BY BRIGHT JACOB
A senior lecturer in the Department of Petroleum Engineering, University of Benin, Onaiwu Oduwa, has described the announcement by the National Universities Commission that Nigeria has only 100,000 lecturers attending to 2.1 million students, as unfortunate, and a situation that requires an urgent solution.
The NUC had said through its Deputy Executive Secretary, Administration, Chris Maiyaki, that 100,000 academic staff members were attending to 2.1 million students in Nigerian universities, and that the Federal Government embargo on employment should not include universities.
While answering questions from The Point, Onaiwu blamed the fallout of the shortfall of lecturers on the circular from the office of the Head of Service placing an embargo on employment in the civil service, and then remarked that as a matter of necessity, universities should begin to employ more academic staff.
“They should employ more staff. They should employ more lecturers. At the moment, the HOS is refusing universities to employ new staff. They said the “old” universities cannot employ new staff, that they should make do with what they have,” he said.
The university lecturer also assessed the employment situation in UNIBEN, and concluded that the employment process involving the academic staff and non-academic of the school was lopsided.
“As we speak, UNIBEN has a shortage of lecturers. When they were recruiting years back, they employed mainly non-academic staff. We have almost close to 7,000 non-academic staff as against the less than 2,000 academic staff. The ratio of university employment should be that for every four lecturers there should be one non-academic staff member. Unfortunately, the reverse is the case for the employment process in UNIBEN.”
Onaiwu also narrated what happened when the University of Benin made a request to the HOS for the employment of more academic hands.
According to him, that request met with a brick wall, saying, “When UNIBEN made a request to the HOS for more employment of academic staff, the HOS said there was an embargo on employment, and we cannot employ them. They said we should make do with what we have.”
He, thereafter, talked about the dangers of not having enough academic staff, and how the school tried to fix the problem.
“After that request was declined by the HOS, UNIBEN knew that a shortage of lecturers would have negative effects on the school, especially during accreditation exercises.
“Accreditation exercises will come and you will fail in it if you don’t have enough lecturers. This is because of what is called “staff-student” ratio. UNIBEN then stated to its non-academic staff who have second class upper, and above, in their first degree, and those who have a PhD, that if they want to be lecturers, they can convert,” he said.
Giving further insight on the appeal made by the school, Onaiwu said that after that exercise, “about 200 non-academic staff were added to our number”, which was still insufficient.
He said that number was “not even enough to employ adjunct lecturers for some departments that were in critical need, just as a stopgap measure.”
He criticised the Federal Government for focusing its attention on the employment of new lecturers for the new schools being established, which is one of the grievances of the Academic Staff Union of Universities. He stated that the NUC was not forthcoming with the whole truth about the lecturer-student ratio in Nigerian universities.
“The Federal Government is only employing for the so-called new universities they’re establishing, and ASUU has been saying stop establishing new universities, the old ones have not been funded properly. So, the NUC, what they said is just one-tenth of the truth. Let them break everything down, you will find out that you need close to 500,000 lecturers,” the don noted.
When asked about the effort the government was making to compensate university lecturers as a result of the pressure on them, Onaiwu replied, “That is what brought about the issue of excess workload; just like earned allowance we are always talking about. They are saying that since we are understaffed, let them pay excess workload. But you do not pay for the excess workload as and when due, and it is too small. The job is killing everybody.
“Due to the shortage of lecturers, there’s a gap or disconnect between students and lecturers called the “last gap” number, and you’re unable to infuse all the quotients in the student to make that person complete”
“The government should change the salary structure for university teachers. They have upgraded those of the polytechnic lecturers who even earn more than the university lecturers,” he added.
On the dangers the lack of an adequate number of lecturers portend for the Nigerian university system, Onaiwu said, “first and foremost, you’re overworking the lecturers. The life expectancy for lecturers will drop. This is why some lecturers, when they retire at 70, before two or three years, they die because of the accumulation of stress.
“The quality of lecturing will not be the way it’s supposed to be. There’s what is called “deep-centered” learning or “student-centered” learning, where you as the lecturer make the lecture more interactive, and students are involved and also make contributions. Can you do that for a larger class?” he asked.
Onaiwu noted that when the quality of learning dropped, half-baked students would be produced.
He also compared his time as a student with present realities, saying, “Teaching a student is more than just standing in front of a board. When we were in school, we were about 42 in a class. Now you see a class of 130 to 150 students. We were not half-baked because our number was not much then. In fact, our lecturers knew the names of all the students. They (lecturers) called us by our names. Unfortunately, that is not the case today.”
On the importance of producing well-rounded and complete students, Onaiwu emphasised on the need to not only focus on the intelligent quotient of students, but also on their emotional quotient, social quotient and adversity quotient.
Describing the intelligent quotient, he said that most times, all we did, especially in universities, was to test students based on the level of their intelligence, while paying little attention to the other quotients.
He remarked that what students need to survive in the outside world was not intelligence quotient, but social quotient, which has to do with the ability to work in a team and network with people.
He blamed the rising spate of suicide on the failure of people to balance their emotions which went down.
He said emotional quotient entailed balancing, thereby managing the emotions properly. He described adversity quotient, which he called a critical quotient, as the ability to cope under stress.
Onaiwu concluded that, sadly, students are not evaluated based on all these quotients because of the dearth of lecturers who are also overworked.
“Due to the shortage of lecturers, there’s a gap or disconnect between students and lecturers called the “last gap” number, and you’re unable to infuse all the quotients in the student to make that person complete,” he said.
A labour leader, Adelakin Idowu, also shared some of Onaiwu’s thoughts while speaking to The Point.
He noted that no lecturer should teach more than 25 students in a classroom, and that a lecturer-student ratio where the lecturers were overworked was the catalyst why many youths are now “buying” certificates.
He said “An average teacher should not teach more than 25 students, and at most, thirty students. So, when we have the kind of statistics put out by the NUC in place, how are they (students) going to achieve what the society expects from them when they go to the schools?”
Adelakin, who is of the Amalgamated Union of Public Corporation, Civil Service Technical and Recreational Services Employees, concluded that the unfortunate situation is one of the reasons “why you see students buying certificates and messing up the country.”
