By Mohammed Dahiru Aminu | Publish Date: Oct 29 2015

I remember how Dr Farooq Kperogi, presently an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Emerging Citizen Media at Kennesaw State University, USA, had written about people, especially Nigerians, who were doing well in their countries, but ended up pauperized in America, and other Western countries when they relocated there simply because the latter society couldn’t find them worthy of employment commensurate with their education and experience. It seems that at best, you can only use a Nigerian degree to get admitted into universities to earn further education in the West but not for the purpose of finding employment, especially academic ones, with those degrees.
My father’s friend, with whom I have conversed for more than 10 years now, who left Nigeria for America, told me that although he had obtained a doctorate from a Nigerian university, and despite being an academic all his working life in Nigeria, he couldn’t find an academic job in America because his doctorate was not obtained from the West. He had to enroll in a university in Arizona to earn MBA degree before he could find a job as a deputy manager in a “station.” Trained as a biologist, he found himself involved in matters of “financial accounting” as a daily routine.
Some few years back, I accidentally came across a woman who obtained a doctorate from University of Ibadan teaching in an American university, and when I told Dr Kperogi about this development, he told me that the only reason the Ibadan-educated woman could find a job in the academia in America as an adjunct professor without being asked to get herself “re-educated” is most certainly that she had a good publication record.
Personally, I wouldn’t blame universities in the West for not taking Nigeria-minted doctorates seriously. On the one hand I personally believe, from my experience, that Nigerian universities, the way they are at the moment, are not qualified to award higher degrees lest they are out to deliberately ridicule themselves-the just recompense for pretentious posturing.
Most doctorate dissertations from Nigerian universities hardly merit the award simply because the researches carried out are neither novel, nor inspiring.
In the West, to get a doctorate, you are required to carry out a novel research by novel methods. In Nigeria, novelty of a doctorate is simply to do the same thing but on a different “case.” In the West, using same methodology to study different cases is seen as routine work, and as my supervisor told me in one of my early meetings with him “we don’t award a doctorate by using same tool to study ‘another case’; we don’t give a doctorate for carrying out routine work.” Again, doctorate research topics in Nigeria are also uninspiring because from the topic itself, you can see that the research is not meant to go deep in the field it seeks to explore.
In the field of geology for instance, of which I am aware, you find doctorate topics in Nigeria on, say, “Geology of Yola and Environs.” These days, in the West, you do not do a doctorate research on the geology of a place as vast as Yola. The logic is simple: the aim of a doctorate is to go deep into that which you are exploring by offering that exhaustive inquiry in order to understand a principle, a process, or a phenomena, but how deep can you go when your area of study is this vast? In the West, for instance in geology, what you are expected and encouraged to do as a doctoral work is to take a rock occurring in Yola, and study it at its microscopic level, e.g. how do individual grains of a particular sandstone in Yola change by the effect of weathering caused by wind? And you have to do this using a novel methodology.
Another problem with Nigerian education is that of integrity. For example, most researchers in Nigeria are not even aware of plagiarism. From school assignments, to long essays, to higher degree dissertations, to journal papers and conference proceedings, it is hard to pass the plagiarism test in Nigeria.
This brings me to the other hand, which is that if we assume that there is a slight possibility of churning out a good-enough doctorate from a Nigerian university, there is the fact that on a good day, typical Nigerian academes hardly have a reputable publication record.
Once in the West, it is very easy for Westerners to know the stuff one is made of as all they will do is to simply do a surname search in their academic databases such as Scopus or Web of Science, where millions of researches are archived. My friend was telling me how on coming to England to familiarize with Scopus, he searched his lecturers’ surnames from Nigeria and could hardly find an entry. There are 2000 journals in Elsevier which receives about 350 thousand new articles a year, but it is not a surprise to find out that one can rise to the professorial rank in Nigeria without a paper in Elsevier or in any journal with genuine impact factor.
While I understand that one of the problems of being an academic in Nigeria is that you are naturally found within a below-standard working environment which impedes your ability to produce quality research acceptable to the serious world, most Nigerian academics, I reckon, do not strive to see that they reach out to serious journals; of course this may be difficult to achieve, but there is no integrity whatsoever in publishing in fraudulent journals. Most Nigerian doctorates, and their subsequent scholarly outputs, it seems, are hardly of any worth in Western countries for some of the above reasons and perhaps even more.

Aminu is a doctoral researcher in Cranfield University, England m.aminu@cranfield.ac.uk
http://www.dailytrust.com.ng/news/columns/what-is-the-worth-of-nigerian-degrees/117041.html

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