Private HE as an antidote to political radicalism debated

Were the proliferation of private universities and the aggressive marketisation of courses in public universities in Africa used as an antidote to cool off political radicalism in higher education, or were they prompted by a genuine desire to harness private resources to speed up the growth of university enrolments on the continent?

Several academics, responding to Jeremiah Arowosegbe’s 2024 paper, ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’, argued that there had been deliberate plans to break up the politically radicalised public universities from owning the monopoly of higher education.

Their insights were invited and published in the February issue of Africa, a journal published by Cambridge University Press and which also carried Arowosegbe’s initial article.

Arowosegbe’s paper highlighted how the postcolonial state continues to shape crises in African universities regarding funding, quality, academic freedom and intellectualism. It also spotlights tensions between academics and ruling elites and the impact of external global forces on African higher education. Arowosegbe is a Nigerian academic teaching political science at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.

Citing the Nigerian experience, Dr Ayodeji Ladipo Alabi, a political scientist at Redeemer’s University, Nigeria, argues that the proliferation of private universities from 1999 may have been hastened by the tense relations between the Nigerian state and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).

According to Alabi, towards the advent of the new century, ASUU and the National Association of Nigerian Students had become the face of demands for increased university funding, university autonomy, academic freedom, and the right of Nigerian youth to higher education.

Private HE scores political points

In his response to Arowosegbe’s position, Alabi noted that the increase of private universities in Nigeria appeared to have scored the desired political points for the governing elite, as it reduced the radical behaviour of students and academic staff against the government, and offered parents and students many studying choices.

This meant, for instance, that students were allowed to study for degrees in private universities which they could not have qualified for in public universities. Students who would not have qualified to study for courses in engineering, law and medicine in public universities, for example, were allowed to study in private universities with only the minimum university entry grades. Further, according to Alabi, the sense of urgency may have had the effect of constraining due diligence in the verification of resources for some of the prospective private universities before they were approved and licensed.

The rapid increase of private universities in Nigeria and elsewhere on the continent may have resulted in high academic quality costs. “The sense of urgency may have constrained due diligence in verifying resources for some private universities before they were approved and licensed,” says Alabi.

He stressed that, boxed in by funding challenges and profit motives, some private universities were marked by a wide range of inadequacies in the early years of their establishment. “Some of the shortfalls included downscaling merit in student enrolment, charging unrealistic tuition fees, hiring academically unqualified staff, seriously inadequate facilities, the toleration of poor discipline among students, and not following due process in accrediting professional courses,” said Alabi.

Although Alabi attributed those weaknesses to the initial stages of the development of private universities in Nigeria, other academics think that most of those inefficiencies still exist.

‘Milling’ many first-class graduates

Gabriel Amakievi Ijeoma, a professor of history at Rivers State University in Nigeria and Yusuf Abdulrahman, a professor of education at the University of Port Harcourt, also in Nigeria, say many private universities in Nigeria have been faulted for ‘milling’ students with first-class degrees (graduating many students with first-class degrees).

In their study, the two scholars pointed out that, unlike public universities, which usually have single-digit first-class graduates, most private universities have consistently maintained double-digit numbers of first-class graduates.

The two academics argued that, although private universities in Nigeria were initially celebrated as a welcome development, with the full hope that all the challenges confronted by public universities would change, there are indicators that their proliferation will not solve the existing higher education problems. Nigeria currently has 270 universities, of which 148, or 54.8%, are private.

However, while the deal private university owners in Nigeria made with the government is unclear, one thing that university leaders have not done is to encourage staff trade unionism or student activism.

Structural adjustment

Elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in Kenya and Uganda, ruling elites took advantage of the World Bank’s structural adjustment austerity measures in higher education to break university students’ role as political actors who regarded themselves as society’s overseers.

To hasten the process of breaking student activism, governments introduced dual-track tuition policies that ushered in the privatisation and marketisation of education in public universities.

The dual-track system allowed universities to admit students on regular programmes, whereby students could access government student loans or bursaries, while also admitting privately sponsored students. The only difference is that the second category pays full-cost user fees. Such students are also described as those enrolled for parallel programmes or are called privately sponsored students.

Commenting on the issue then, Dr Carrol Bidemi, a former World Bank consultant on higher education, noted that, although the initial goal appeared to raise additional revenues for the universities, the process had implications for the behaviour of students and staff.

According to Bidemi, paying students started being seen as clients and not merely as students, while some academic staff pursued aggressive strategies to recruit privately sponsored students as they earned extra money. Eventually, many narrow degree programmes were created, not because of their academic value, but because they benefited students and staff.

The underlying issue is that the financial crisis in public universities across Sub-Saharan Africa struck students hard, especially when stipends and free cafeteria systems were abolished and replaced with loans, and students were required to buy meals from their pockets.

Change from activism, self-conscious elitism

According to Dr Leo Zeilig, a research associate at the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, the reality of student poverty and the financial crises of African universities transformed their activism and their self-conscious elitism.

Highlighting the behaviour change of students in public universities in Kenya, Professor Maurice Amutabi, the director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at the Technical University of Kenya, told University World News that the extreme poverty of campus life has transformed students today into bedfellows with the broader poor in society. “They are no longer a privileged layer,” said Amutabi.

In this regard, scholars are divided on whether the proliferation of private universities, the introduction of two-tiered tuition policies in public universities, and the aggressive marketing of university education had any bearing on the desire to raise the enrolment ratio or was just meant to tame political radicalism.

Even then, whether private resources can significantly increase participation in tertiary education in Africa remains to be seen. Statistics from UNESCO indicate that uptake for tertiary education in Sub-Saharan Africa in the past two decades increased from 5% to 9.4%, compared to a global rise of 19% to 40%.

What about the vibrancy of African HE?

But, despite Arowosegbe’s propositions that precolonial ruling elites are responsible for the decline of postcolonial universities, Alabi and other academics think the ruling bureaucracy is not entirely to blame.

For Alabi, tensions between the central government and the academy are significantly impacted by respective situated ideologies, which create social contradictions that hinder socio-economic transformation and development.

As for Dr Anna Mdee, a professor in politics of global development at the University of Leeds, Arowosegbe’s take on the crises and challenges of postcolonial African universities is excessively bleak, as it sidesteps the vibrancy and the broad growth of higher education on the continent.

In her response, ‘The condition and purpose of universities in Africa’, Mdee said that the rapid economic growth of some African economies and their transition to lower middle-income status is evidence of success that is offering the youth an opportunity for the future.

She recognises the charismatic first postcolonial rulers, such as Nkrumah and Nyerere, who tried to own the intellectual space of the newly emergent academic class. She argues that the political class did not merely seek to replace colonial officials but faults structural adjustments for the ensuing problems.

“In the wider political economy of the continent, the debt and structural adjustment pressures of the 1980s exacerbated the chronic underfunding of emergent public universities and research,” says Mdee.

However, Mdee sees a silver lining in some emerging African universities, such as Mzumbe University in Tanzania. Initially a small institute for training civil servants during the colonial era, it was scaled up after independence and became the third established public university in Tanzania in 2001.

“Mzumbe has both private fee-paying students and a small proportion of students in receipt of government loans,” said Mdee.

An onslaught on the arts?

In his response, ‘Offloading African academic fodder? A response,’ Dr Gerald Chikozho Mazarire, lecturer of history and African studies at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, says a new experiment in higher education in Zimbabwe stresses an onslaught on the arts.

According to Mazarire, like previous reforms, the new university transition in Zimbabwe promotes mergers that have seen departments, such as history, bundled into unwieldy entities meant to produce graduates who must contribute to entrepreneurship and industrial development.

In this regard, there are indicators that the debate about the crises and challenges facing African precolonial universities will attain high gear on the continent, besides South Africa and Egypt, where stronger university systems are emerging due to massive government investments.

In most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, rifts will remain regarding the extent to which postcolonial elites have contributed to the crisis and challenges in African universities. For instance, questions will arise as to whether the political class has always been interested in filling the shoes of colonial officials, hence cracking down on perceived revolutionaries and avoiding intellectual scrutiny.

Currently, questions are being asked in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa as to how privatisation and marketisation could significantly increase participation rates in tertiary education. Similarly, the debate will continue on university reforms, governance, missions, and academic freedom.

In effect, Arowosegbe’s paper, which some of his detractors have framed as mere rhetoric, has provoked a clash of ideas, showing that there is little indication of the ruling elites (power estate) and academics (knowledge estate) working together harmoniously, as Alabi has suggested.

This feature has been updated on 4 April.