down the drain.
It is on record that at the inception of the University College Ibadan in 1948, during the colonial rule, the forerunner of the University of Ibadan, the Nigerian premier university, the college enjoyed some administrative, academic and financial excellence as inheritance from the University of London, the mother university. The curricula of the pioneering courses were tailored after London University. Most of the pioneer staff of the college were seconded from University of London. Salary and emoluments of the college staff followed a similar pattern as those staff in London. It was not difficult to see why the then principal of the then University College Ibadan enjoyed a salary level close to that of the Prime Minister at the federal level after independence in 1960. The salaries of academic staff in the 50s and 60s were so good and comparable to what people of equivalent ranks earned in the UK and other places at that time.
Moreover, in those days, academic staff were entitled to sponsored overseas trips with their spouses and a maximum of four children during long vacations in the summer. That opportunity used to give members of staff access to first-class medical treatment and tourist attractions, visits to first-class laboratories and libraries abroad, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of staff as top-flight academicians in those days. Those opportunities also provided physical access to professional colleagues and thereby facilitating exchange of scholarly ideas among peers. No wonder that many of our citizens trained abroad came back to Nigeria with the first available flight in the 1950s to the 1980s. They came back to contribute their quota to the Nigerian academic and manpower development, ignoring similar opportunities and appointments abroad.
Today, many academic staff that were sent abroad on sponsored doctoral programmes by the Federal Government of Nigeria through TETFUND simply disappeared and failed to come back home. In addition, most of our young colleagues at the beginning and at the middle of their career are busy scouting for academic and other jobs abroad and from local nonacademic sectors. The attractions are the competitive salaries, emoluments, research grants and other facilities readily available in the country of their destination and in other sectors.
People who came and worked in those days in Nigeria gave their best on the job, leading to the pleasant consequences of writing the name of Nigeria in the world map through respectable cutting-edge research reports that were published in top outlets around the world. The global integrity of our universities was earned by our past heroes and handed down to us in our own generation.
Nigerian degrees consequently attracted respect around the world. In those days, University of Ibadan graduates with first, and second-class upper division were admitted directly at Oxford, Cambridge and London universities for doctoral works and later postdoctoral works without necessarily going through the master’s degree enrolment. That was the consequence of the high quality of degrees awarded by our university in those days. The situation today is no longer the same.
For example, because of the excellent quality of services, our famous university teaching hospital, UCH, in Ibadan, attracted patients from around the world, including the family of the Saudi monarch. Records at the hospital can confirm this. The University of Ibadan once enjoyed the status of one of the best ten universities in the commonwealth with the department of Medicine, Mathematics, Chemistry Economics and others being declared as centres of excellence in the university. In Ibadan department of Mathematics where I work, a pioneering department of UCI, we used to have the Ibadan School of Functional Analysis and Ibadan School of Differential Equations led by our late distinguished Professor Adegoke Olubummo, the first Nigerian Professor of Mathematics and late Professor Harron Oladipo Tejumola respectively.
The schools attracted contributions from numerous foreign experts in the subject attending regular annual conferences here in Ibadan in those days. At the moment, the schools need serious reorganization, funding and encouragement of staff necessary for reactivation of the age-old academic excellence through frontier research contributions by the existing staff in the department and around the country. The picture here in the Mathematics department is similar to what we have in many other pioneer departments and faculties at the University of Ibadan and other first and second-generation universities around the country.
It is obvious that our previous achievements in the university could not have come about if the academic staff were not highly motivated. By raising the morale of staff, the achievements of our universities in the past can be repeated even at a higher level. We are yet to see any country in the whole world that achieves greatness when the core of the academic staff is treated as an unwanted and unappreciated group in society. Top ranking academics in the universities do not come cheaply. They are encouraged, motivated and treated with care everywhere.
Some countries budget funds for certain scientific directions they want to go in five or ten years and challenge their academic staff to the task of developing some pre-assigned numbers of their citizens along the directions. Some will assemble first-class brains from their secondary schools in all areas of the sciences and humanities, and give them special treatments and challenge their academic staff to mentor them. These are some of our experiences around the globe studying and observing attitudes and treatment being meted out by diverse countries to scientific and academic communities around the world. The purpose is to motivate development, especially in the STEM disciplines by those countries that are eager and in hurry for economic developments. Many countries such as Japan, India, China rely greatly on incomes as a result of the knowledge economy which they painfully and carefully developed over the years with their academic communities at the forefront. Many countries in the commonwealth close to our level of development are busy mobilising their academic staff for training and mentoring of their young ones in emerging technologies such as quantum information sciences, quantum computing, advanced computing, Artificial intelligence, Supercomputing, high and low technologies, Big data analysis, and so on. Academic staff, who will do the mentoring and the teaching must be happy to do what they know best to do. Although the present hardship has resulted in another round of brain drain in the last couple of years, the situation can be helped if the president urgently intervenes in the matter.
It is time for the president to approve a comprehensive significant wage increase as a matter of priorities for academic staff in public universities. Special packages should be worked out to attract and retain top level and productive academic staff. A whopping number of these staff have died on the job in the last ten years in each public university. Many died because of poor wages and unaffordable health care expenses because of many terminal illnesses and afflictions. Sedentary lifestyles are major characteristics of the academic profession. People have to sit down in the libraries, laboratories and their study rooms for long hours each day thereby developing at later stages of life some sicknesses that are consequent upon such lifestyles. Many could not afford standard local and overseas treatment due to the paucity of personal funds. On the other hand, politically exposed persons and technocrats in government and other juicy sectors of the economy can afford such local and overseas treatments because of resources available to them. The present salaries of academic staff cannot support such trips and treatments. Academics staff should be considered for living wages because of their contributions to manpower development in all sectors of the Nigerian economy.
Many retired academic staff experience delay in the release of their gratuities and monthly pensions. Some recently retired staff passed on while waiting for their entitlements. We recently lost a colleague professor of physics in our university before the first-year anniversary of his retirement. Academic staff should not be allowed to retire into poverty that cuts short their lifespan.
Just a few days ago, sad news about a professor went viral on social media. A man who has spent his life in the classrooms, lecture halls, and libraries was in the news, not for publishing breakthrough research, not for mentoring future leaders, but for selling soup ingredients at a roadside stall, simply to survive. Another professor from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, is now publicly crowdfunding for thirteen million naira for urgent medical treatment. There is another senior lecturer in another university looking for twenty-three million to travel for life-saving care in India. These examples are an indication of the helplessness of our academic staff and their poor incomes. These call for urgent presidential interventions.
The present danger of a political economy that systemically despises the knowledge industry and treats the practitioners with disdain should be arrested forthwith. We should do away with a state structure that punishes academic competence and excellence. The country should eliminate a national mindset that glorifies quick wealth and trivializes intellectual and academic labour. Many of our children and students abhor academics as a profession because of the present adverse treatment and substandard remunerations that do not commensurate with many years of hard studies and toiling. We must put in place efforts that make academic professions attractive to our young ones for future sustainability of professional excellence at all segments of our national life.
I believe that it is not too late for our distinguished president to do something for academic staff in the Nigerian universities. Consequently, people like me will be happy if the president can do the following as a matter of urgency.
1. Concluding and implementing the recommendation of the Yayale committee on academic staff welfare without further delay. It was reportedly submitted to the Minister of Education in December 2024. It is on record that former President Obasanjo improved the emolument of university staff during his tenure in the year 2000. President Tinubu should do similarly for university staff for posterity to write his name in gold.
2. Ensure that the salaries of academic staff receive a major upwards review. This will encourage our young ones on ground to stay in the country. The elders in the system are currently finding it difficult to convince our young ones not to abandon the country for foreign jobs. But the crucial deciding factor will be respectable incomes that can go far in the face of the present high cost of living in the country.
3. Ensure that academic staff in the universities are happy by boosting their morale. Payment of the outstanding three and a half months salaries will contribute to the happiness of staff.
4. Immediate implementation of the terminal salaries as pension for professors that retire at age 70 or those that have spent at least 20 years as full professors before disengagement as passed in the pension acts of 2012. We are happy about your government efforts along that line.
5. In addition, academic staff should normally be insulated from politics and should not be seen as politicians. The academic staff union consists of people sympathetic to diverse political ideologies. But the common characteristic is the academic service which everyone provides in their various disciplines. Academic service should be primary considerations and focus.
Finally, there are criteria for quality rankings of universities in this era of digitalization. Such criteria include quality of instructions and research outputs as measured from diverse academic databases available world-wide relevant to each discipline. The publications in these databases are independent of any problem or unpleasant situation faced by any researcher around the world. The databases review and record the quality of contributions of any group of researchers from around the world. This is why the quality of funding and condition of service available to any researcher anywhere in the world will be a direct influence on the quality of the products or outcomes of such researchers and groups of researchers. Top rated and competitive journals in each discipline will not publish any poorly researched article, and neither will such articles appear in respectable databases anywhere in the world regardless of where the researcher comes from. So, the issue of funding and emoluments of researchers are crucial factors that ensure the presence of Nigerian universities at the top of the ranking table.
Thank you, Your Excellency, Mr. President, for your patience and understanding.
Ezekiel Ayoola, [ FNMS] is a Professor of Mathematics, and former Deputy Vice Chancellor (Administration) ,University of Ibadan,Nigeria.
