The Nigerian Philosopher in a Fund-Starved Academic System

This is the second installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a look at what it's like to be a philosopher in countries outside the anglophone west. This is a guest post by Ada Agada, faculty member at The Conversational School of Philosophy, University of Calabar, Nigeria (read more about the general state of African philosophy in his Aeon piece, here).

A year in the academic life of the typical Nigerian philosopher is a long one defined by frustration, mediocrity (either self-imposed or externally imposed) and drama. The drama aspect revolves around violent student activism leading to university closures, Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) industrial actions, blood-letting on university campuses by students who are members of violent cults, the intrigue surrounding the selection of new vice chancellors, the latest corruption scandals, political interference in university administration, or accusations of sexual harassment directed at prominent professors. There is drama all right, and plenty frustration.

In Nigeria the apex labour union that protects university teachers’ interests, ASUU, is best known for calling industrial actions that last from a few weeks to an entire academic session. An academic session consists of two semesters of about four months each. But the regularity of industrial actions in the system means that public universities have no fixed academic calendar and students are often on enforced holidays. It is not unusual for a student pursuing a four-year philosophy degree to end up staying in the university for six years. The rationale for the frequent and destabilising ASUU strikes is the avowed commitment to the fight to prevent the Nigerian university system from collapse. The usual ASUU focus is university funding.

The private universities fare much better in terms of calendar stability. Unionism is discouraged in the private universities. They are all relatively young universities and mostly lack the profile of the public universities. Just two or three private universities, notably Covenant University, can compete favourably with the established public universities.

Committed Nigerian philosophers immersed in the academia in Nigeria are buffeted from all sides by forces they are mostly unable to control. The gravest challenge the Nigerian philosopher faces is poor research funding, which in turn means meaningful research activities cannot be fruitfully pursued. Most Nigerian philosophy departments have departmental libraries to augment central libraries that exist virtually in name only as some of these central libraries have not been restocked in decades. You walk into the libraries and you see mostly centuries- and decades-old volumes on Western philosophy. Unfortunately, the fate that befell the central libraries is also the portion of the various departmental libraries. Philosophers have no choice but to depend wholly on their self-funded libraries. And it is never easy for the Nigerian philosopher to go about building library capacity in view of the poor remuneration package of Nigerian academics relative to their counterparts elsewhere. Conference attendance grants, postdoctoral fellowship grants, and other research-related funding are either non-existent or come sporadically.

Obviously, actors in the Nigerian academic system are aware of the importance of research and excellent research funding for the optimal performance of the system. The strange problem here is how well-intentioned interventions are frustrated internally and externally, such that the funding matter becomes intractable. The Nigerian government set up the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) in 2011 by an act of the Nigerian parliament to address the research quagmire in Nigerian higher institutions, with special focus on the university system. While substantial funds have accumulated in the coffers of TETFund, academics, including philosophers, have bitterly complained about the difficulty in accessing the funds. Bureaucratic bottlenecks in the application process, the perennial menace of corrupt practices, intellectual indolence, and sundry other factors have been blamed for the poor performance of TETFund. Surprising as it may sound, the TETFund administrators have had cause to complain about the poor research proposals submitted by some academics, leading to rejection. Certain unscrupulous scholars awarded TETFund scholarship to study in the West and Asia have been known to have scandalously diverted study funds into private bank accounts and stayed put in the country. Many philosophers have found the application process for publication funding too long and cumbersome.

Even with the TETFund intervention, the Nigerian philosopher’s access to much needed funds remains grossly restricted. Nigerian philosophers compare their unenviable situation with the much more comfortable situation of their counterparts in the West, parts of Asia, and even South Africa (which has the most developed university education system in Africa). To improve themselves and be more competitive in the current global village, Nigerian philosophers are forced to look to the West, mostly, for research funding. They apply for one foreign fellowship or the other. If they are lucky and successful they are able to work for a while in the West and see how things are done differently. Indeed, migration is top on the priority list of Nigerian philosophers as such an event alone promises them escape from the frustrating research situation at home. The migration bug has, unfortunately, created a grave problem which I think has not received the serious attention it deserves. Here I speak of the phenomenon of brain drain. Top Nigerian philosophers are finding ‘safe’ havens in European and American universities where they generally excel.

In recent times, however, some of these philosophers are no longer at ease with the ‘Trumpification’ of Western politics and the upsurge of populist sentiments. Consequently, some committed Nigerian philosophers conclude that the devil one knows is better than the angel one does not know. They stay put in Nigeria fighting a losing war to save a collapsing academic system, doing their best to impart knowledge to their students and hoping against hope while sliding into the mediocrity that has become second nature to Nigerian universities. Thus even the committed philosopher steadily becomes immersed in the everyday averageness Martin Heidegger talks about in the context of the inauthentic life.

The Nigerian academia is a negatively competitive place. Apart from the grave research funding issue highlighted above, there are also ethnic, political, and social issues the Nigerian philosopher must contend with. One will suppose that the poor remuneration package of Nigerian lecturers will discourage freshly minted philosophy PhD holders from seeking teaching jobs. This is not the case because of high unemployment levels in the country. There is in reality a mad rush by trained philosophers to get into the system and make a living. It is a negatively competitive race. Winners are not necessarily the best brains but the best connected, politically and socially. Nigerian public universities do not enjoy autonomy in the strict sense. The system is open to manipulation by politicians who are more than willing to direct university vice chancellors to employ their preferred candidates. Consequently, committed Nigerian philosophers find themselves working with people who ordinarily should not be in the university system. But they cannot speak out, lest they lose their jobs.

The excessive politicisation of the Nigerian university system is without doubt one of the ills ravaging the system. Ethnic loyalty and fixation create discrimination in the system in relation to promotions, hiring, and disciplinary processes. Belonging to a particular ethnic group can be an advantage or a disadvantage. I have, out of curiosity, asked my Western friends whether favouritism plays a role in the hiring process of Western universities as it does in Nigeria. My friends have been surprisingly forthcoming, perhaps because they perceived my sincerity in laying bare the Nigerian philosopher’s predicament. These friends admit that ‘backdoor’ hiring of faculty is not alien to Western universities. They add that the scale of favouritism in Western universities is limited. In the Nigerian academia favouritism is not hidden. It is the norm. Ordinarily, recommending philosophers for academic jobs is not a bad thing. The problem here is that merit is disregarded and every Tom, Dick, and Harry finds their way into the philosophy departments.

 On a less grave note, the Nigerian philosopher discovers in the course of teaching that the project of decolonisation – one of the most influential intellectual currents in Africa today – imposes a duty on him or her to draw a line between African philosophy and Western philosophy. The African decolonisation project invites the Nigerian philosopher to shift some focus from the teaching of Western philosophy and create an epistemic space for African, Asian, and Latin philosophies. It makes little sense calling yourself a Nigerian, nay African, philosopher based in Nigeria and Africa when all you teach is the ideas of ‘dead white men’, to use a term favoured by feminist thinkers in the West.

It is ironic that up till today Western philosophy constitutes not less than 80% of the content of the Nigerian philosophy curriculum. A number of Nigerian philosophers have entered into a serious conversation with philosophers from South Africa, Europe and the USA over the question of how to decolonise the philosophy curriculum in Africa. Truly, it is a striking irony that while the majority of philosophers at Western philosophy departments have refused to create an epistemic space for African philosophy even at the risk of being called Trump philosophers – to borrow an apt term from Bryan van Norden, Nigerian philosophers are marginalising African philosophy and giving disproportionate attention to Western philosophy.

As bad as the situation of Nigerian philosophers is, we like to encourage one another by mouthing the mantra no condition is permanent in this world. There are committed philosophers driven purely by academic passion even in the context of the everyday averageness they are immersed. They continue to teach a very determined student population. These students wake up every day and set out for classes wearing the determined looks you find on the faces of students in a typical Western university. Most of these students are from poor homes and struggle to pay school fees in the absence of significant scholarship schemes and loan support systems. But they are Nigerians after all and are good at surviving. Like the philosophers who teach them the history of world ideas, these students hope against hope in the belief that no condition is permanent in this world. The philosophical value of this favoured Nigerian expression may be a matter for discussion some other day.

Comments

[Julia]

I think this series is awesome, and so eye-opening. It's really sad to hear that universities in Nigeria are in such bad shape. Hearing about the terrible access to libraries should remind us how important it is to make our work accessible for people with no journal subscription access, for example by posting unofficial versions on our websites.

[Fool]

How is the American University of Nigeria regarded within Nigeria? I'm familiar with the equivalent institutions in other countries and pretty impressed by some of them, but don't know much about AUN.

[Nqabutho]

"No condition is permanent in this world" is a good fundamental philosophical principle. I'm looking forward to seeing it as a matter of discussion here or any where else. African in origin, but with universal intent and significance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk62olgWxCI

[Nqabutho]

As for your second question, "Is the universe pointless?", it would be if we were not here to wonder about it, we with our heuristic passions never to be satisfied, and that's why we need to be here.