By Dele Sobowale

“Bringing Harvard to Nigeria”, Chief Chidolue, VANGUARD.

THAT was the way the proprietor of Chelsea University, a private university which is scheduled to resume in 2016 described it. In addition to that wildly exaggerated claim, Chief Chidolue promised to engage the best professors in the world to teach at the new school.

Chelsea serves as a metaphor for what we can expect from the proprietors of new universities in their bid to get our kids to enroll as pioneer students.

It has always been a risky gamble, it remains so; and will for ever be a tough decision. But, more than ever, given what we now know about private universities in Nigeria, skepticism is the best response to the claims made by Chelsea’s owner – as well as others.

Here is why. Harvard University in the United States, unless the Chelsea boss is talking about another one, has an annual budget larger than those of our five richest states – Lagos, Akwa Ibom, Rivers, Delta and Bayelsa – put together.

It also has an endowment fund larger than that of the Federal Republic of Nigeria’s External Reserves. And just in case anybody thinks all these facts were Googled , I can state that I lived in the USA for ten years and spent six of those years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard is situated. It is stretching exaggeration to the point of falsehood for any individual in Nigeria today, Dangote included, to state that he would start a university that would compete with Harvard.

Irrespective of how good Chelsea University, Abuja will be, it has several decades of great strides before it before it can even approach the standards Harvard has achieved today – if ever. I strongly believe that Chief Chidolue had weakened the case for his university with that statement and that is one good reason everyone should exercise caution before committing a kid’s future to it.

But, it is not just Chelsea, in front of which a sign should be placed saying PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS BEWARE. It is virtually all the universities opened in the last five years – but especially the recent ones. The National University Commission, NUC, like all government institutions, is not beyond reproach in the conduct of its oversight functions. In fact, it is mostly derelict in its duties. Why?

I visited one of the newly approved universities (name withheld) last year, officially, and again this year, unofficially. The university claims to offer biological sciences as well as chemistry. But, the facilities for teaching science in this university are barely superior to those I saw at Igbobi College, Yaba – a missionary secondary school. Furthermore, having taken elective courses in Biology, Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Microbiology and Biochemistry, as an undergraduate in the US, I have some idea of what should be the minimum facilities in a university offering those courses. They don’t exist in the university.

Later, during discussions with a retired university professor, who had gone on those accreditation exercises, it was revealed to me that some universities would borrow equipment they lack from complaisant universities, just for the visitors, which would later be returned – leaving a huge deficit in teaching facilities. At the risk of sounding cynical, the fact remains that Nigerian proprietors of private universities possess two characteristics which make them suspect until proved worthy of trust.

They are business people who have invested huge sums in the venture and they want returns on their investments by means fair or foul – usually both. Second, they are Nigerians; and as such, are susceptible to the Nigerian Factor – defined as cutting corners (including bribery) to achieve their objectives. Anyone, forgetting these two basic truths, acts at his own, or, his kid’s peril. Many have suffered the consequences of believing the promoters of the institutions. They have offered their kids as the Guinea Pigs, called Pioneer Students, only to discover that they have committed expensive blunders.

Several reasons account for the problems pioneer students encounter at the new universities. But, permit me to touch on only two. One, irrespective of their experience, the authorities of the university, both academic and non-academic staff, constitutes a new team. Even if a few came from the same university, the fact remains that they are mostly strangers to each other, come from different cultures and are now charged with forging a new institutional culture. That would not occur in one day; not even in several years.

mployed.