By Abdallah el-Kurebe

Prof. Abdullahi Abdu Zuru is the Vice Chancellor, Kebbi State University of Science and Technology, Aliero (KSUSTA), and the immediate past National President of Institute of Chartered Chemists of Nigeria, ICCON. In this interview, he spoke on matters revolving around Nigerian education, among others. Excerpts:

You are 30 years in the teaching and research profession. What have you seen as government’s attitude to Research and Development, especially in the area of adequate funding?

Well, I think it has been positive when we look at the early eighties when we came into the industry. There was a lot of training of young, promising, intellectuals people who were engaged in the industry, some were sent abroad to get the necessary training.

But from the late 80s, things started to plateau and then went into the era of decline. In the 70s and 80s when the government had positive attitude to research and development, the universities were vibrant, and the most recent book published anywhere in the world was made available in Nigeria within 24 hours then. Sending people abroad was not necessitated by the need but by requirement.

This positive attitude was not tied to any particular national goal. I think this is where the issue is. You can liken it to the difference between a bush and a garden, where the bush is disorderly while the garden is well planned. So, it is the same way you should look at in terms of research and development. If it is tied to a national goal, there are specific target to be achieved.

Then you can say that, I want to produce this number of engineers to take care of this; that number of medical doctors to treat that kind of ailment. If it were to be so, the decline we suffered would not have occurred.  But we seem to have gone into training of researchers, educationists, etc without specific purposes beyond the national development.

Prof. Abdullahi Abdu Zuru

How would you advise the government in this direction?
It is never too late as there are a lot of researches that are still on the shelves and the people that were involved in those researches are largely around. All we can do is take an inventory of what is available, map out strategic plans and translate these things into national development.

Once this is done, I think that will help. I am opportuned to be in the Vision 2020 drafting group and I am aware that plans have been put in place for this purpose. There is a thinking that we are going to have national scientific parks where they would be gravitating around certain universities. This would be on the basis of what raw materials are available in that varsity.

The real answer has always been you want to bring in some form of relationship between the industry, the academia and the government. Government provides the enabling environment, industry or private sector is the driving engine and the academia spearheads.

This where we incubate ideas, they germinate and translate into products. But you will be asking too much of the academia to live beyond generating ideas, incubating them and all these things to translating them into products. Once there is working relationship between the three arms, then the progress in economic achievement and development would come in.

The rising profile of varsities against the tidal wave of inadequate finance asks volumes of questions. Do you see the justification for more varsities that wouldn’t adequately be funded?

There is no question for justification about additional varsities in Nigeria. We are talking about a population of about 170 million at the present time. Each year, about 1.3 to 1.5 million students sit for JAMB, all wanting to come to the university to system.

The enrollment capacities of Nigerian varsities put together is about 300,000, so each year, there are more than 1.2 million prospective students. This tells you that there is the demand for higher education, which we are not able to meet at the moment. So, the need for addition is necessary. One of the things government is talking about is access to education, especially tertiary; then quality.

Quality requires that you go with a small number that you can effectively manage. Access means that you want more people to have education so balancing the two is the problem. Then the other challenge is how the universities would be funded. My belief is that there is the will to fund but the issue is the way we do the funding.

The debate that is going on now is that we believe it is only the government that must do the funding. The government is saying no, funding education is our collective job of the private sector, communities and parents. What we have not been able to do is to achieve a clear-cut way of doing this.

In Nigeria, we are rather debating the need for collective role to do this. I just came back from NEEDS analysis where they looked at the requirements of the varsities. For example, they are looking at populations in some of the varsities.

In Nigeria, the enrollment at ABU Zaria is 49,436; UI has 33,481. UNN has 23,481, but the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, has 316,050. This is one university in Argentina. The National Autonomous University of Mexico has 314,557; University of South Africa, Pretoria, has 250,000 while Cairo University, Giza, Egypt has 200,000.

The largest university in Nigeria doesn’t have unto 50,000 but in South Africa, a single university has 250,000. When we come to Open Universities, Indira Gandhi NOU, India, has 3,500,000; Allama Igbal OU, Pakistan, has 1,121,038; Bangladesh OU, Gazipur, has 600,000 while our National Open University of Nigeria has only 57,759.

That is why I said the need for access is there. There is the argument that one of the things should be to expand the existing ones. But Nigeria in terms of population is a large country.