Nigeria: Our Father Who Art in Abuja

13 December 2017
opinion

Nigeria is again in the throes of the annual rituals of national strikes by workers in public universities. As of now, the non-academic staffs have locked up the classrooms in almost all Federal universities. The yuletide session is not allowing many Nigerians to realise that like the harmattan haze, the strike session is with us. The culprit, according to the workers, is the Federal Government which has reneged on earlier agreements on staff welfare. After decades of continuous and almost yearly strikes, the Nigerian university system is now poorly rated among leading universities in the world.

Yet there was a time in this country when American degrees, except those from the leading ones like Harvard and MIT, were rated as inferior to most Nigerian university degrees. In 1973, there was even a national debate whether graduates from America and the old Soviet Union should be permitted to participate in the compulsory National Youths Service Corps. Because of this hostility and unfairness, some Nigerian students, who were graduates of Russian universities, had to travel to other countries, especially the U.S. and the United Kingdom to bag additional degrees to prove their worth. Now here we are being rated far below the standard of most countries in the world including states of the former Soviet Union.

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