BY DAYO ADESULU

… as ETL gives 5 lectures overseas scholarship training
As the hope of undergraduates in public universities  hangs in the balance, the Director of Research on African Environment and Development, University of Reading, United Kingdom, Professor Chukwumerije Okereke has urged the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, to focus their attention more on reviving the mental intellectual decay in the sector.

He said; “More than the decay in infrastructure, I sympathise with the value, mental decay and intellectual decay in the sector because things that are intangible are better than the tangible. The things that are seen are controlled by things that are unseen.”

Okereke who came into Nigeria to deliver a lecture titled; Advancing Higher Education in Nigeria through Training and Retraining of Manpower at the 5th anniversary of Executive Trainers Limited held in Abuja, charged lecturers to invest more in meaningful researches to develop themselves.

Lamenting the decadence in lecturers’ scientific publications, he noted that in 1981, Nigeria had only 1,062 scientific publications of Nigerian scholars in world scientific journals. By 1995, he noted, when that number should have doubled, it dwindled to 711. Are we going forward or backwards?

According to him, “In the same year, South Africa had 3,113 publications, India had 14,883, Brazil had 5,444.

“Results do not lie, wherever you spend your money, that is where you get the results. Whatever result you are getting, it is the function of the investment you are making in that field. If you spend money on your car than your brain, your car will run faster than your brain.”

The Director of Research who maintained that Nigerian government should invest heavily in technological education, pointed out that while Nigeria spends only 2.4 per cent of her GNP on technological education, America spends 37.3 per cent. “No wonder we have only 15 scientists paying one million Nigerians compared to 118 in Brazil, 159 in China, 158 in India and 4,103 in the United States,” he added.

He said, “The research on development that takes place in higher education has played immense role to enhance socio-economic development. Therefore, we cannot afford to toy with our tertiary institution. If tertiary institutions are so powerful in shaping the economy and society, maximum attention should be given to its development.

“The state of our university system is very appalling. In the 1970s, our university graduates could compete favourably with their contemporaries anywhere in the world. But today, no Nigerian university is ranked among top 1,000 in the world. OAU is 1,113th in the world and 8th in Africa.

“The university is where we train our citizens to be dynamic, purposeful and resourceful. We can test the vibrancy of a country in the vibrancy of her institutions. If the university is poor, the society is poor, if there are no values in the university, then there are no values in the society, if the university is compromised, the society is compromised, if the university is weak, the society is weak.”

The university is the live wire of a nation and the soul of a community. “Universities in America and UK are moving now in delivering online courses. That means we can stay in the UK and teach anywhere in the world. Whereas there are many universities in Nigeria which do not have functional websites and we are living in an information age. I have heard of a computer department where you do not have a computer. ”