It’s no mean feat to spend four or five years at the university, beating away at books and life.
This is why- on that busy day- one filled with rituals of food and a culture of littering the environment- people, well-wishers, friends and family would converge to rejoice with the latest alumni.
The convocation day is just a day out of the many years spent at the university, so even if one graduates with a first-class, I came to realise that the thrill was just for that day, even if one is the best graduating student, it’s no different.
For many of us, what is left of our self-reliance is mostly a shaky wool.
Pause: It is necessary to disclaim here against nit-pickers and for open-minded reading purposes, that the writer here graduated with a first-class from his alma-mater.
It is a sad thing the way our universities leave their students to graduate. It was in my third year during the nationwide-strike of the embattled Jonathan administration that some group of policy-makers in education decided it was a good thing to introduce entrepreneurship education into the university curriculum but like every course taken in our universities in Nigeria, the predominant for the average student once the course is passed, is that feeling of hollowness.
The worst is the Students’ Industrial Work Experience Scheme (SIWES) commonly referred in short as IT and one Student Work Experience Programme (SWEP) for engineering students, which no matter the amount of time done as in some universities, leaves many students trying to understand the superfluous reasons of the scheme in present day Nigeria.
No wonder self-development, a strong personal drive is the distinguishing factor in this environment of ours. But our Nigerian universities give us little or no hope of what true self-reliance means. No clear-cut direction for many graduating students. There is this loud voice aching to carve out its identity. A common thought is, “What do I do next?”
I have heard well that for fresh Nigerian graduates that after a bachelor’s degree, they look for well-fitting jobs, for most if they don’t find one and their degrees and pocket one way or the other can afford it, they go back to school for their master’s, then go back to look for work in the industry or possibly in the academia.
The critically acclaimed award-winning Bollywood movie, 3 Idiots in which Aamir Khan played the lead protagonist role showed us a smell of the way tertiary education is rigged.
You don’t possibly have to be most intelligent to have a first-class honours degree (90-100%) or its second class upper honours degree (70–89.9%) using a 5.0 scale. You just have to be clever and in some schools hardworking and know how to slice your onions without hurting your eyes.
So, I have also come to realize in my five years in a federal university of technology, that being a lecturer, doctor or professor does not necessarily mean you are brilliant at what you do. It’s pitiful when many lecturers cannot take courses to impart students with required knowledge in an acceptable, sane and loving manner that will instill a solid personal drive process in students to improve their area of discipline for technological advancement. It is a dangerous thing for the future of our country when school curriculum are time-wasters and end of session chasers.
It is evident that this country needs to manage the time and mental resources of its youth for sustainable national development.
I well remember when the year, 2010 came and I was admitted to study an engineering discipline at the best university of technology in Nigeria.
My hopes and expectations of transparency, technological development from the university and its system were very high but years after getting in, they seemed like the fantasy of Alice in Wonderland.
I met a system that drank the offerings of personal motivation, diligence and hard work but ruled and thrived on deception, easily angered academic and non-academic university officials, lecturers emanating cold gestures and many who acted like small gods in the forest of a thousand demons. A place where students are not oriented about the touted SERVICOM and even if the other way around, they doubt if it works.
During my sophomore year, I gradually discovered the absurd way in which many times students’ work where mostly underrated or overrated. At the beginning of my final undergraduate year in the university. One of my departmental colleagues told me about some of my colleagues in a frustrated chat, “You’re just looking at this people. Many of them know how they play their cards with those lecturers.”
In essence, the average Nigerian university is sometimes- a place where someone who did nothing can have a 5.0 while those who did something get less than expectation for their IT Defence.
It turns out that the four walls of the university tower are filled with all kinds of unspeakable nonsense out of line from professional ethics that has greatly delayed or seductively enabled the future of many individuals from allotting undeserved grades to students, to allotting carry-overs or outstanding to others where they never deserved it. These lack of quality control is a bane in our universities.
I even heard of a university policy in a federal university in Ogun State, where if a carryover or grade mistake was made, the student would have to take it as fate. These are the sorry tales of university life and I bet it on this country’s honour that every fresh Nigerian graduate can most certainly with nostalgia tell you these stories for free.
Final year projects are assessed in many ways via unnecessary pressure. The accurate way of writing formal projects and papers in academia is not taught them far beforehand or if taught they remain shambles from ineffective impartment, so final years end up being mostly on the part of pressure and monetary wastage for many. Where students are accessed on projects they were never taught anything about.
The departmental dons don’t look at the knowledge that the student had gained from engaging in a project. All they care about is “did it work” or “what new thing have you added to it.” I am sorry to say this but University Dons can be so silly.
Nigerian universities also run one of the biggest con-industry in the country. Entering as a fresher through leaving as a graduate, they take amounts that won’t get past proper auditing in a farce of essentially needed things or make students pay for things that may never use or denied access to use on a 24/7 basis, be it via libraries, laboratories or the internet service or anything within the four walls of the ivory tower.
Nigerian tertiary institutions also cunningly play and feed on the fears and desires of those who want to get a tertiary admission, especially at the university at all cost. Many gullible students pay to work their admission into the universities but only few get lucky in this corruption while those who passed but know no official at the senate are sacrificed for them.
I asked one young student who came to write a Post-UTME to get accepted to study Computer Engineering the reason he wanted to study Computer Engineering and he simply said “…because I like anything computer.” Ask someone who wants to study electrical, the same thing he will say something similar to that phrase, “because I love electronics.” That shows the gross deficiency of Secondary Schools towards proper orientation in career guidance and counselling.
When they enter the university, many are given the course they registered for, many are also given courses they never dreamt of studying. Soon, they become moaners and highway burial singers. They waste their time in cramming what they have been taught and they never try to get the basic understanding of it.
You would think our lecturers would be eager to contribute to technology but all they really do in the name of science and technology is to run after promotions and self-gratification.
So why won’t many- who can afford it- want to go and study abroad?
Students are admitted into institutions with no personal motivation or prior essential orientation in their choice of course or given course, to chart a way forward for their future. So, when graduating, many of them are left groping for that more definitive identity.
Should our tertiary institutions be a statement of Murphy’s law? Our best Universities are only best to the university itself and those that grade them such, but not so to the students. If our best universities leave our fresh graduates feeling hollow and feeling somehow alone, how much more those under the food-chain (the polytechnics and colleges of education).
I certainly hope that the Minister of Education, Dr Adamu Adamu reads this commentary, carries out his own investigations and audits, so he knows the urgent state of damage our tertiary institutions, especially the so-called top rated universities are in today.
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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija
Oluwasegun is a fresh graduate from the Federal University of Technology, Akure. He lives in Lagos and tweets @somefunAgba.
