Town-gown misalignment

The misalignment between town and gown in Nigeria is increasingly becoming an object of national concern; whilst there are signs of hope, a concerted effort and making the Tertiary Education Trust Fund’s (TETFund) National Research Fund open to every Nigerian researcher irrespective of whether they are from a private or public university would be necessary.

To illustrate, one of the most significant innovations that were responsible for making the United States of America (USA) an industrial powerhouse was the development of industrial Research and Development (R&D) laboratories in the last century. During the second quarter of the 20th Century a number of pharmaceutical R&D laboratories were established in the vicinity of research intensive universities, very much like the more recent case of the Silicon Valley in California.

However only in November 2016, Abdullahi Bichi Baffa the executive secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) said the fund had spent N1.7 billion on the National Research Fund but the researches have not translated into any improvement in the ranking of tertiary institutions in the country. This is probably because the Fund is not competitive enough and open to only researchers in public universities.

Some universities are currently supporting industries with research but most of these researches are too academic and abstract in nature, and this is why there is a big gap between the industry and the research output.

A cross section of responses harvested from chief executive officers and production managers’ surveyed by BusinessDay show that universities’ approach to research is the problem. They strongly suggested schools should ensure that the industries are consulted first before any research is carried out.

For instance, at the University of Lagos, over the past five years more than N500 million has been spent on scholarly research work. In 2012 and 2014, the value of university funded faculty research was about N100 million with support from the Tertiary Trust Fund (TETFund) and the Central Research Committee (CRC) set-up by the University Senate. But this has not translated into tangible product developments.

Reconnecting academia to industry, a number things need to be done chief among which would be two key moves; TETFund’s National Research Fund should be open to every researcher, either from a private or public university with requisite governing documents and universities’ Research and Innovation Centres should be run as limited liability companies.

The first direction is research capacity building. There is the need to run annual, intensive, capacity-building (training) workshops on contemporary research techniques, for cohorts of science researchers. During the last five years, dotted all over Nigeria, are specks of such research capacity-building efforts which have had feeble impact in bolstering overall national contribution to the global science and technology research literature.

We need a reasonable level of research infrastructure to publish peer reviewed articles in high impact journals and we need excellent teachers to enable our graduates to perform confidently in the work place.

A proactive government should challenge its universities to come up with solutions to problems in the society. The United States of America, the United Kingdom and other advanced economies do this. They challenge their researchers and say these are the problems we have, universities come up with solutions.