Welcome to Our World: A sprinkle of self-doubt, systemic fear will ensure you graduate this year.

Of high hopes,

our ancestors had them in abundance

The dream Fatima Al-Fihr had for Africa was one of massive enlightenment and collective emancipation of the mind. A demand for a struggle for beneficial knowledge from every background, every class, every political dispensation. You needed to be educated albeit not necessarily formally to be invited to the table. The collective vision was to put in structures that would continuously foster a civilization worthy of advancement.

A backstory

When you’re born in Africa, West-Africa, you are fortunate to be handed a name with a history, of successful, brave, immortal predecessors. One would instinctively expect that the same be said of working systems, of a government with the interest of her people at heart, of a university with the sole aim of educating her students but the contrary, a grave deterioration is what is the reality of the continent.

The first thing one must learn at any Nigerian university is that the lecturer, not the judge, is God. After scaling through the hurdles of the Joint Admission Matriculation Board (JAMB) examination, Post-JAMB, Acceptance fee, a fee to be paid (usually not less than 50,000 naira) to secure a “spot” after being offered admission, the student is mentally battered and doesn’t even recognize the misuse of power by the lecturer as oppression.

On sexual assault and

harassment,

No Repercussions

In West-Africa, culture (read: respect), has a place in the educational system, it is the tool used to instil fear in a lot of campuses.

So much so that when a female student is harassed, her first point of action is not to report to the university authority but to keep mute, to live in constant fear of her harasser because ultimately there are usually no repercussions other than the lecturer being transferred to other universities where the action is likely to continue and that action rarely gets taken against the harasser.

Recently, A male student from the University of Ilorin was assaulted by a lecturer for stating the obvious fact that the duration for his class had elapsed, the lecturer after physically assaulting the student went on to dismiss him from his class and other future classes with not as much as a query from the university authority.

Overpopulated spaces called lecture rooms with little to no study materials.

It might start sounding cliche by now but African problems are quite fundamentally similar, I could be talking about an overpopulated lecture room in a Nigerian University and it would still apply to a Ghanaian, Liberian, Ivorien or a Gambian university.

According to a student from the University of Ghana, who was advantaged to go an exchange programme to Germany, “My experience in Germany was different.

The classes were always small (max of 20 people for seminars (interactive style) and 50 for lectures). This allowed the lecturer to interact with everyone on a personal level. But our large numbers here make this challenging”.

She also went on to say, “Reading materials are uploaded on a platform called stud IP, where you have access to all the required readings for the course. All you need is the internet which is made available by the school.

Sometimes lecturers print extra copies about the topic treated(mostly a page or two) and share to the class. I experienced and heard no case of sexual harassment. Germans are extremely time conscious so lectures start and end on time”.

All of that is not a given in an average University in West-Africa, for example, failure to buy the lecturer’s handout could lead to outright failure, yes — failure.

A student of United Methodist University, Monrovia, Liberia also had this to say, “Most of the lecturers treat us like they are doing us a favour instead of doing their jobs. They don’t respect students and hardly do they ever don’t respect the time and numerous sexual harassment allegations against lecturers on campus”.

But do we

allow this to continue?

Introspection would be a great start into recognizing that the lecturer attending and leaving a lecture room just in time is not doing the students a favour, it is just the appropriate and ethical thing to be done.

The remarkable similarities in the treatment of students across West African countries is a statement of fact that there is a gap between the treatment of students in other continents compared to the African continent, coupled with the fact that there’s also a total disregard for the autonomy of students. Bear in mind, when you speak against this iniquity, you’re guaranteed of being singled out, shunned, bullied, repressed. We can’t continue to allow this direct indictment on our educational system multiply.