A University of Ibadan lecturer, Dr Oluwatoyin Adeniyi, has hinted that public universities in Nigeria may face brain drain after the rampaging coronavirus pandemic has been tamed.
He stated this Sunday in a webinar entitled “PhD Thesis writing in Economics or Finance,” saying there are indications that public universities in Nigeria may lose some of its best brains to the Global North in a post-COVID era if academic salaries and infrastructure to support teaching and research activities remain in comatose.
Dr. Adeniyi further stated that the conditions of service in Nigerian public varsities cannot attract any foreign scholar and it has incapacitated teaching and research activities.
He said: “While there is a huge deficit of available PhD holders that can supervise doctoral students in Nigerian universities, the conditions of service of thousands of PhD holders already burdened with supervising and working to sustain teaching and research is not encouraging.”
He said Nigerian universities have deficits in PhD holders in specialised disciplines such as information sciences, law, architecture among others, and the substantial gap between the proportions of doctoral holders needed for certain courses accounted for why many universities face accreditation problems for their courses.
“The world over, the higher education system is recognised as a major contributor to national development. National budgets even in the most advanced countries have a substantial portion allocated to the education sector in order to facilitate teaching and research activities of Universities and other research-based institutions.
“The PhD programmes represent the highest echelon of academic training and the global distribution of graduates from doctoral programs is a mirror, in many respects, of the disparities in the levels of economic, political and social development across countries.
“In other words, North America, Western Europe and other OECD countries outside these two regions have a disproportionately higher number of PhD holders. The deficit in doctoral holders in Nigeria plus the deficit in the number of women who hold PhD partly accounted for the low levels of social, economic and political development in Nigeria. For the developing world, however, countries like China, India and South Africa are the only comparators albeit at the lower end of the spectrum.”
Dr Adeniyi stated further that: “There is also a gendered dynamic which manifests in the almost spatially ubiquitous under-representation of females in the pool of PhD graduates.”
