Still on NUC and CCMAS
By JGN Onyekpe
I have gone through the document recently issued by the deputy executive director (academics) of the National Universities Commission, NUC, Dr Noel Biodun Saliu in defence of the Commission’s Core Curriculum Minimum Academic Standards, CCMAS, for Nigerian universities.
I still do not think the NUC should be telling the universities and faculties what to teach. Curriculum development/ review is internal affair. It is process led, from department to faculty, and from faculty to academic planing unit/senate. There is no provision in the Acts listed in the NUC’S document requiring any university to submit their curricula or academic programmes to the NUC for approval! The sections of the NUC Act cited do not empower the NUC to develop curricula for varsities either!!
These sections comprise of Act No. 81 Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, LFN, 2011 and Act No. E3 LFN 2004.These Acts only provide for the Commission to ensure accreditation ( not development) of programmes, implementation of admission quotas, equity in the distribution of subvention funds and earned allowance, etcetera.
These Acts are not in any way in conflict with the various Acts by which the individual universities were established. They are also not in conflict with the university autonomy clauses in subsisting Federal Government of Nigeria, FGN and the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU Agreements. The sections of the Acts cited by the Commission were, and still are, not intended to legally invalidate or render inconsequential, the university autonomy clauses in subsisting FGN/ASUU Agreements. By relying on the Acts in question to develop curricula for varsities, the NUC has either betrayed its wrong and inadequate understanding and interpretation of the Acts or it is a case of arrogance and desperation to legitimise the abuse of varsity autonomy. In any event, CCMAS has no legal foundation.
That the universities are funded by the government as is constitutionally provided for should not be taken, as the NUC has done, to mean that the government and its agency or agencies should develop curricula and programmes for them. CCMAS is Nigeria’s home-grown aberration. The NUC is headed by a senior academic, but it is not an academy of scholars. It is an administrative agency of the government made up mostly of a hierarchy of bureaucrats and civil servants. The few consultant-contractors engaged by the Commission to develop curricula for the varsities cannot be better than the varsity academics themselves.
For Christ and Allah’s sake, the NUC should let the varsities be so the varsities’ senates can exercise their primary statutory responsibility of developing and reviewing curricula and academic programmes for the varsities as is universally done. The time to address the absolutism of the NUC is now!
This piece was written by JGN Onyekpe, fhsn, from the University of Lagos, Akoka.
