₦airaland Forum

Lecturers are spending many hours and days moving from one university to the other to teach, findings by Daily Trust have revealed. This is because new universities, including those established by states and private entities, survive on visiting lecturers and professors to meet their manpower needs.

Analysts, however say the frequent shuttling by lecturers is endangering their lives and affecting their primary responsibilities. With the establishment of new universities by the federal and state governments, as well as corporate bodies and private individuals, surge in student population and high student-to-faculty ratio, most universities are left with no option but to employ the services of visiting lecturers/professors on short-term basis to fill the gaps in teaching and research.

However, experts told Daily Trust that shuttling lecturers that have taken more temporary contracts than they can comfortably handle, are to some extent not effective and punctual; and are to a greater extent skipping classes due to fatigue caused by excessive workload. A former Vice Chancellor of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, Prof. Saminu Abdulrahman Ibrahim, said established universities had sufficient lecturers and professors who had enough time for their students; but that new universities face the challenge of shortage of professors and qualified lecturers and more often than not, engaged visiting lecturers.

On the other hand, he said visiting lecturers had maximum acceptable work time that allowed them to teach in only two additional higher institutions and a ceiling put on heavy workload. Prof. Ibrahim said university authorities were expected to crosscheck the records of any visiting lecturer and ensure that apart from his main university, he was not teaching in more than two additional universities before offering him a part-time contract. He further said, sadly, most new universities took desperate steps to look for visiting lecturers and hardly authenticated their records.

The risks involved

The VC of Bayero University Kano (BUK), Prof. Muhammad Yahuza Bello, said apart from the safety of staff members, his university was concerned about the personal development of students, thus, while a lecturer was allowed to take additional short-term work in another higher institution, the distance should not be more than 200km from his main place of work. He said, “lecturers are human and the services they provide require their time and effort, and it is not possible for one to be teaching in many universities and still give his best. “The policy in the university is that if the institutions are not more than 200km from Kano, one can visit up to two, and if the distance is more than 200km, a lecturer can only visit one.

“Again, one should not spend more than four days in serving the visiting lectureship to ensure quality of service and health of lecturers, because when people are busy travelling from one place to another, there could be risk of accident. “Actually, the National Universities Commission (NUC) is coming out with a more comprehensive policy, and if it is stricter than our own, we shall enforce it,” the V-C said.

He added that shortage of lecturers in new universities was as a result of lack of proper planning, noting that Malaysia embarked on massive academic staff development in the 1980s before establishing new universities. Reports indicate that nearly all the new universities utilise the services of shuttling lecturers to close the gap of staff shortage. However, established universities have adequate personnel. For instance,

Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, has about 600 professors; which is the highest. It is followed by the University of Ibadan (UI) which has about 450 professors.

Situation in states

In contrast, Sokoto State University, which was established in 2009, has only six locally bred professors and about 20 PhD holders. A cross-section of students interviewed, however, said they have many lecturers in their respective departments, many of who were graduate assistants.

The university is offering 23 courses and 18 of them are fully approved while the remaining five have interim accreditation from NUC. Similarly, apart from the six locally bred professors, there are 14 visiting professors in the institution. A 200-level student of Political Science told our reporter that the department had only three PhD holders, but no professor. However, some students of biological science said their department had become a reference point for students of other departments being the one with the highest number of professors.

“We have about eight professors majority of who are visiting lecturers from the Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto (UDUS),” one student said. Speaking on the development, the VC of UDUS, Prof. Sani Dangoggo, said there was hardly a university that has the required number of lecturers it needed in the country. Prof. Dangoggo said, “they may be adequate in some areas, but not in all areas.” On what they are doing to remedy the situation, he said the university was still recruiting more lecturers, training those already employed and getting senior lecturers from other universities to teach on sabbatical arrangement, while some were visiting lecturers.

“Many of our lecturers are on study leave, but six of them are back after completing their PhD programmes. “As I am talking to you, we have six locally bred professors and 14 visiting professors and over 20 PhD holders. And all our courses are approved by the NUC,” he said. Kola Daisi University, Ibadan, Oyo State,

Read more: https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/how-lecturers-shuttle-to-teach-in-new-universities.html

What are the new/private universities expecting when they don't want to employ full time lecturers? Their greed combined with that of the visiting lecturers is killing the academia in Nigeria

backnbeta:
What are the new/private universities expecting when they don't want to employ full time lecturers? Their greed combined with that of the visiting lecturers is killing the academia in Nigeria

Though I can't really say how proficient this member may be in summary, something tells me she scored above 95% in English Summary and Comprehension.

She just summarised the lengthy report to 2 short sentences.

It's a two edges sword scenario. The universities don't want to promote the existing lecturers in the system because promotion implies higher salaries n the universities authorities n government bodies responsible for them(federal n state governments) are not willing to do that. Meanwhile the private universities r looking for already made lecturers n so they poach from the government universities. They are not ready to train post graduate students n the post graduate students are cautious about working for the private universities because your terms of employment n service r not guaranteed.


Everybody is just being cautious but it is putting a strain on the existing lecturers. They are making more money going from one university to the other but performance output is being stretched to its limit.

Massive employment of post graduate students is the key n the private universities should assure the post graduate students n lecturers that it's safe to work for them with a long term terms of service that put their minds at rest not tomorrow you sack them anyhow or attempt to limit their scope of research because of one religious ideology or the other.

I knew of a Prof. that only came to class once and then we have exams. He comes to class during the exam period.