Rediscovering the Fundamental Essence of University Education in Nigeria

By Tunji Olaopa

The higher education system of any nation is designed as a critical arm of the state to enlighten the society about the elements that make for social harmony and social order, while at the same time getting the citizens connected with the state’s policy and development priorities. The higher education system, in other words, is one of the crucial avenues by which a nation defines and articulates its pathways towards wealth and progress. The university system constitutes a critical component of the higher education dynamics. This is why, across the globe, tertiary education is often aligned to national objectives. The Nigerian National Policy on Education is very clear on this. Tertiary education—within the overall educational philosophy—is meant to achieve the following: “(a) contribute to national development through high level manpower training; (b) provide accessible and affordable high quality learning opportunities in formal and informal education in response to the needs and interests of all Nigerians; (c) provide high quality career counseling and lifelong learning programmes that prepare students with the knowledge and skills for self-reliance and the world of work; (d) reduce skill shortages through the production of skilled manpower relevant to the needs of the labour market; (e) promote and encourage scholarship, entrepreneurship and community service; (f) forge and cement national unity; and (g) promote national and international understanding and interaction.”Over the long, sixty-six, years of Nigeria’s national evolution, several dysfunctional cracks have emerged within Nigeria’s educational and tertiary system that have diminished the higher education’s capacity to mediate learning and development for Nigerians and the Nigerian state. Two key symptoms are crucial in denoting what has gone wrong. The first is the terrible disconnection between the government and the Nigerian intellectual and academic class that motivates the higher education system. This anti-intellectualism ensures that the government’s policy architecture does not benefit from policy intelligence generated by universities and think tanks. The second symptom is the reduction of tertiary education to the acquisition of certificates, diplomas and degrees. Nigeria’s certification craze therefore implies that tertiary institutions offload graduates into the labour markets who are not grounded sufficiently to make any significant socioeconomic transformation or affect the nation’s national goals. Manpower development therefore lost its critical and functional edge, and collapses under the weight of misplaced priorities.In short, the fundamental way to conceptualize this dysfunction of the higher education system, and its disconnection from Nigeria’s national objectives, is to say that universities have lost touch with their founding objective. This becomes very acutely destabilizing when factored together with Nigeria’s very high youth population and human capital and citizenship potentials. Nigeria is one of the most youthful countries in Nigeria with over 60% of its population under the age of thirty. This does not only imply that the youth population falls in the category of university undergraduates and postgraduates. It also means that Nigeria has a large chunk of potential human resource to harness for national progress.These facts ensure that successive Nigerian governments have poured huge efforts and financial commitment into rehabilitating the university system to correct its dysfunction while redirecting its dynamics toward better functionality on behalf of the Nigeria state and her society. What remains to be seen is how successful these efforts have become. Need I point to the dismal youth unemployment statistics to underscore the fact that we seem not to have made much progress. The reformer in me therefore suggests that the reform of the university system needs an urgent and crucial reform. This re-forming will be situated at the intersection of creativity and innovation, youth demographics, technological development and governance.Adam Grant, the American author, is very apt in attempting to nail the essence of higher education. According to him, “The mark of higher education isn’t the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It’s the skills you gain about how to learn.” This fundamental point features cogently in my little 2010 monograph, The Joy of Learning, that interrogates what it means to learn within and outside of the formal tertiary dynamics. What learning really means—what it means to acquire skills that enables one to learn, according to Grant—demands rethinking our current understanding of education and the university system. As it is, our understanding of university education hangs on the system’s capacity to generate skilled manpower. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this aspiration. Except that we will eventually be generating either robots without empathy or spirituality in the workplace; or we will be offloading graduates who lacked character and humaneness despite all of their skills and competences.A right perspective on education and how the university can facilitate it for the betterment of the individuals and the Nigerian state require asking two questions. These questions are relevant given that education is primarily about the youth and their potentials for transforming the future of any society or state. The first question then: what are we preparing the Nigerian youth for? The second question: how are we preparing them for that future? These two questions ought to inform the reform of the ongoing reform of the university system in Nigeria. To answer the first question, we need a paradigmatic reorientation in terms of the objective of education and how the university can be reformed to make it happen. Education is not essentially for employment or credentials. Wendel Berry says this more aptly than I could have: “The thing being made in a university is humanity…. [W]hat universities…are mandated to make or to help to make is human beings in the fullest sense of those words–not just trained workers or knowledgeable citizens but responsible heirs and members of human culture…. Underlying the idea of a university–the bringing together, the combining into one, of all the disciplines–is the idea that good work and good citizenship are the inevitable by-products of the making of a good–that is, a fully developed–human being.” If this understanding is taken to heart, Nigeria has a most potent opportunity to reconnect with its youth population and lay the foundation for a credible and capable citizenry that constitutes the basis for social order. A paradigmatic change in the understanding of what education is therefore prepares the Nigerian youth for a future that enables them to connect fully with what it means to be a human being in Nigeria.The higher education system therefore ought to find that balance between character development and manpower development. And this leads to the key change management dynamics that will allow the university system, as a part of the larger higher education framework, to facilitate transformation for the Nigerian state. This is the essence of the second question—how are we to prepare the youth for that human future? This question demands that we recalibrate the university system in ways that enable us to rethink and reform what education truly means. Let us frame the critical reform issues around the following questions: (i) In terms of relevance, should universities prioritize knowledge creation, skills training, employability and social mobility? (ii) How does technology factor into, and shape, teaching, learning, research, within the context of online and hybrid education services delivery models? (iii) How does the university system balance between the traditional disciplinary boundaries (which are becoming limiting) and cross-disciplinary research and learning within the growing globalization of learning and the emerging knowledge society? (iv) What governance models and funding structures will best support Nigeria’s emerging model of university autonomy and sustainable funding? (v) In what ways can the university strategically manage the critical emergence of the STEM—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—field while also prioritizing the fundamental and broad significance of the liberal arts, humanities, and the social sciences? (vi) How will universities prioritize the required balance between continuous skills development and adult education, as a key strategy for enabling the economy to cope with the speed at which technology renders skills obsolete in a heavily internationalized labour market? (vii) How will university system foster and deepen research and development (R&D), as well as entrepreneurship education, rooted in innovation and industry partnership, without compromising their research agenda and academic integrity?An undue focus on education as a return on investment, while it answers Nigeria’s development aspirations (and even parental yearning for purpose for their children), must be placed within a larger objective, especially within a crucial postcolonial context like the Nigerian society. Education must prepare us to live together within any context we find ourselves—workplace, families, neighborhood, villages, virtual spaces, schools, and so on; and with others who do not belong in the same gender, status, ethnicity or religion with us. The added benefit of an education that prepares the Nigerian youth for life and reconnects them back to their humanity is that it also prepares them to face the challenges of the time and context. Such an education prepares them to navigate life’s circumstances and the demands that new technologies and innovation require, for instance, to facilitate Nigeria’s entry into the knowledge society and the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions. Then we can be satisfied that the higher education system has started enacting learning. And we have commenced a future where Nigerian youth would have started asking critical questions not only about living together and ethically with one another but also with intelligent machines in the age of AI.

• Being excerpt from the address delivered by Prof. Tunji Olaopa, Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, as Chairman of the 2026 Convocation Lecture Programme of the Federal University of Agriculture (FUNAAB), Abeokuta, on January 30, 2026