With lecture halls in many federal universities lacking electric sockets and master’s degree students still compelled to produce handwritten research works, Nigerian universities look like relics when compared to their peers in Asia and Europe registering patents for artificial intelligence.
In the race for innovation in technologies including artificial intelligence and 5G networks, universities from China, Korea and Taiwan are registering more patents than even their US peers in wireless communications, but Nigerian computer science departments are still looking for funds to buy computers.
“Nigerian universities at this point are struggling to modernise and equip their computer science laboratories. Some of the universities are still not able to introduce and use basic technology in the classroom,” said Terae Onyeje, managing director, Wowbii Limited, a technology company that produces interactive board and classroom teleconference facilities.
So, with up to half of white- and blue-collar jobs expected to disappear due to artificial intelligence, Nigerian students will lack the skills needed to compete with their peers in a rapidly-changing world.
Emmanuel Mkporjiogu, head, Department of Computer Science, Veritas University, Abuja, said curriculum is a big problem as old computer science professors regard artificial intelligence as a component of computer science.
“Artificial intelligence comprises natural language, voice and text processing. It also includes robotics, machine learning and big data analytics. These things are not taught in our universities,” said Mkporjiogu.
“NUC needs to invite professionals who understand current AI trends to review the curriculum. Some older professors of computer science still see it as an arm of mathematics but this has to change,” he said.
In preparation for this future, primary and secondary schools in China teach AI courses in classrooms and technology companies like Squirrel.AI are building personalised learning platforms with AI. Many public secondary school students in Nigeria still stare at laptops with a sense of wonder.
In 2018, three Nigerian universities – Covenant University, University of Ibadan, and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka – were included in the 2019 Times Higher Education World University Rankings which featured 1,250 universities in 86 countries but none of them has a functional programme on wireless technology.
Covenant University and University of Ibadan occupy fifth and sixth positions, respectively, on the table of all the 28 African ranked institutions for the 2019 ranking, but their peers are better positioned to prepare their students for the technologies of the future. Wits University in South Africa teaches AI and Google is opening an AI lab even in Ghana.
No Nigerian university has a patent in any of the latest technologies. The most some Nigerian universities have done is set up discussion groups pretending to be hubs or mention AI in passing at introduction to computer classes.
“We have an AI hub in the Computer Science Department in association with DataScience,” said Victor Odumuyiwa, computer science lecturer at the University of Lagos.
Unlike in Europe, Asia and America where corporate labs turn out commercially successful inventions, corporate Nigeria relies on talent from abroad for the most basic services.
Microsoft Research, corporate lab of Microsoft, employs 1,000 scientists and engineers who focus on dozens of areas of computing and openly collaborate with academic, government and industry researchers to advance state-of-the-art computing. Google x, a corporate lab established by Google, created self-driving cars, but such partnerships are lacking in Nigerian universities.
While public universities are poorly motivated to think innovation, funding is a major constraint for private universities. The average wage bill of a medium-sized private university per annum is about N500 million. Setting up a well-equipped electronic engineering department costs about N80 million and profit is strictly a game of numbers. It takes at least a decade to have the number of students needed to break even.
With shoestring education budgets, Nigeria’s fiscal plans show that education does not rank high in its priorities.
This compares poorly with China which spent nearly ¥4.3 trillion ($675.3 billion) on education in 2017, an increase of 9.43 percent from 2016. Nigeria has not made a dent on the UNESCO recommendation of 26 percent budget spend for education. Even those hired to manage education often fall short. The current Chinese minister of education is an academic administrator; Nigeria’s education minister is a journalist.
Analysts say the future belongs to businesses that have successfully built incubators and innovation-focused research labs and partner with universities to build creative solutions for problems that impact companies and consumers in big ways.
Nigerian university lecturers who teach entrepreneurship and management skills to graduate students shut down universities in endless strike over wages and some private universities major in minor as they battle to align students with some parochial moral codes.
ISAAC ANYAOGU & STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
