No student should spend extra time in a university because of accreditation woes
Dahiru Adamu Bara had glowed with the prefix of a doctor since his days in the secondary school. His classmates tagged him with it and he took it as a badge not only of honour among his peers but also of hope.
After all, his older brother, now an associate professor of medicine, was a role model and he followed his trail. But through patience and many night oil lamps that lit and expired, Bara gained admission to the University of Abuja to study medicine.
In a few years, that is, within the mandatory six years, he would don the graduate’s colourful gown, sweep up the podium to pick up his certificate, pose with family and friends in a shower of camera flashes and walk into his future with the name Dr. Dahiru Adamu Bara no longer a fantasy.
Well, it remained a fantasy for six additional years as Dara witnessed others step in and out of the university portals with their certificates. He waited for his with the tenacity of Job.
The delay was simple but hints at the endemic decay in our educational system. The medical school into which Dara was admitted had not secured the accreditation of the National Universities Commission (NUC) and the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria.
This was no fault of Bara’s and the other 29 students who were granted admission into the university. This raises a number of questions that have haunted our educational system, especially at the university level. Why would our universities grant admission to students when they know that they are not in a position to pour out credible or competent young men and women into the labour market?
What qualifies a university programme accreditation is known to the institutions’ authorities. They include the quality of the faculty, the facilities, the student-teacher ratio as well as other environmental factors. These qualities are no mysteries to the universities, and many Nigerians still wonder why students are made to groan under these indignities.
Sometimes, students are admitted while a university still savours its accreditation, but a student is stuck when the NUC withdraws its accreditation before the students are due for graduation. A university does not lose its qualifications overnight. It is when the authorities fail to keep vigil over its disappearing virtues that it seems to be blindsided into a fall from grace.
If the good staff are making their exits, they ought to replace them. If the library is falling into grey years, they ought to update it, or if the laboratories are short of equipment or competent hands, they ought to adjust budgets to them. When nothing happens, the school falls out of favour and the students suffer.
Prospective students who now outnumber available spaces in our institutions do not worry over accreditation. They may have spent years at home, and so cling to any offer. They become victims of institutional failures like the absence of accreditation. Young people should be warned with the example of Bara and his peers about the consequences of not looking before they leap.
Some universities have been known to take advantage of the corrupt society to gain accreditation. In the name of giving the visiting accreditors to the universities some sort of comfort allowances, they impress the assessors to look the other way when the universities fall short in some critical areas. The consequences of this are grave, and it partly explains why the graduates in our universities have not lived up to the certificates they brandish.
Part of the problem may not lie in the universities themselves, especially as it relates to state-owned universities and some of their private counterparts. Funding has remained a perennial handicap. The budgets fall short and federal and state allocations have not taken cognisance of the challenges the schools face each year. The school authorities can do little to finagle their ways through some of their financial alleys.
We have also witnessed as a nation how some university authorities have shown cold eyes to the decay of their institutions because they are busy helping themselves with “loose” funds that may have averted disasters for the students’ education.
Dr. Bara’s story should be a template for sobriety. He said only 18 of the original 30 students were able to wait out the challenge. He himself tried to get out but his attempts to transfer to the University of Maiduguri and Bayero University in Kano failed. He said some of his peers could not handle the emotional and financial pressures and fell by the way side. Intimate failures also occur. Bara confessed that he had to surrender his courtship to an intended.
While we are thankful that the era where strikes kept our students at home for whole years seems behind us, a new nightmare may be creeping in.
