For universities in Nigeria to reoccupy their pride of place on the global league table, there must be a conscious entrenchment of excellence by the managers in administering these institutions. It is the only way to bring about efficient utilisation of human, material and resources in the attainment of universities’ objectives of teaching, research and community service as well as human capacity mobilisation and utilisation.

This is the position of Mr. Ayorinde Ogunruku (JP), the Registrar of Obafemi Awolowo University, (OAU), Ile-Ife in his lecture titled: “Excellence in University Administration in the 21st Century: Nigerian Universities in Perspective”, which he delivered recently in Ado Ekiti in honour of Chief Deji Adegbite, first Registrar of the University of Ado Ekiti, formerly Ondo State University to mark his 70th birthday ceremony.

According to Ogunruku, a lot needs to be done by managers of Nigerian universities to bring about excellence in university administration that will eliminate those glaring inadequacies currently confronting the nation’s universities.

The former administrative officer at the Federal University of Technology, Akure further explains the challenges militating against an efficient and effective management of universities in Nigeria thus:

“Universities in Nigeria lack the required human resource capacity, particularly in terms of the qualified academia to drive the objectives. Many in the administrative cadre are birds of passage who get recruited because that was the job available. Many of the equipment being used for scientific research are quite obsolete.

Many of the technologists are not exposed to efficiently manage the equipment. When the equipment is right and up-to-date, inadequate power supply makes the research tedious and results questionable.”

The OAU Registrar continues: “Many of the staff in the universities are today so environmentally subservient that rather than lead society in the right direction, they tail the society in its craze. The love of lucre is a driving force. Questions are raised, therefore, whether money actually motivates.

There is a scenario of the academia wanting to do more of administration than the traditional teaching and research, while the professional administrators are busy unionising to even-up with academia rather than facilitate the academic process. The domestic system of governance that is traditional to the university is yielding to a unitary one of ‘winners takes all’.

“The students also, because of perhaps a hopeless post graduation life, have turned the campus into a haven of brigandage and lawlessness. Students unionism that was part of our national pride has now been turned into money making venture, maintained and sustained by cultic groupings and other primordial interests.

Academic sessions that were predictable have become wantonly elongated due to unbridled student unrest and staff industrial crises. Even when sessions run, one is unsure of the quality of time given to academics because it is sometimes not impossible to have staff that would be unavailable to attend to their lecturers until midway into the semester.”

Ogunruku says that due to the numerous universities in the country without adequate staff, the few available engage in moonlighting, disclosing that it is not impossible to have an academic staff listed in three universities at the same time as a member of staff.

He also stressed the problem of infrastructure facing the ivory towers.” Our campuses became littered with abandoned physical facilities.  Available structures are inadequate to cater for the number admitted, thus inhibiting their capacities to adequately cater for the number they have. Yet there is teeming population of qualified candidates all across the streets of our nation.”

Part of the problem confronting the universities, according to Ogunruku, is the recruitment of candidates  who do not possess the prescribed requirements. Such students, he says, are like bad raw materials processed through the industrial mill, adding that comprising laid down regulations for admission by any of the agents creates a slur of excellence.

Closely related to this, says Ogunruku, are the discrepancies in the requirements from various universities. His words: “Because of certain peculiarities of inadequacy of candidates, some universities lower the minimum conditions for entry. JAMB set up various technical committees to ensure adherence to the prescribed minimum requirements.

There has always been stories that the prescribed minimum standards were being compromised. Certainly, where such compromises take place, excellence will be jeoperdised and the output at the end of the process becomes suspect. The need to ensure quality of the candidates admitted is the only panacea for excellence.”

The OAU Registrar also raises the issue of inadequate number of academics which is below the number  required in the nation’s 106 universities. Yet these academics are at the core of the universities endeavour, adding that the possibility of ensuring quality becomes compromised as those in charge of the core functions of the universities are not there.”

Similarly, the principle of recruiting the best into the administrative officer cadre, over the years, became compromised, says Ogunruku, and the effect on the performance of the administrative officers became obvious, explaining that the quality of the Technologists in our universities is also suspect.

To ensure excellence, therefore, he explains that the recruitment of all categories of staff must conform to the minimum standard required of a university of the 21st century.

The university administrator also wants university workers to be adequately rewarded, laboratories to be adequately equipped so as to facilitate the capacity of the universities to carry out appropriate need-driven research and the level of funding of research to be improved in order to get excellent service delivery and output in the universities.

A major component of resources required to give the universities the leverage for excellence is funding, says the Registrar. His words: “Government has continued to posit that funding has improved momentously in the last ten years.

The reality, however, is that truly allocation of funds to universities has increased tremendously in the last ten years but a greater percentage of the allocation goes into salaries of workers and other personnel emoluments. Provisions for other running costs such as provision of municipal service, funding of laboratories costs, research grants, etc are minimal and paltry.

To facilitate excellence in the university business, he said the various organs need to adhere strictly to the standards laid out in terms of structure and process, adding that from about the turn of  the new millennium, major issues that have impacted upon organisation structure and decision making processes of universities all over the world are the emerging political-economic dictum of “less government’, democratisation of decision making, promotion of professionalism in institutional governance and the over arching influence of ICT.