By Lasisi Olagunju

There was a time in this country when professors earned more than federal permanent secretaries. That was before Nigeria happened to itself. A professor in 1973 was on a consolidated annual salary of £3,000; permanent secretaries earned £2,800. Today, the most senior professors do not take home N450,000 per month; federal permanent secretaries gross N1.3m monthly. From that gross, they pay this tax, and pay that rate and then net between N900,000 and N950,000 – more than twice the pay of the longest serving professors in Nigeria.

My source of those perm pec figures is a retired permanent secretary. He couldn’t have lied against himself. This ex-civil servant and his colleagues in service are likely to see the comparison I just made here and say my judgement or logic is perverse, that they suffer too. If such is said, I would borrow a proverb from my Fulani friend and retort that brides cry, hyena’s victims cry too but their tears are not of the same taste.

I am not the only one who has read a viral text on professors queuing for N35,000 loans to buy food rations in UNILAG. I forwarded it to some of my ogas in Ibadan and Ife last week. I also sent it to serving and retired professors in other places, fishing for gists. They all replied confirming the deflation of their tyres. One of them texted me: “I retired this year (from a federal university) after 40 years and six months, 20 of those years as a full professor, and on a monthly salary of N403,000. Today, you know what a bag of rice costs, not to talk of petrol which sells at N1,200 per litre. Now, how would one sustain a modicum of decent existence and not borrow?” I didn’t know what word of consolation to give. Another professor wrote me: “I will retire shortly and for people like me who focused on serving the system, it is good to hear these stories of post-retirement deprivation, obviously worse than pre-retirement poverty, even if close to Armageddon!”

I wrote in the first paragraph above that before 1974 in Nigeria, a professor earned £3,000 per annum. Today, my professor’s monthly salary of N403,000 translates to $243 per month. In one year, his pay would be $2,900 (or £2,169). A quick check: the purchasing power of £100 in 1973 is that of £1,242.24 today. At parity with the British pound sterling, £3,000 (Nigerian pounds) of 51 years ago equals £37,267.2 of today. How much would that be in naira terms? N83,129,657.16 per annum or N6,927,471.43 per month. If poverty reigns in places we call the ivory tower, those figures offer some explanations. If crisis and restlessness define industrial relations in our universities, it is because the teachers there are paid slave wages.

How did our smart university teachers get left behind? The English man calls female goats Does. In the very unfair, iniquitous political economy of traditional goat keeping, productive Does never belong to the absent. The goat of the one not present must always be male, the unprofitable specie that neither replicates nor multiplies itself. Varsity teachers had no seat where the knife portioned out the collective yam in the 1970s. They still do not in 2024 – although the system humours some of them as hirelings. They engage them as night soil men, services which Roman orator, Cicero, described as “vulgar” and which “incur people’s ill will.” They are never there where real actions take place. And, if you are not present or represented where decisions that affect you are being taken, your portion of pounded yam will always be smaller than the smallest. And because teachers are perpetual outsiders, their fowls get randomly eaten by weasels of power; their sheep by leopards of advantage.

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There was a time in the United States when university teachers were like they lived in today’s Nigeria. They were forced by their economic circumstances to remain less than they should be. “In every teacher, a struggle for survival is going on.” Donald W. Rogers, who authored that line, started his February 1948 journal piece with this sad quote: “one can’t get rich at teaching.” My headline above was the headline he wrote. I took mine from his. Rogers wrote about teachers and two kinds of poverty which he said shared causal relations: “One can become so poor in goods while teaching as to become poor as a teacher.” But a society that pauperizes its teachers pulverizes its future. I agree with Roger’s position that the “quality of a college’s product is a function of its teachers.” Quality stands with teachers, quality falls with teachers. And it will fall where teachers struggle to live, because, as Rogers wrote, “greatness of vision and the capacity to fulfill it rarely flourish in privation.”

Between 1948 when Rogers wrote his article and now, a lot that is positive has happened to teachers in the United States. Teachers there now eat their eggs, yolk and albumin. Their “struggle for survival” of 76 years ago has been replaced with competition for excellence. Here, the stories we hear and read distress daily. The latest is the spectacle of professors and other PhDs at the University of Lagos shown on cooperative queues seeking access to loans of N35,000 to buy Ounje Eko, a psychedelic name for IDP rations. They need the money to feed their needy families. The war of survival is not being fought on the Lagos front alone; there are battlefields anywhere you see signboards that suggest schooling and lecturing. A senior professor of medicine at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, told me early this year that what Nigeria loses daily to the outside are not just young doctors and nurses, but also the senior ones, the trainers. The ones healthy enough to escape are almost all gone. But why? Why not? We may be ignorant of so many things but not the knowledge that the indentured is resource poor.

This rain beating the vulture of the Nigerian academic started a long time ago. As a university undergraduate almost four decades ago, I had a lecturer who repeatedly described his job choice as “an oath of poverty.” As a Marketing student at the polytechnic some 40 years ago, I had a young teacher who would pause his Economics lecture midway, throw away the chalk in his hand and shout “I need money!” He died shortly after I left that school. And, it wasn’t that he was an unsteady character. It was his material condition that ailed his balance.

I encountered all the above years and years ago. The experiences are as fresh as now; the cancer has metastasized. To mark the 50th anniversary of the University of Ibadan in 1998, IFRA-Nigeria organized an international conference on ‘The Dilemma of Post-Colonial Universities’. Professor Ayuba Hudu of Ahmadu Bello University delivered a paper at that conference on the working conditions of staff of Nigerian universities, using his ABU environment as his field of study. Sobering as Hudu’s findings and conclusions are, they are what we’ve always known to be true. In one instance, he discovers that as of the time of his study, “Ahmadu Bello University continues to pay N800 as night allowance to senior lecturers on research trips while officers of the same rank in the civil service are paid N7,000.” He quotes a lecturer: “Both my remuneration and working facilities are grossly inadequate. A hungry man can’t enjoy his work. As at now, lecturers do not have any living conditions. A group of people whose work demands great mental work should be properly paid so that undue external pressures for survival, decent appearance, transportation problems etc. are not allowed to distract their concentration. Until such is done, it will not be fair to talk of their work output – especially when the facilities and working environment are non-existent.”

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That was 26 years ago. The situation is worse today – especially with education becoming of less importance on the scale of preference of our governments. But, what can the teachers do to cleanse the clogged arteries of their vocation? The best of them do not belong to where hard decisions that impact their lives are taken. Even if their log plunges into the depth of power and stays for ages in that water, it will never become a crocodile. And the Nigerian establishment is a mix of crocodiles and sharks.

So, will this tragedy continue till resurrection day? Sometimes a problem charts more than one road to its solution. In Jane Watson’s ‘Three Hungry Men and Strategies for Problem Solving’ (1988), we encounter a mathematical problem that offers so many avenues for possible solution. Watson gives the problem: “Three tired and hungry men went to sleep with a bag of apples. One man woke up, ate 1/3 of the apples, then went back to sleep. Later a second man woke up and ate 1/3 of the remaining apples, then went back to sleep. Finally, the third man woke up and ate 1/3 of the remaining apples. When he was finished there were 8 apples left. How many apples were in the bag originally?” Those who were asked to answer the question varied in age and social status. Some of the examined worked backward (or forward) with fractions, some without fractions and the two groups were right. One attempted the solution with a diagram, another used algebra, yet another used the ratio concept, and all came up with what they believed solved the problem. The correct answer is 27 but the examiner got from his ‘students’ 24 different strategies. In the end, some got it right, some got it wrong but all participated in finding a solution to a common problem. That is the approach I recommend here. The issue with our university system must be seen as a troubling nut that must be cracked. And, all stakeholders, including the government, must be willing to come to the table with whatever key they have for the iron door.

At the core of this problem is funding. Why can’t our country’s government accord education very high funding priority as it is giving the Lagos-Calabar coastal road? Adequate funding of the universities is a must if we will exit poverty and create equal access for children of the rich and those of the poor. The Tinubu government has a student loan programme. It will get it right if it fulfills a number of ‘ifs’: if the programme is widened to accommodate all who need and want the loans; if greed, cronyism and corruption are not allowed to kill it; if the loan consistently and adequately finances a student’s education till graduation; if repayment is not expected to come from a graduate’s joblessness; and, if it is adequately funded, public universities will, with peace of mind, charge appropriate fees. And, if the universities charge reasonably for services they render, they will be free and solvent enough to meet their obligations to staff, students and the society. Otherwise, we roll from one crisis into another.

We must avoid another season of disruption in our public university system. It will add to the poverty of the poor. ASUU has issued another strike notice and, you can’t ask the teachers who suffer willful deprivation not to go on strike. It is the only tool they have. Cries and yells cannot move a government that feigns loss of hearing. The union said last week that it had extended the 21-day ultimatum it earlier gave the government on August 18 by 14 more days within which it expected all the lingering issues to be addressed to the satisfaction of the union and its members. What are those issues? They are about adequate funding of the universities to enable them perform their duties as catalysts of development. ASUU’s demands include better working conditions for staff of the universities, release of their withheld three-and-a-half months’ salaries due to the 2022 strike action; release of unpaid salaries for staff on sabbatical, part time, and adjunct appointments affected by the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) and release of outstanding third-party deductions such as check-off dues and cooperative contributions.

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Yet, we cannot discuss and achieve national development without tackling the rot in our universities. Derek Bok, author of ‘Higher Education in America’, writes that the universities “have assumed an importance far beyond their role in earlier times.” He writes that in the modern world, colleges and universities help “to strengthen our democracy by educating its future operators.” He adds that the universities are “the country’s chief supplier of three ingredients essential to national progress—new discoveries in science, technology, and other fields of inquiry; expert knowledge of the kind essential to the work of most important institutions; and well-trained adults with the skills required to practice the professions…” The most prosperous state in the United States is California; with a nominal GDP of $3.987 trillion in 2024, it is the world’s fifth largest economy. It owes its prosperity to its wise investments in education. It is home to 35 of the world’s 50 leading AI companies. That California is “home to the most Fortune 500 companies” is a function of its creation of a robust knowledge-based economy baked by its universities.

The Nigerian system would, instead, wonder why we, at all, need professors and the universities that habour them. It would justify its stance using the law and common sense. Is it not true that the constitution which provides the framework for the government and all it does with us does not recognise colleges and universities as trainers and producers of leaders? Education “up to school certificate level” is all you need to be president of Africa’s most populous country and one of the continent’s largest economies. It will therefore be wasteful, even suicidal, to empower the universities and the heretics within their walls. Is it not historically true of our context that higher education is a pollutant of the mind? Does it not create an irreverent citizenry that asks too many questions? Do the universities not produce a population of critics who frown when knees of democracy are made to bend deep into the ground in supplication to raw power?

“How painful it is to have to go on living, despised by all, even by yourself, and at the same time keep up a brave pretence that you not only think well of yourself, but even regard yourself as a decently useful public servant.” Raphael O’Leary wrote that passage of pain and put it under a piece he entitled “Pity the Poor Teacher.” O’Leary’s “poor” speaks of a different kind of poverty – not the slave-wage or wage-slave burden crushing the Nigerian professor. Where I come from, we say what-shall-we-eat comes first before what-shall-we-do. A hungry, ill and deprived professor will profess nothing positive. His teaching will be an any-how teaching. And, if “how we teach is what we teach” as said by John H. MacArthur, a former dean of Harvard Business School, then it means we can’t use our schools to kill poverty or get our own Silicon Valley nor shall we ever escape the present dank, dark cave of negativity.