A
Professor in the Department of Microbiology, University of Ilorin, Poju
Akinyanju, tells MOTUNRAYO JOEL, the challenges confronting science
education in Nigeria
President Goodluck Jonathan has said Nigeria needs more universities. What is your stance on the issue of establishing more institutions?
The question is more basic than this. We
should first of all ask ourselves if Nigeria has universities. What we
call universities, to be frank, are not universities. There is very
little research going on in our universities and there are not enough
facilities in our institutions. It is easy to bring students together
and graduate them after four years. But the students will leave with a
wishy-washy training because the teaching facilities and research work
are not there.
I am speaking largely for science-based
disciplines. We need more facilities in our institutions. So, what we
should be asking ourselves is if our universities should be called
universities in the first place. We should think about this before going
ahead to establish more universities.
In the area of science, is Nigeria closing the gap?
We are not even close to where the world
is in science. In the last 15 years, I have taught in about three
universities and on the average, we line up about 20 students to a
microscope. There is very little that can be done with in such a
situation. For example, microbiology in our institutions is at the
molecular biology phase. I am not aware of any functional molecular
biology laboratory in Nigeria and if there are, they must be every few,
or largely dysfunctional. The truth is that you need to be on ground,
doing your own part of the research in order to compete with the outside
world. Facilities such as microscopes and spectro-photo meters are not
available. These facilities are necessary.
The Federal Government often says it funds public tertiary institutions adequately. Do you agree with this?
It is a little bit of both, the
universities and the federal government are at fault. I will explain
why. For example, there is no sufficient money for universities to run a
proper molecular biology laboratory. To run this type of laboratory,
you will need about N20m. This is not a lot of money when one considers
the amount of money people play around with in Nigeria. There is no
university that can actually devote that amount of money to molecular
biology and the FG is also not releasing that kind of money.
