IN revisiting the question of why important books on Nigeria are no longer written within our country but abroad let us situate the problem by stressing that no nation can make the transition to a knowledge economy if human capital formation and nurture remain in the tatters which the Nigerian political elite have left them. Let us hear this axiom from Abdullah Bin Ahmed Malaysia's former prime minister who said that 'For most countries today human resources development and human capital formation are either extremely important, absolutely vital or a matter of life and death. In the case of Malaysia, we think it is a matter of life or death.'In other words, countries that wish to get ahead in a world in which the generation and domestication of knowledge and innovation drive economic development must necessarily prioritize those factors that conduce intellectual productivity and leading edge, scientific activity. Considering this backdrop, it is an awful shame if not a tragedy that a nation that publicly aspires to world class economic status has so callously and coldly diminished intellectual labour. The nation currently teeters on the brink of another university shut down occasioned by the failure of our political leaders to honour agreements reached with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).Truth of the matter is: Outstanding talent, great leaps of imagination and facility in the use of language can produce poets, novelists and dramatists of world class stature, indeed, Nobel Laureates. And of course, Nigeria has had a fair share of substantial creative writers with many of them working in distressed circumstances.Academic excellence is a different kettle of fish altogether as it does not obey the privilege of great talent unaided by the propitious circumstances of well furnished and up to date libraries and laboratories, immersion in the latest scientific journals, exposure to great minds and mentors in the discipline as well as generous research and travel grants with which to track data and so on. The world over, there are prestigious universities which train the nation's elite and engage in research that informs policy. Indeed, no serious nation allows the minds of its future leaders to be moulded by other countries without a countervailing cultural resource to project the nation's aspirations and goals. It is a matter for regret, however, that the degenerate status of higher education has resulted in a situation where Nigeria has become a 'huge bonanza' for all sorts of universities across the globe including those of less endowed countries like Ghana, Benin Republic and Togo which actively compete for the training of young Nigerians.The reason for this downturn is that a decrepit environment replete with ailing infrastructure and a disabling organisational climate cannot be the right soil in which, proper academic work, much less excellence can sprout. It is not just that seminal books about the country are not being produced in the country but more painfully most of what passes for academic output in our universities can be safely ignored. The research culture once buoyant and located on the world map is experiencing dying throes as the production of textbooks of indifferent quality as well as vanity journal publications are the order of the day. Only a few days back, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan Prof. Isaac Adewole revealed that many universities are not taking advantage of the Educational Trust Fund (ETF) enhanced provision for research. This may surprise those outside the academy; but insiders are acquainted with the sobering fact that a substantial portion of money allocated for research in several universities are returned unspent year after year. To fully discuss this dimension of the crisis will take us beyond the space provided by this write-up but suffice it to broach that a creeping organisational dysfunction is evident in our universities resulting in the fact that diminishing attention is paid to the most essential task of these institutions, namely, the generation of new knowledge through research.As an academic, I was never fortunate enough to obtain research grants from the several universities in the country where I had worked and not for want of trying.In one distressing instance, an application I submitted along with my head of department lapsed because my principal partner retired from the university five years after the application was submitted and no response was forthcoming. It is pleasant to report, however, that I had benefitted from such sponsors as the Carnegie endowment, Friedrich Ebert Foundation as well as the Ford Foundation which generously funded a book project in Political Communication described by the European assessor as 'a very substantial work based on extensive personal research.' This personal reminiscence is to throw in bold relief those dimensions of our bottom league academic status which relate to the organisational climate and incoherence of our universities themselves. Speaking broadly, a highly bureaucratised university system featuring a National Universities Commission (NUC) determined academic regime which is replicated across the country cannot produce excellence.For example why should a word-class professor who has published substantially in the leading journals of his discipline earn the same salary as another professor-who is far less productive and far less cosmopolitan' This sort of uniformity and civil service rigidity does not happen in several other countries where universities are globally competitive and maintain incentives and indeed have a mission to attract the best scholars in order to create a culture of excellence. As it is well known for example, the Ivy League universities in the United States, so named, because they combine excellence in scholarship with excellence in sports, pay their academics higher than most other universities in the United States. They also spend more on libraries-Harvard University for example spends close to a hundred million dollars a year- and have special incentives for attracting star academics from all over the world. In sum, not only are our universities not topical and woefully under- resourced but they are hamstrung by inappropriate governance structures and a culture of mediocrity antithetical to world-class output.This uninspiring ethos is also responsible for the divorce between outstanding intellect in the marketplace such as the professions and our universities which continue to snub them. Many mass communication departments in British universities, for example, are proud to display the names of star journalists on their staff list partly as branding techniques to attract students with an eye on successful journalistic practice. Indeed, a few years back, the City University of London appointed a journalist, George Brock to a chair in journalism from the Times of London where Brock spent twenty seven years. Sadly, this kind of cross-fertilisation and excellent blending of town and gown hardly occurs in our academic culture which continues to maintain an unimaginatively formal definition of scholarship.To be sure, there are still in our universities, a few outstanding intellectuals who are labouring heroically in disadvantaged circumstances but these are clearly an endangered minority which are not being replenished. It is clear therefore that if our universities must return to the centres of excellence which they once were, a host of inhibiting factors internal and external must be addressed. There must be a political elite that is ashamed enough about the dramatically attenuated status of our universities to create the foundations of resuscitated academies that have an identity on the world map. This cannot be done by proliferating universities according to the logic of prebendal resource sharing across the nation's geopolity, a phenomenon described recently by Prof. Biodun Jeyifo as 'the grandiosity of mediocrity'. What we need to do is to create or at least foster elite universities well funded enough to undertake leading edge research and sufficiently divorced from the controlling hand of government parastatals to determine the payment structure of their own staff and consequently to have the leeway to institute a pay structure calibrated according to productivity. This is saying in other words, that the universities themselves require governance structures which facilitate serious academic output on the scale of Richard Joseph's seminal book; a better motivated and inspired academic yeomanry as well as visionary university administrators who can drive the projected ascent of these embattled institutions to global reckoning.Olukotun is professor of political science at the Lead City University, Ibadan.
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