A visitor to Ibadan University in pre-independence Nigeria more than 50 years ago was impressed by its modern structure and 100 000-book library.
”I might have forgotten that we were in tropical Africa,” wrote globe-trotting journalist John Gunther in 1953.
Since then, Nigeria’s premier university, which started in 1948 as a University of London college, has come down in the world. Today, run-down faculties with paint peeling off walls, and crowded, scruffy student hostels testify to its decline.
Across the continent, proud centres of learning which once burnished the hopes of post-independence Africa and educated its leaders have fallen on hard times, overwhelmed by tens of thousands of young Africans scrambling for university education.
From Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire to Kenya and Uganda, crumbling faculties and campuses, overcrowded lecture halls and hostels and depleted libraries and laboratories bear sad witness to chronic shortages of funding and investment.
And the prospect of better salaries abroad is luring away talented teaching staff and dragging down the academic standards of the continent’s once renowned alma maters.
Only in South Africa, it seems, have universities managed to maintain globally competitive academic levels, despite a fall in investment which started years before the 1994 end of apartheid.
”There was a time that when you talked of the University of Ibadan, you would also be talking about Oxford University,” said Ademola Dasylva, who teaches literature at Ibadan.
He blames the decline on Nigeria’s post-independence military rulers, whom he says deliberately starved state universities of funding.
Lecturer Benson Mojuetan says Ibadan, once famous for history and chemistry, can no longer compete globally.
”We are not current in journals, we are not current in literature in the various disciplines. We try to make the best out of a very bad situation,” he said.
Losing battle against decay
In faculties across West and East Africa, there is the same litany of complaints about poorly maintained facilities that have not kept pace with a crush of new students.
Stories abound of lecture halls filled to overflowing, of professors straining to be heard by classes of 2 000 students crammed into rooms designed for less than half that number.
”Some students even sit on the lecturer’s table when he is delivering his lecture,” said Mariam Kivugo, a 20-year-old first year student at Dar es Salaam University in Tanzania.
Power outages, the bane of so many energy-starved sub-Saharan African capitals, often disrupt lectures and study.
”Sometimes our classrooms aren’t lit and we write in the dark,” said 22-year-old literature student Achille Kore of Côte d’Ivoire’s Abidjan University.
In Uganda’s Makerere University, once the most admired in East Africa, daily electricity cuts plunge lecture halls, computer rooms and laboratories into darkness.
Poor living conditions in hostels and delays in payments of grants have led to numerous strikes, sit-ins and protests that often turn campuses into battlegrounds between stone-throwing students and police firing tear gas and wielding batons.
For days on end this year, such clashes at Dakar University in Senegal blocked one of the main avenues out of the city, leaving the stink of tear gas wafting across neighbourhoods.
Earlier this month, Makerere’s students rioted again after their lecturers went on strike, leading to cases of looting.
Fed up with low pay and shortages of everything from books to computers, many African university teachers and lecturers look abroad to develop their careers.
”Our salaries are scandalous. The university must give us better remuneration. Otherwise, there will be brain drain,” said Dr Simon Nyandemo, a University of Nairobi economics lecturer.
”As a graduate student, I had better facilities than a professor today,” added a colleague, Dr Wilfred Nyangena.
South Africa still shines
South African universities seem to have weathered the setbacks better.
Johannesburg’s Witswatersrand University, where former president and anti-apartheid giant Nelson Mandela studied, has imposing buildings, vast halls and well stocked libraries.
Along with other publicly funded South African universities like Stellenbosch, Cape Town and Bloemfontein, its scientific research is known to be of world class standard.
But even these universities are faced with diminishing funding and high dropout rates.
”It impacts on salaries you can pay. We’ve lost a lot of professors, even young lecturers,” said Ihron Rensburg, vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg.
”The second casualty is capital expenditure. You can’t rehabilitate old buildings, let alone put up new ones.”
The situation is much more alarming in rural universities, which struggle to attract and retain students and staff.
But some African governments and university administrators are fighting to stop the rot.
In Senegal, union officials say university teachers who have been working abroad are returning after President Abdoulaye Wade’s government increased salaries last year.
And the West African nation is pressing ahead with an ambitious expansion plan that would open three new university ”poles” in the interior.
But even if African students survive the rigours of their university courses, they may still struggle to find jobs in often tight and graft-ridden labour markets.
Some, like tens of thousands of young West Africans this year, may risk a dangerous sea voyage to seek work in Europe.
”The mirage of Europe still exists … students want to go north, whatever it takes,” said Ndiace Diop of the SAES university teachers’ union in Senegal. – Reuters