PURSUIT OF POSTGRADUATE DEGREES IN NIGERIA IS A SUICIDE MISSION: SURVEY OF CONVERSATIONS WITH SELECT POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS IN NIGERIA.

At the risk of sounding like a cracked music plate on a turn-table or, perhaps, immodest, I will like to make this last post in relation to my PhD journey. After this, the rest of the story will come in the form of a book. For now, please bear with me and come along. I plead with you to take your mind away from the object (the PhD) and let's focus on dream or aspiration. 

No thanks to unstable academic calendar and other systemic issues, I was the first in my MA class to finish the programme after four (4) years. This, along with other factors, made me firmly resolve to seek further educational accomplishments outside the shores of Nigeria. Don't get me wrong. My decision had nothing to do with anything other than the realisation that PhD in Nigeria was NOT FOR ME. 

And so the journey began! I had no problem securing admission in foreign universities. I actually lost count of the number of universities where my application sailed through. In fact, a university in the USA once sought me out and offered me admission on the strength of my GRE scores. Before then, I had no idea that that university existed. I never applied to them. 

But I had no fund or scholarship to proceed any further. And so years began to accumulate.

Somehow, I held on to my 'crazy' dream. I will be the biggest liar to tell you that it was easy. It definitely wasn't!

While I waited, I was seen in some quarters as an irredeemable fool!

While I waited, I was insulted formally and informally!

While I waited, I was mocked!

While I waited, I lost some opportunities!

While I waited, the dream often flickered!

But while I waited, I somehow found God's uncommon grace to keep the dream alive!

Some said I lacked the mental capability needed for a PhD research and that I was only using the 'dream' of doing a PhD outside Nigeria to hide my inadequacies. Interestingly, when the opportunity came my way to receive funding, the same people who claimed I didn't have what it would take for PhD studies, fought with every fibre in them to rob me of the opportunity. In fact, if it were possible, they could have spilled their blood to prevent me. Anyway, they succeeded at that point!

It's impossible to recount it all here. I don't want to bore you. Apart from my immediate family and quite a few other people, the rest wrote me off. I was dismissed as a fool, a numskull who had nothing to offer, a 'compound' fool, if you like! But in it all, I found the unusual grace to keep nursing my 'crazy' dream. It flickered occasionally but I refused to let go.

Finally, the day came when, in that hall, in an open defence, with many seated and others watching via zoom from within The Netherlands and the rest of the world, I successfully defended my PhD at the University of Amsterdam, a world class university established in 1632 (pardon this peacock). Less than 20 minutes after the defence, the conferment of doctoral status followed and so ended the many years of waiting. In a twinkle of an eye, the dream gave place to reality!

So back the question I began with: what dream are YOU nursing? How long are YOU prepared to nurse that dream? What will make you give up YOUR dream? Don't forget, this is not about my PhD but about YOUR dream. I urge YOU to hold on! Receive God's grace to hold on!

Above is the PhD story of a Nigerian on how suicidal it is to pursue a doctoral degree in Nigerian universities. The second paragraph of the story points to the frustrations involved in pursuing a doctoral degree in Nigeria. How can you advertise that PhD is 3 years and hold students down for the next 10-12 years? How can a student spend 4 years on a master's degree supposedly meant to span for the duration of 18 months? How can Mr Governor and the Nigerian government make doctoral studies in Nigeria more humane, attractive, reassuring and in so doing, most Nigerians will have confidence the system, stay, work at home and Nigeria will save some money by preventing academic exodus occasioned by sadism, unnecessary subjectivity, delay or undue elongation of duration of postgraduate studies and conservatism in our universities. At AAUA, our survey shows that 8 out of 10 postgraduate students carry suicidal thoughts or frustration in their hearts because their PhD supervisors had hung their fates and destinies in the balance without caring whether their careers or survivals depend on the doctoral programmes. Most of them are forced to vent their anger and frustration on the students while marking their scripts or teaching them. Most of the postgraduate students you see at Akungba are suffering and smiling. Most of them are not speaking up because they were afraid to do so due to eventual witch-hunt from the university and their professors. One of the PhD students in one of departments mentioned that there is a professor in the department whose name scared students away. According to them, "at the name of so-and-so, every student shall flee". Out of curiosity, I asked "why?" They responded "because frustration will make them drop out and because they will never graduate".

The Way Forward: 

The dean of postgraduate school should request for files of postgraduate students at the beginning of every session to determine whether there are students held down for more than three years. Where there are cases like that, the dean should officially question the supervisor and the students. Where there are reports of professors whose names scare students away, such professors should not be given students to supervise. Supervision is all about mentoring, not frustration or dream-killing. Appointment of anyone as a professor should also be based on the number of students he or she had mentored at master's and doctoral levels. Someone mentored you and you are selfish, if you do not mentor people in your areas of expertise and knowledge. Imposition of supervisors on PhD students without recourse to areas of expertise or research interests is outdated and belonged to the period of "Jahiliyya". PhD students should be allowed to determine who supervise them after checking through the list of professors in their prospective departments. Students should be reassured that they will graduate in record time and not at the mercy of starry-eyed professors and supervisors who think they are doing you favour by reading through your thesis and ensuring that you graduate in record time. Imagine Nigerian professors telling you that s/he did his/her PhD for 10-12 years and would continue to repeat that, to scare or harass the students into submission. Some students have had reasons to murder their supervisors in other parts of Africa sequel to this avoidable human wickedness. Most Nigerians who went to study abroad and refused to return did so because they never had faith in the system and because they wanted to pursue their programmes and graduate on time. We keep talking about brain drain in our universities when most of our university professors join in killing dreams of upcoming scholars. Some of our professors have, by their sadism and conservatism, destroyed many destinies by making academics look like a forest of trillion demons, unsafe to navigate for younger generations of scholars. How do you explain the situation whereby a PhD student cannot even call his/her professor to ask questions or even ask for academic materials. We can change the narrative by making upcoming scholars fall in love with academics through a drastic change in the way things are done.