You are reading a story. But wait till it starts. It starts and ends with the Ahmadu Bello University, though. That institution is located in Zaria, Kaduna State. It is 50 years old. It marked the anniversary of that number last November. It did with fanfare. The fanfare had intellectual contents, mind you. Add “quality” to “intellectual”. Now the mix is right. For that was exactly what the golden jubilee anniversary of ABU was. It wasn't a jamboree, not a celebration of wind as is witnessed in some other places nowadays. Thousands graduated on that occasion, and VIPs were honoured, too. The latter, as you can imagine, were dressed in academic gowns, with hoods around their necks, mortar board caps sitting gingerly on their heads, and they got honorary certificates.
Note: A visitor to the Senate building of ABU is your protagonist. He was walking towards the main entrance of the building when he heard someone saying, Give, give way! He stopped, and turned around to see a female security officer. She had asked everyone heading for the same main entrance to give way. Your protagonist didn't understand why. So he asked the security officer: Why did you say I should give way, and for whom? The officer had asked in return, a smile on her face: You mean you didn't see the person coming towards you? Who? Your protagonist had asked. The security officer pointed. Your protagonist looked in the same direction; an elderly gentleman in white babanriga who had come out of the Senate building, was walking past. One wouldn't consider separating him from the rest of the people around, if the security officer had not pointed at him. He looked simple, without airs, yet distinguished. Your protagonist turned to the security officer again, with a questioning look. He still didn't get the point. Are you a student here and you don't know him? the officer asked. Your protagonist said, No, I'm not a student, but I intend to be. Then that's your Vice-Chancellor, the officer said. On that note, your protagonist thanked the officer, and both parted on a cordial note.
So it was that one of the earliest and dramatic encounters your protagonist had with ABU was with its number one citizen, Professor Abdullahi Mustapha. Well, your protagonist had other encounters, too, milder ones, and that was at the time he applied for a postgraduate programme at ABU days later. His first surprise was that he could get all of that done on the internet. He had expected to be given loads of paper as the application form. But he met the form on the Internet. Filling application form on the Internet, in the comfort of his office, without having to grapple with paper work was a novelty to him, especially in this part of the world. That's because the last time he filled one of such postgraduate application forms more than a decade earlier, the layers of papers were more than what insurance companies would issue. So filling a PG application form in seven, eight simple steps, and pressing the SUBMIT button thereafter, was exciting, almost unbelievable. Then when he had a problem in the course of filling his form, your protagonist called a dedicated phone number he copied from the application form page, and someone picked the phone immediately. As for the man at the other end who attended to applicants that had challenges, his response was satisfactory.
That made your protagonist decide to ask questions when next he was on the campus of the institution. That happened days after ABU marked its 50 years of existence. He questioned a student who was about to round off her four-year course of study: “What's your impression about standard in general at ABU”, your protagonist had asked. In her department, the undergraduate said, so many things work better than before due to the effort the current administration has put in. The current Vice-Chancellor, she further added, (without any prompting or reference to the VC by your protagonist) has been trying. He ensures that academic standard is raised and serious and high quality academic work is going on. And she had nodded in agreement, when your protagonist told of his experience in the process of filling his application form for a postgraduate programme. That experience was a glimpse into the workings of ABU, and it left an impression on the mind of your protagonist, because he had had encounters with students of other universities, too. There is one university, (name withheld), whose student told your protagonist that the sitting VC had run the institution down. There is nothing called integrity, or a commitment to administering a decent institution that everyone believes in, the student had added, referring to his VC. In fact, he referred to him as “cash-and -carry VC”, whatever that might mean. On the airwaves, however, employees of the university in question made the same compliants in the course of their interviews with journalists. And there was the example of students in the same institution who were told to leave their classrooms, almost a year into the programme for which they had paid all the necessary fees. Reason? The school authorities informed them that their admission letters were fake. For months, the airwave had been agog with coverage of students' demonstration about the poor level of management and academic standard in the institution.
The essence of this piece is to note the controversies that surround every aspect of university life in the country, and to state that, sometimes, small things that count and are essential to the making of the reputation of an institution are being left unattended to, while so much noise is made about other issues. Foremost of such is funding. Sometimes, the noise about funding takes attention away from simple day-to-day delivery of services that are not going on in many of the nation's tertiary institutions. Truth is, raising standard, quality and integrity of academic programmes may not necessarily be the direct consequence of the fund that is available, but how well the little there is, is administered. And there's something about ensuring that services are rendered as they should. There's a code of conduct, too, a standard that the management of any academic institution needs to set and abide by. It has become embarrassing that in spite of the noise about conduct, or ethics that has been said to be below expectation, the quality of management in many tertiary institutions in Nigeria remains poor. One would think cases of the eyesores that the nation could point to in these institutions, are enough reasons for their management to sit up and jealously guard the name, and the integrity of the certificates they award. But this has not happened, in most cases.
Getting the managements of the nation's academic institutions organised in such a way that everyone, home and abroad, trusts their names and certificates doesn't sound like what requires all the fund that can never be enough under any circumstances. Getting staff to do that little task they are paid to do as efficiently and as conscientiously as they should, a thing that leaves a lasting impression in the mind of their contacts, doesn't sound like what more funds only can achieve. And getting faculties to work in such a way that confidence is returned to academic institutions doesn't sound like something for which all the funds in the treasury of the Central Bank of Nigeria are needed. At least, that's not the way it is in the foreign academic institutions that get listed in the top 1000 universities in the world. The point is clearer here: Your protagonist called a mobile phone number he had copied from the Abeokuta branch of the West Africa Examinations Council on the organisation's website in October; the person at the other end said it was a private number, not WAEC's, and that so many people had also called his number. An email sent to the Lagos headquarters of the organisation had been without a reply, and of all the six phone numbers listed for the Lagos headquarters, none worked. That's an example. The reader can imagine the kind of impression such leaves in a mind. The same applies to many government establishments across the country.
