Falola convokes conference of varsity administrators, dons to assess higher education in Africa

Foremost professor of Histor and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, the University of Texas at Austin, Toyin Falola convoked a regional conference on higher education in Africa.

The conference with the theme: ‘The Impact of Private Universities on Public Universities in Africa’ has the support of the University of Texas at Austin, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The event held at Babcock University, Remo, Ogun State, commenced on Thursday, January 6, and would run through Friday, January 7, 2021.

While speaking on the relevance of the event, Falola stated that “We are studying five countries: Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa. This is not the only meeting we are convening. By July, I am taking over sixty people to Nairobi to look at this issue from East Southern African dimension. We are comparing at various levels of countries, amd further I will be comparing African institutions with Asian ones at a greater level. I am always looking for the best for my people, country and continent. That gives me energy; that makes me restless. What are you; who are you if your people are not developed? What are you using your knowledge for? This drive has been relentless.

“Oil is going to dry out. The Stone Age ended not because there are no more stones; the stones are still there. But new ideas, new knowledge overtook it. We have to be thinking about a knowledge economy. We can use this knowledge economy to drive the overall economy.

“We have many private universities; we want to assess their performance in the long run but at the same time understand the impact they are making in public universities. For instance, is Babcock affecting the University of Lagos and University of Ibadan in terms of student recruitment, performance, efficiency of administration, personnel, student-teacher relationship? This is the first time we are bringing people together from five countries to examine the impacts and the relationships.

“The main goal is to influence policymaking in education in Africa. This is not your regular academic conference. It is a policy-oriented conference. The goal is to cumulate all these policies in those five countries and come out with recommendations that we are going to send to regulators, to ECOWAS, to people funding universities, and to the African Union for them to take whatever they want to take. We will make those recommendations but we cannot enforce them.

“The opinions on funding of private universities by government are divided. Some people are saying if they are private why should government give them money? My argument is that those who go to those private universities are citizens. They are Ugandans; they are Nigerians. Why are they being excluded? We now have a situation in which if a parent sends his child to private elementary, private secondary and private university, what has the public contributed to the education of that citizen who is going to be part of human capacity, productive capacity and contributing to national development?”

Speaking further, he informed that the regional convening is part of a larger project to study the impact of private universities on public universities in Africa. He added that through commissioned research and two regional stakeholder convenings in Nigeria and Kenya, the project seeks to explore the effects of private universities on public academic institutions in Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana.

In his keynote address at the event, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lagos, Professor Oluwatoyin Ogundipe dwelt extensively on the emergence of private university education and development of public universities in Africa. According to him, “Public universities in many regions of Africa have witnessed tremendous growth. However, concerns exist for the following: funding, relevance of curriculum to the needs of the country; the quality of program in relation to societal and industrial needs; capacity for sustainable research; declining condition of service; inadequate infrastructural facilities; enrolment beyond carrying capacity, and alternative routes to provide higher education is establishment of private universities.

“Before Nigerian independence, we had only one university: the University of Ibadan. Later, we came up with other regional universities. Because of the demand for university education in Nigeria, it was increased. Presently we have about 203 universities in Nigeria. The increased demand for university education in Africa is a very serious one. Because of the need to meet that demand, then the private universities came on board. In Nigeria, we have over 2.1 million students in all the universities and only five per cent are in the private universities. The demand will continue to increase. Not all students that apply to come into the universities are given the opportunity to do so.

“There is also the issue of ineffective policy support which is a very big problem in this part of the world. Generally no formal relationship exists between private and public universities. Many universities in Nigeria prefer to have partnerships with foreign universities. Some lecturers from public universities unofficially work for hours in private institutions. There is the need to develop a new and healthy competitive relationship for improvement of standards. The standards need to be improved in the private universities and some of the public universities. Initially there are linkages and staff exchange, sharing of facilities, joint committee membership. In Nigeria, NUC started something whereby new universities were linked up with older ones wherein the old university would mentor the new university. In the process there is the exchange of staff and students, facilities, seminars.

“In public universities, problems include frequent strike actions, limited admission quota. The government would set up a university, release a start-up fund of maybe N2 billion, and that will be all. What about having good facilities that would be needed to run the universities to be able to compete with other universities at the local and global level? We never consider that. This also affects the availability of technology facilities. These facilities are very expensive. Private universities are perceived to have limited faculty members; they scout for lecturers from public universities, even for non-teaching staff from other public universities. They have limited programs.

“Many of them start with less expensive fields of study. When we carried out  study, we found out that the program that is most expensive to run is dentistry, not even medicine. Many private universities do not have the needed facilities. Many of their programs are expensive. The gap between demand and availability of spaces in both private and public universities also include: enhanced access to university education, innovations in curricula, increased employability of graduates, provide new models of educational deliveries, functional libraries, adequate teaching classroom space, sufficient furnishing of staff, adequate laboratory equipment, adequate provision of catering services for students. These are facilities you get in good private universities which are absent in many public universities.

“Governance models in public universities derive their organizations from laws stemming from the relevance of government systems. The governor of a state can decide to start a university; there is nothing NUC can do about it about it. In some instances, you have three universities in a state and the state is struggling to fund them. This will always lead to interference from the government. In Kenya, a vice-chancellor was appointed and the secretary of the Minister of Education told the university council that it cannot appoint the vice-chancellor. We have the same thing in Nigeria. There is a lot influence by the government in the running of the universities. In private universities, they have large boards of trustees who determine the organisation of their institutions.”

He therefore called on all the relevant authorities to help arrest the disturbing state of public universities not only in Nigeria but in other parts of Africa, just as he noted that private institutions should also build capacity and facilities.

Also speaking, one of the participants, Dr. Hannah Muzee, Research Fellow at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa, stated that: “What the statistics show is that you tend to see private universities springing up. The question is why. One of answers comes from the economic aspect in that education has tended to be more commercialized now. It has become more and more expensive. As this becomes more expensive, people look for more alternatives. Later on it was discovered that it has become entrepreneurial. The private universities tend to come from more entrepreneurial aspect. But again, the basic rationale is to contribute to the education of Africans. The quality of knowledge production between private and public universities varies from one country to the other. But there are definitely some private universities that have surpassed the norm. it is more relatable to the fact that even when you compare, private universities seem to be more efficient. Public universities suffer from the same diseases that public institutions suffer from. These discrepancies come in.

“On the impact of this conference on policymaking in education, I believe that everything begins with a conversation. This conference is the beginning of that conversation. This will eventually lead to an impact on policy. It brings together different stakeholders. At the end of the day, you want to see an Africa that has intelligentsia who can contribute to the development of the liberation of Africa and its people. The beginning of that conversation is what this conference is doing and that is very important.”

The conference was organized into sessions which particularly were heralded by country research reports from South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. The event also drew participants which included foremost university administrators, scholars and policy influencers from across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa. The various panels zeroed in on issues surrounding the impacts of private universities on public universities in Africa, reforming public universities in the area of management and challenges, the role of founders and donors, the impact of staff unionism in universities, among others.

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