Kukah: Universities Have Become Playgrounds For The Ambitions Of Local Elite

During an interview with ARISE NEWS on Thursday, the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese Of Sokoto, Nigeria, Matthew Hassan Kukah, said that Nigerian universities are no longer solely focused on academic pursuits but “have become playgrounds for the ambitions of the local elite”.

He added that there are a lot of ethnic biases, favoritism, and religious restrictions within campuses, which is different from what universities were in the past.

“There was a time when we knew what universities were. Ahmadu Bello university for example had lecturers from different parts of the world. Now, look at what has happened to our universities across Nigeria. Our universities have become just mere incubators of ethnic jingoism. I don’t know which federally funded university that you will name that has a vice chancellor that is not a local boy.”

His words of disappointment in the current state of universities in the nation came after he expressed that the Nigerian university system is a vital yet troubled component of national development and emphasised the need for integration and religious freedom for students, stating that their absence poses challenges.

Kukah said, “One of the missing links in our national development program has been the university system”. If students in the university at the point of their growing up are not allowed to be able to integrate and interrelate and that churches and mosques cannot be built across the country, then there is a problem.”

The bishop questioned the rationale behind universities prohibiting the establishment of places of worship for students of different religious backgrounds, emphasizing the importance of accommodating religious needs on campus regardless of location or demographic.

“Why should a place of worship be a problem for a university? Whether it is for the Muslim students in Calabar or the Christian students in Sokoto or the Christian students in Kano or the Christian students elsewhere? I approached the Minister of Education on this. I have a letter from the NUC, the universities in northern Nigeria have refused to implement this recommendation.”

As a solution to the disintegration in the nation, he suggested restoring integrity to not just universities, but bureaucratic offices, through cultural diversification in the area of leadership roles, noting that issues of diversity management persist beyond academia and affect bureaucratic structures as well as national cohesion. He also warned that without actively managing diversity, there will be continued “hemorrhage”.

“The first thing to do is, let’s restore nobility around the university because that’s where the leaders of tomorrow are going to come from. Let’s also diversify this in the way Obasanjo did that somebody like Adamu Baikie was Vice Chancellor of the University of Benin, because our inability to manage diversity has also led us to a situation where we’re literally on a dead end because you go to the bureaucracy and you find that in a single office, people who are running the show are people from the same community, the same religion or the same tribe. So if we don’t deliberately decide to figure out how to manage diversity scientifically, then we’ll continue to hemorrhage.”

Melissa Enoch

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