By Ganiu Bamgbose, PhD
Talk does not change so many things but silence does not even change anything in society. Even though scholars have interrogated the challenges confronting academia in Nigeria in both data-driven and position papers, the fundamental need to own up to our scholarship as a country has remained a Herculean task for Nigerian academics, higher institutions of learning and regulating bodies.
In an earlier piece, I had talked about the publish-or-perish concept which was an old colonial system of harvesting fresh ideas from young innovators and creative people, most likely towards the development of their countries. Such exploitative disposition of the colonialists did not only play out with our cultural artefacts but also at the level of the intellectual prowess of our earliest scholars. At the staleness of the publish-or-perish syndrome, we are now charged to be visible to to vanish. And that has been the race for a while again at both individual and institutional levels. We now compete by the number of papers we have on Scopus even if it adds nothing to the corpus of transformed lives. We are visible on Scimago but in the society it feels like we are on embargo. We are fascinated about citation even if it means nothing for transformation. We care so much about web of science that our ingenuity, creativity and originality all know seem to be in a web. As Nigerian scholars, we do not make the music that we dance to and we do not dance to the music that we make. We measure our impact by what the other side of the world considers Impact Factors. Let there be publications whether or not they boost intellection. Let us chase virtual visibility notwithstanding real life anonymity. As individual scholars, we cannot lay claim to scholarship if we do not stop being the western scholar-sheep.
Of course the trend is same at the institutional level. The worth, prestige and intellectual impact of our institutions are graded and rated by external bodies. Yearly, institutions look forward to the announcement. The ones that the indices favour jubilate, others contemplate and some others lament. What I know for sure is that many academics cannot even tell the factors that are considered for this rating. The inclusion and exclusion year in, year out even make one wonders who looks for what and what is being looked for in doing this rating. Why are we not the ones setting the standard by which we are rated? Why are we not the ones rating ourselves? Why do we even have to be rated? If a higher institution of learning is set up with its vision and mission, what is the essence of rating it along side others that equally have their visions and missions? What does it matter that we are well rated but our essence never gets upgraded? What about all institutions putting mechanisms in place to rate themselves based on their essence? What about we rate with internal considerations such as the number of universities that can survive without government subvention? What about we rate with the quality of lives and impact of the students graduating from each school?
Education is irrelevant without domestication. Scholarship demands authorship. Let us as a country author what purpose education should serve for us based on our local needs. Let us be the owner of our scholarship. It is doable. We can do it.
(c) 2025 Ganiu Bamgbose writes from the Department of English, Lagos State University.
Ganiu Abisoye Bamgbose, PhD
Department of English,
Lagos State University, Ojo
[email protected]
08093695359, 07084956118
