For sometime now it has been a major concern to me personally, not so much that unnecessarily lengthy amount of time is routinely being spent in Nigeria just to obtain an MSc, MPhil, and PhD degrees, but that it appears everyone is cool with it. No one is speaking out against it. Well, it is not normal. For petesake it is abnormal to spend 3, 4, 5 years for an MSc or MPhil degree, and 5, 6, 7, 8... years for full time PhD degree. It brings untold hardship to the students and their families, the length of time they have to spend, the amount of money it consumes... Students are usually required to register every single academic year that the programme spreads across. This is nothing else than corruption on the part of the University management; to collect so many tuition fees for an academic programme that should last for fewer than have the time that students are paying for.

The government should urgently look into this growing cancer in our universities. One of the things that the government should address and stamp out is the deeprooted apathy that characterizes project supervision. (I need to quickly state here that apathy isn't a vice of just the supervising lecturers, one often meets students displaying the same) Students often go through hell, literally, trying to get the attention of their supervisors. Well, this is not normal. This is a gross abuse of the graduate/doctoral research process. Any lecturer that is not available to supervise should simply not take students... A way around this is for the government to tie a financial compensation to each research project successfully supervised to completion by the supervisor. This can be in the form of 5% and 10 % increase in basic salary at the successful completion of the process for MSc/MPhil and PhD degrees respectively. What this means is that supervisors will be keen to have the students complete their programmes at record time. And since this increment will be computed as a product of the number of such projects taken to completion it will additionally be a way of compensating the hardworking lecturers for job well done.

Those still caught in the web of this educational ill and corruption, do not stay quiet. Graduate education should be fun instead of the slavery that it has come to be in Nigeria.

lalasticlala Seun