Professorship Now Chieftaincy Title - Nok

Lagos, Sep 21, 2009 (Leadership/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- LNGLF | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Professor Andrew Nok, the winner of this year's Nigerian Award for Science, the prestigious laurel of the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG), has blamed the two factions in the worsening standoff in the ivory tower for the abysmally low standard of education in the country.

While arguing that ASUU needed to be more flexible to get the negotiations off the ground again, and that the union's demands were not all about salary increase, the professor of biochemistry contended that lecturers and, indeed, the federal government have turned professorship into chieftaincy title.

He contended that the federal government had lost touch with the ivory tower to the extent that once a lecturer is promoted a professor; he keeps his position even when he has become dormant.

Nok, who is the first northerner to win the prestigious award, said that only three per cent of the professors in Nigerian universities met the required number of published research works and the number of PhD students they have supervised to remain professors.

Others, he said, just keep the tag as a chieftaincy title while doing nothing to challenge the frontiers of knowledge.

He said the lack-lustre attitude of the university dons was encouraged by absence of continuous assessment of their performance.

In Germany, professors are assessed annually. That is why they are always angling for breakthroughs.

In Nigeria, once somebody is promoted a professor, he goes to sleep because noone comes around to assess him or set targets for him', said the NLNG science laureate.

He argued that even if the federal government accepted a salary package of one million naira per month for professors, the quality of education in the country would not improve if the performance of the dons was not assessed annually.

Nok stressed that the services of professors in Nigerian universities should be compared to that of English football clubs. 'If Manchester United emerges champion this year but loses 10 matches the next year, it would be relegated to second division irrespective of the big names in the club,' he said.

'Professors who cannot meet the required number of published research work and the number of PhD students supervised, should lose their seats', he argued.

The NLNG laureate argued that it was not proper for the federal government to sign a blanket agreement for the universities in the country with ASUU, stressing that the agreement to be signed by the federal government should only set a benchmark pay that would not impose a uniform pay package for the states since their resources was not the same.

On the craze for state universities, Nok said that many of the states do not need to own universities as they could not cope with the manpower demand.

'During accreditation tours we often find the names of some lecturers in more than one university disguised as visiting lecturers or professors. This is an indication of inadequate manpower in some of the universities."

Professor Andrew J. Nok is the Director of the Centre for Biotechnology Research and Training, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

He won this year's Nigeria Award for Science with his breakthrough on the cause of trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), an award that comes with a prize of $50,000 which he plans to use to enhance further scientific research.

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