by Niyi Akinnaso
When I applied for admission to the
university in the 1960s, I knew nobody. There was no godfather or
godmother. Neither my parents nor my older siblings could assist me,
because they were all stark illiterates. As the first person in the
entire Akinnaso lineage to ever go to school, I was virtually on my own.
Without any guidance whatsoever, I applied for direct entry admission
to the University of Ibadan and the University of Ife, after passing the
required General Certificate of Education (Advanced Level) papers at
the end of my first year of the Higher School Certificate class. I was
admitted by both institutions, each one acting independently and without
recourse to a superior authority. Ife, then, was a regional university,
while Ibadan was federal. I chose to go to Ife to read English. The
rest is history.
I told my admission story to a senior
female civil servant, who approached me last year for assistance in
getting her daughter admitted to study law at the Adekunle Ajasin
University, Akungba-Akoko. She listened attentively to my story and
replied: “That was then, sir. The country has changed. You have to know
somebody who knows somebody in order to get things done.” I’m sure she
did not like my next statement: “It’s people like you, who beg around,
that caused the country to change”. She was not done: “No sir, it’s the
system”.
There really is plenty of blame to go
round, just as there are many sharers of the blame, including the
students and their parents; the Joint Admissions and Matriculation
Board; the universities; the Federal Government; and the society at
large. But my focus today is the government, which is now like that wild
elephant, reported in the media recently, which killed an admirer who
wanted to take a selfie with it.
The Federal Government has been known to
be the enemy of quality tertiary education in this country. It has
earned that status by (1) over-centralising the institutions, procedures
and regulations governing the activities of the universities and then
starving them of the resources needed to carry out those activities.
Even where some resources are available, such as the tertiary education
funds, the procedures for accessing them are again over-centralised.
In a distinguished lecture, titled
‘Education sector in crisis’, given by Professor Ladipo Adamolekun at
the Joseph Ayo Babaloa University in 2012, over-centralisation was one
of the three major causes of the crisis in the education sector, the
other two being implementation failure – due largely to inadequate
funding – and the de-emphasis of the value of education, including
quality decline in the teaching profession.
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