The university system in Nigeria is failing drastically. Universities now produces half-baked graduates, first class students that can not defend their certificates, we also have the issue of cultism, students bribing their lecturers, female students sleeping with their lecturers, drug use, and the fact that a lot of students even the non-students practice internet fraud. I am going to talk on most of these and a few other issues.
A University is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in various academic disciplines. Universities typically provide undergraduate education and postgraduate education. The word “university” is derived from the latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which roughly means “community of teacher and scholars”.
Lots of things to discuss in the university system but I am going to start with the students. The students in a Nigerian university are mostly in groups, we usually have the ones from a rich background, the ones who do illegal work in school and are also part of the rich gangs, the ones who do regular work like repairing of phones, selling half used products, doing make-up, etc. we also have the ones who belongs to one cult or another, some causing or wreaking havoc and bullying other students, we have the God fearing ones and finally we have the ones who don’t belong to any part of the above mentioned.
Now not all of them come into school like this, for some it is due to peer pressure or just wanting to flow with the trend. Some of them come from good homes with good allowances but once they get to school they start to shift, they start to do things like miss their lectures, stop going to church, e.t.c. this can also be caused by the kind of hostel they stay in especially for those that stay off campus and for some it can be their roommate. For example a friend of mine got an admission into a university, she applied for the hostel on campus but she didn’t get one so the parents secured an accommodation off campus for her, after some time in school she started changing so I went to see her in her hostel and when I got there the first thing I saw was some boys smoking weed in front of the hostel, after a while staying there, her roommate came in and the roommate started talking to me and telling me how she has a boyfriend that she spends a lot of time with and how she misses classes a lot, and I was like I refuse to believe and the next thing she said was I introduced her to the guy in one of the parties I took her to, I was like what party and she said there was a night party in town and she took her there that’s how she met the guy she was dating. My point here is that this girl wasn’t like this before but due to the peer pressure from her roommate and probably the boys from her hostel she caved in. Now it’s not only the students, some lecturers also do this to students, there are some lecturers that collects money to upgrade your score or to make sure you don’t fail while some sleep with the females. Of course there are some lecturers that the female students might approach first so they can get a better score but nevertheless the lecturer still threatens some students. For example, a friend of mine said there was this lecturer that said he doesn’t give an A or a B to his student, that they should just be fighting for a C but he said after the exam there were people getting an A and B and he said they were confused so they went to meet a girl and she told them she slept with the lecturer, a guy who he called a G guy said he paid the man money for him to get that score and he said they went to his office and they said it jokingly to the lecturer that a girl got an A and he said the man simply told them “and so, can you do what she did?”. Now imagine that, a normal student that would have read day and night but because he or she didn’t sleep with the lecturer or give him money ends up getting a C or D, isn’t that unfair?
We also have the issue of strike in our universities. We can have the NASU strike, ASUU strike, or even an internal strike. Series of strikes can spoil a student’s moral. Imagine a student that is supposed to have an exam in a week and is fully prepared and the next thing he hears is that the school has been closed down due to the ASUU strike and the strike goes on for over two months then you call it off, such a student will be destabilized. Or an instance where a student is supposed to be in school for only four years but because of the strikes the student has been in school for over six years and he or she is not a medical or a law student and he is not still through, these things can make a student think that what is the point in trying again and start making them find alternatives and sometimes these alternatives can be internet fraud, armed robbery, e.t.c. There is also the problem of unemployment, in the Guardian newspaper, it says and I quote “a total of 41,032(45.72%) of the 89,755 people who responded to the survey on jobberman.com said they were unemployed graduates”, this result makes some students think that after studying in school for years and going through all the stress and lecturer problems and also strikes they might not still get a job so what’s the point. I have a friend who said that nowadays most parents and people say finish with a first class or a second class upper nd you will find a job but in reality there are many first class and even second class upper students that are unemployed. Now some students take this news seriously and pay less attention to their study instead they commit to anything they can find in school to make money and this can also be bad. There is a friend of mine and he was talking to me one day and said school is now nonsense and I was like why and he said lecturers are just killing him, the next thing he said was it is hard balancing everything and I was like balancing what and he said going to lecturers, reading your book, taking care of your needs, creating time for women and still trying to make money for himself. I told him that you can just use your allowance and when you are done with school you can go for any girl you want, he just laughed and said you are not feeling fine and laughed and asked why and he said what is the probability that he won’t be unemployed like a lot of people or that he might get a job with a small pay and wont still be able to have the girl he wants, he then said he would rather make the money now and enjoy himself then he can invest the rest instead of giving his time and intellect to making someone richer. Now his point of view is not bad, only few students think like this, most of them just take the risk in doing criminal act just for fashion or to show others that they have arrived. However he wanted to use the money to invest and set himself up that way he doesn’t have to work under someone and I thought to myself that I also don’t want to work to make someone richer, I would love to have my own business. I saw a post on instagram from a millionaire mentor and he said why would you want to wake up as early as 5 am in the morning, go through traffic, use your time and intelligence just to make another man richer, I also saw another quote that said an average millionaire has at least 3 income streams, as a student I think most people should have this vision of starting themselves up and using the money they gain from their work to invest in their selves. As a student we shouldn’t let our Grade point(G.P) determine our future success and we don’t have to wait for employment we can set up ourselves, there are business opportunities everywhere we just have to seize it.
Finally we have the issue of bad government policy. In Nigeria, different government with different governing policies and sometimes this affects students and the university as a whole. For example, in my university we have this issue with management students because it is an agricultural school and the federal government said that all schools should strictly abide to its name, that is if your school is a school of technology, it should be purely technological and if it is an agricultural school its should strictly be agricultural. Now my school cant admit any more management sciences students because of the decree and the problem now is most of their lecturers are leaving because they can’t wait for all of them to finish then be left jobless and moreover most of them have received letters from other universities. Most of the students now are purely into yahoo work or buying and selling or a Ponzi scheme because we believe that our certificate would have less value since we have been scrapped. I was discussing with one of my friends and he said we are finished and I asked how and he said imagine you are an employer and someone came to interview for a position and after you check his file you try to confirm and find out that the university is not doing management courses and the person should tell me that “ehn, they scrapped us later but you can check a particular year within a certain period you will find my school there” he said, would you give he or she a job and I laughed and said no…and we both said we are finished.