The authorities should ensure the learning environment is decent and inviting
With the suspension of strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), students of public universities are now resuming on their various campuses. While we hope for measures that will put an end to what has become an annual disruption in university calendar in Nigeria, the state of most campuses should also be of concern to the authorities of these institutions. From available reports across the country, most of the structures housing the different faculties and departments in these institutions are unkempt and unmaintained. Many of the hostels where the young men and women are sheltered are unfit for human habitation. The lecturers’ quarters in most of these campuses are deteriorating due to lack of repair. These are issues that impact on the quality of tertiary education in Nigeria.
In most of the campuses, the toilets are not working and where they do water is not available. The rooms are overcrowded. During the rainy season, many of the roofs leak. On one campus, according to a recent report in a national newspaper, “the hostels, which are located at the end of the administrative and lecture blocks, are surrounded by bushes while the forecourt of the two hostels is waterlogged. It was observed that the paint on the buildings had faded, the walls cracked and the windows as well as sliding doors were half eaten by termites.” There have also been reports of armed robbers attacking hostels and carting away students’ belongings.
There are several reasons for this problem on our campuses, but ironically some are inflicted by the government. The growth trend in the number of federal and state universities and polytechnics is expansive instead of developmental. As a nation, we seem to like building large structures without the least care about how they will be maintained in the future. Without an active real-time maintenance department, every such institution goes into disrepair and becomes a nightmare. That is how slums and ghettoes are born. The danger of such dark places is that they tend to breed murky characters and nasty ways. Perhaps it is time for an independent maintenance audit of our public buildings, especially the federal and state universities/polytechnics. The result is likely to be a monumental scandal.
While we call on the Alumni associations of these institutions and other public-spirited people in the private sector to rally for urgent assistance, the problem must be tackled holistically. The main thrust of the physical decay of these institutions is first the caliber of administrators who superintend them. There is of course the central question of what quality of minds will emerge from these squalid environments.
A certain lack of creativity is a hallmark of the new breed of vice chancellors of universities and rectors of the polytechnics. They are more contractors and politicians than decent academic leaders and managers of scarce resources. One way in which these institutions can manage their maintenance and general management services would be to create student work/study programmes in which interested students get hourly paid employment to be part of these services. That way, they earn income while being a part of the upkeep of campus municipal services. This would of course be only complementary to the compulsory presence of well-equipped maintenance and parks and gardens’ units.
Perhaps in addition to all these, the rudiments of decent living and healthy environmental habits should form part of the general studies in our institutions of higher learning to stem the current tide of a national elite that mostly lacks environmental decency.
