By Gbenro Adesina
On Friday October 5 2018, the 81 -year old guest lecturer of the 70th Anniversary Lecture of the University of Ibadan, UI, Professor Oluwafeyisola Sylvester Adegoke, who noted with regrets that there is no Nigerian university in the top 200 universities worldwide, did not mince a words in setting a target for any Nigerian university proposing to be among the best world universities. Adegoke was also of the opinion that except certain national maladies, including corruption and lack of patriotism, are exterminated, Nigerian education would find it impossible to find its place among the world notable universities.
At the tail of his lecture titled, “UI @ 70: Strategies for Attaining World Class Status by 2028 And Beyond”, Adegoke expressed dissatisfaction with the state of the nation considering several problems in Nigeria. These include: the country’s educational system which is in distress, characterised with frequent industrial strikes and fraudulent admission processes, excessive emphasis on paper qualifications and university degrees without concern about necessary skills to transform the nation into enviable state, inferior perception of technical training, low interest in the science, engineering and medicine, preponderance of unemployable humanities graduates, the stinginess and unsupportiveness of the Nigerian businessmen to higher education, creation of too many universities in short span of time with no effort to train commensurate number of faculty and little interest in developing bottom-up-No Technology Triangle. He added, “Government’s tendency to convert technical colleges and colleges of education into degree-granting institutions has not helped, likewise, the folding up of heavy industries and conversion of industrial buildings into events and party centre.
 

He quickly pointed out that as bad as things are, the nation is not in a complete state of hopelessness and made certain recommendations that must be expediently executed if Nigeria and her educational system would be saved from collapse. The recommendations include: dogged fight of corruption and its extermination in the educational sector, granting of absolute autonomy to higher institutions, improvement of governance in tertiary institutions, encouragement of Nigerians to be creative and innovative partners and participants in development, reduction of dependence on foreigners, encouragement of Nigerians in diaspora to cooperate with their colleagues, creation of technical training and skills development centres, funding of research and development programmes, massive overseas training of new generation researchers, acknowledgement of the nation’s largest pools of high performance intellectuals, mostly in diaspora and institutional reforms which must be local and fast.
In the lecture, Adegoke reminisced his days in the University College, Ibadan, UCI, now known as UI, saying, “I enjoyed every moment of my time then. The quality of education was very high. So, was discipline and sense of community life. Students’ hostels were of high quality, with majority of the students having a room to him/herself. Electricity and water supply were stable and students could study freely in the well-equipped university library till 10pm daily. Each of the halls of residence that existed at my time had a students’ committee elected by the inmates of the hall. Their task was to look after the general welfare of the members of the hall. One weekend every month, the students of each hall of residence had the privilege of siting at a formal dinner with senior academic and administrative staff, who were assigned to each hall. The dinner was presided over by the Hall Master, who was a very senior professor. The formal dinner was designed to expose us students to the quality of life and the kind of interactions that occur outside the university and in the world at large. This great institution prepared me and most of the contemporary students adequately for future development, both within Nigeria and overseas… As for me, I can confidently say that without UCI, there may never have been a Professor Oluwafeyisola Adegoke as we known him today”.
He continued, “It is also normal in human endeavours to celebrate “success”. For example, I expect that the University students, the staff, and we, their proud parents, would spend the better part of this year 2018 to rejoice and set aside a considerable part of our time for deep and sober reflection. We ought to focus not only on the success of the journey so far, but also on the challenges that must be overcome in order for our dear university to attain greater heights, albeit considerably lowering our digit of global ranking that is now a little below 900 to some figure like: top 100 or better still 50, by any of the agencies that carry out the academic rating of world universities. My suggestion is that we give ourselves the next decade either 2028 or 2038 to attain our desired goal”.
Adegoke, quoting World Bank 2009, said that to be a world class university, elite status has to be conferred by the outside world on the basis of international recognition, pointing out that the criteria used in the university recognition include: international reputation, large number of international students and faculty, academic and research performance of staff, publications in leading international journals, production of graduates who are in high demand, abundant resources to offer rich learning environment and autonomy.
 

Among the reasons that UI will for a long time to come be Nigeria’s Premier University, is that since its inception in 1948, it has grown steadily and remains, all of the time, Nigeria’s unchallenged leading university. “Compared with similar institutions nationwide, UI has the largest number of fellows of the Nigerian Academy of Science, NAS, as well as the largest number of Laureates of the Nigerian National Order of Merit, NOM. It also shares with Obafemi Awolowo University, OAU, the unparalleled honour of having had on its staff Nigeria’s only Nobel Prize winner, Professor Wole Soyinka… There is little or no doubt that the quality of both university staff and students of UCI was very high in those days and, to a large extent, it remains pretty much the same even today. However, when compared with other global institutions of the same age, there is a lot more that we need to do now…. our Nigerian universities should not be contented with being listed as unclassified Ivory Tower institutions that concentrate their energy largely on teaching and some research only. We must instead, strive to simultaneously embrace all of the three key properties and virtues that are globally associated with top ranked universities. We as well as the university must strive to be: engines of growth, centres of innovation and excellence, and agents of development and wealth creation. We must develop these virtues not only for ourselves and the university community, but also for individuals with whom we have work and social contract, for our surrounding communities and for the nation at large”, he said.
Justifying his vision for the Nigerian universities, he cited Stanford University in California, USA as a major engine of growth and innovation with far reaching impact that goes well beyond the borders of the university and its surrounding cities that are referred to as Silicon Valley. According to him, the impact, in fact, spreads into and beyond the major surrounding cities of Palo Alto, San Jose, Sunnyvale and Cupertino, highlighting the Stanford Solar System:Alumni that rule the technology universe to include: Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, Ebay, Netfux, Goggle, PayPal, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. “The latter of those towns, Cupertino is the home of Apple, the most valuable company in the entire world today with a market capitalisation that broke the trillion dollar barrier early this year. I deliberately single out the relatively small cities of Cupertino and Silicon Valley to drive home the transformational roles that universities, and in particular UI, can and should play in the development of itself, the surrounding communities, the nation at large, and indeed, the world. Why should UI, OAU, FUTA, UNILAG, UNIMAID, ABU, UNN, UNIPORT, UNILORIN, UNICAL, etc, be any different from these universities that surround Silicon Valley”, he stressed.
The erudite scholar posed few questions to drive his point home as he asked, “If universities such as Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley can be inseparable components of the Silicon Valley Ecosystem, what can we say is holding back Nigeria’s older generation universities from playing similar developmental roles here in Nigeria? Does our country Nigeria not have more problems that are crying for solutions than those of major developed countries? Have we not doomed ourselves to the problems of perpetual electricity and water supply failure, inadequate food, agricultural developmental setback, failed roads and railway systems and other failed infrastructures? Have these problems not been begging for solutions for more than the seven decades before UI was born? What nations of the modern world have 50 years of problems starring them in the face annually without searching for solutions? The only answer to all those questions is: Nigeria. Our 2nd question is: What kind of universities witnessed 50 years of basic problems all around them without making efforts to develop strategic plans to solve them? The undisputed answer is Nigerian Universities”.
Pointing out that wealth creation follows only those who develop solutions to problems, Adegoke was of a strong opinion that Nigeria is not making head way in anything especially education because the Nigerian governments at all levels, go cap in hand overseas begging foreigners to come and transfer the technology needed to develop Nigeria. “Unfortunately, while Nigerian politicians and government officials belief that they are smart enough to govern us, they falsely nurture and propagate the belief that we university people and graduates are incompetent, hence their belief that only foreigners can technologically develop Nigeria”, he added.
According to the lecturer, key requirements to making a world class university according to Salmi, 2009, include: high concentration of talents-faculty staff and students, abundant resources to offer a rich learning environment and to conduct advanced research, favourable governance features that encourage strategic vision, innovation and flexibility to make decisions and manage resources without being encumbered by bureaucracy, good liberal arts education plus high dose of science and technology, exposure to ICT, initiation of innovative projects with potentials to become startups, linkages with industry and investors and cooperation with neigbouring universities. He debunked a perceive false belief and assertion that leading Nigerian universities cannot contribute to commercial or technological and infrastructural development because they are government-owned, saying that the universities he cited to have been identified with Silicon Valley are government funded institutions and they contribute to innovation success in their respective countries.
Adegoke highlighted futuristic plan for the UI College of Medicine and if executed, would enhance the upgrading of UI into world class university. He emphasised that this model, if considered useful, can be further improved by the university and adopted as the masterplan for the new generation UI College of Medicine. He said, “As in other developed countries, the operators of the College of Medicine should earn enhance salaries and benefits derived legally from income generated from the improved services offered to the public from the new and cost effective way the hospital is administered. If this is run properly and profitably, all service providers will have no need to own or run private hospitals while they are still in the service of the university. The university must also form linkages with other good universities outside Nigeria. This will not only enhance quality of local service delivery, but will contribute to the higher global rating of the university. The Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ibadan offers materials for a good case study…. The hospital was commissioned on November 20, 1957 as a 500-bed hospital. Currently, the facility has grown to 1000 beds. At its inception in 1957, the hospital had only two clinical departments (medicine and surgery). The hospital has recently been expanded from two to 65 departments”.
Portraying UCH as a teaching hospital, tertiary healthcare facility, which is still burdened with primary and secondary healthcare, Adegoke pointed out that since its inception, “the hospital, has trained over 6000 doctors, 501 dentists, 4,513 nurses, 2307 midwives, 471 pre-operative nurses, 1062 labouratory scientists, 576 environmental health officers, medical records officers, and community health officers”. Due to the aforementioned facilities, which has made UCH to enjoy a wide patronage national and international clientele, Adegoke illustrated the contributions of the University of Ibadan trained physicians and medical professionals to healthcare in Nigeria.
Quoting UN, 2018, Adegoke stated that Nigeria, the largest country in Africa with a population of 196 million, lags behind many other African countries in health care. According to him, “Whilst at independence in 1960, the national healthcare system was significantly better than in neigbouring countries, recent data suggests that countries like Ghana and Cameroon have overtaken Nigeria in critical areas of healthcare such as Infant and Child Mortality rates. For example, the 2008 WHO Infant Mortality Rates for Nigeria and Ghana are 68 and 43, respectively, while the neonatal mortality rates are 101 and 47, respectively. Of note is the decline in children immunisation coverage from 80 per cent between 1988 and 1992 to 13 per cent in 2006. Additionally, Nigeria’s health system performance was ranked 187th among 191 member states of the WHO in year 2000. These health trends and indicators can only be attributed to limited vision and poor strategic planning for preventing and treating diseases by our policy makers. It is high time that our policy makers endorse an innovative system that will resuscitate the moribund state of our national health care system”.
He continues, “Of great concern is the fact that Nigeria spends only 3.5 per cent of total government expenditure on healthcare. In contrast, Ghana spends 8.5 per cent of total government expenditure on health care, South Africa 10.8 per cent, Cuba 11.7 per cent, Norway 17.8 per cent, and USA 18.9 per cent (WHO Core Health Indicators, 2008). The total expenditure on healthcare as percentage of Gross Domestic Product, GDP, is 4.6 for Nigeria as compared to 6.7 for Ghana, 7.6 for Cuba, 8.6 for South Africa, 9.7 for Norway and 15.7 for USA. Of further interest is the study showing that the annual average total health expenditure in Nigeria between 1998 and 2002 is 3.0 to 5.0 per cent of general government expenditure while the total federal government expenditure per capita is 3.2 to 3.4 per cent. This level of government expenditure in the health sector over the years tells a story of nearly total neglect”.
He, however, stated that the gross underfunding of healthcare by the Nigerian government has resulted in the anaemic state of the nation’s healthcare, which has resulted in disillusion and dissatisfaction of physicians, nurses and pharmacists because they have no option but to practice substandard medicine that meets the expectations of neither healthcare professionals nor their patients. “The ensuing discontent and dissatisfaction with the practice of medicine has reached epidemic proportions and has led to the departure of several well-trained health professionals from our major hospitals to take jobs abroad. It is estimated that the number of Nigeria trained physicians, who have left the country is more than the number of Nigerian trained physicians, who are practising in Nigeria. It is also sad to see the large number of government officials, industrialists and wealthy citizens, who fly abroad to seek medical care. In simple terms, this is an indictment of our health care system. Government can stem the flight of qualified physicians from teaching hospitals and reduce the pilgrimage of well-to-do Nigerians to Europe, Middle East and USA seeking foreign medical care, by equipping all health care institutions with modern technology and by increasing the percentage of total government expenditure on healthcare to meet WHO standard”, he lamented.
Adegoke advocated for a need to change the way research in healthcare system is being conducted considering the complexity of medical care stressing that this need is perhaps most compelling in the field of Regenerative Medicine. He could not understood why at this age of Nigeria, there is no designated institute with focus on specific diseases like cancer, diabetes, organ systems like heart, eye, kidney, stage life like children and the aging population, overarching opportunities like deciphering the human Genome, understanding Cellular Biology and technologies like biomedical imaging. Such an institute like National Institute of Health, NIH, in USA, or the Medical Research Council, MRC, in Britain to support research and training through extramural activities and also conduct in-house science and training. “One thing that is clear to us now is that only research centre like an institute that is well structured, equipped, funded, and endowed with outstanding clinical scientists and biomedical scientists can properly pursue Stem Cell Research in Nigeria”, he added.
With the prevalence of cancer in Nigeria, Adegoke could not understand why the national health policy makers have not focused attention on cancer screening particularly breast and prostate cancer that are the most frequently diagnosed cancers in Nigerian women and men respectively. He said, “The 5-year relative survival rate for all stages of breast cancer is 10-15 per cent for Nigerian women compared to 87 per cent for American women. Of interest is the 70 per cent 5-year breast cancer survival rate in women who live in Central Harlem in New York where the socio-economic factors among the population are similar to the Nigerian situation. The disparity in survival rate observed in Nigerian women with breast cancer compared to white and black women in America is due to late stage disease presentation. Studies on breast cancer from different parts of Nigeria show a late stage of disease at diagnosis with 70-80 per cent of cases being staged III and IV compared to 10-13 per cent in America women. Delay of breast cancer presentation is attributed to myriad sociocultural, economic, behavioural, environmental and educational factors that include poverty, fatalism about cancer, alternative care, communication and information barriers, medical system barriers and lack of access to breast cancer screening rather than tumor biology”.
He continued, “Evidence based medical practice confirms that the improvement in 5-year breast cancer survival seen worldwide is, in part, due to mammographic screening which results in early disease. One fails to understand why the national health policy makers have not focused attention on cancer screening, particularly breast and prostate that are the most frequently diagnosed cancers in Nigerian women and men respectively. Currently, the estimated number of new cancer cases in Nigeria is approximately 100,000 per year. By the year 2020, a conservative estimate is 500,000 new cases per year. For all the above, Nigeria needs a national centre responsible for coordinating cancer incidence, diagnosis, treatment and survival”.
With this glooming picture of health situation in Nigeria, Adegoke recommended that UCH, being the leading federal teaching hospital should lead the way in research innovations and learn from the NIH Core Strategic Vision of four pillars of improving healthcare, known as the four Ps: transforming medicine and health from a curative to a preemptive paradigm, support basic research to identify the earliest molecular stages of disease in complex biological systems, accelerate translation of findings from the bench to the bedside to the community and provide the evidence and knowledge base to allow for a rational transformation of healthcare system to one that is patient-centred and pro-active.
According to him, the four Ps promote an era of precision medicine by transforming medicine from the current practice of intervening too late in a disease process to a new era when medicine will be more predictive, personalised and preemptive. He also charged UCH to be at the forefront of new progress in medical research that improves the understanding of how the human body works and to gain insight into diseases and disorders.
Emphasising that funding of research should be a major concern of the government and private and public partnership, he noted that research priorities should be focused on infectious diseases, vaccines, lowering maternal and infant mortality rates, genetic disorders and genome, cancer, and end-stage organ failure. He further called for autonomy for universities as well as emphasising that there is a need to change from the paradigm of curative medicine to a focused, organised biomedical research.
Speaking on funding of the universities, he called on all the universities to develop strategies for raising fund to support education learning from the examples of older and more stable institutions. Other sources of income recommended include: endowment covering gift of money and income producing property, contracts and commercialisation of patents, copyrights, etc, promotion of involvement in goal-oriented researches, promotion of commercial alliances with public and private sectors to develop university-generated inventions through establishment of: development of startup projects, technology triangles and venture capital.
For Nigerian universities to be world class institutions, he recommended a need for major reforms in the governance of Nigerian higher educational system as regards over centralisation, politicisation of appointment of VC’s, rectors, and governing councils of Nigerian public universities and other tertiary institutions and government’s strangulating control of: funding, pointing out that government cannot fully fund universities, admission should be decentralised, level of fees charged needs reconsideration, wages paid should negotiated, retirement age should be flexible until shortages in quality staff is remediated, and public university council members should be selected on merit rather than political affiliation.
Other recommendations include: strengthening and reforming UTME till it attains status of similar exam bodies overseas, e.g. SAT, giving tertiary institutions right to admit students best suited to their needs, reform NUC and other regulatory agencies, grant full autonomy to Nigerian tertiary institutions including freedom to: search for and select chancellors, pro-chancellors, and Vice Chancellors, principal officers, councils members best suited to achieve institutional objectives under an independent board of trustees, hire and fire staff, freedom to negotiate competitive salaries and wages, freedom to admit quality undergraduate and graduate students, freedom to plan teaching and research programmes that are peculiar to their areas of strength and initiate programmes for the training of competent technical staff and technicians.
In attendance are notable Nigerians including: Professor Ayo Banjo, former President of Central Council of Ibadan Indigenes, CCII, Chief Bayo Oyero, Chairman, Governing Council, Lead City University, Ibadan, Professor Jide Owoeye, UI Pro-Chancellor and Chairman, Governing Council, Nde Joshua Mutka Waklek, Vice Chancellor, Professor Abel Idowu Olayinka and other principal officers