ICYMI: Policy-research imperative in Nigeria’s development process | The Guardian Nigeria News - Nigeria and World News
The crisis of research-policy nexus is a microcosm of the larger challenge of research dynamics in Nigeria. What we have observed about public administration percolates down from the larger higher education problematic in Nigeria. If research in Nigeria’s higher education sector is not able to feed the policy intelligence and action research needs, it is essentially because Nigeria’s underdevelopment has also happened to her tertiary education and its research component.
The enormous challenge faced by higher education research in Nigeria is that of how to effectively hold the two ends of global significance and local relevance together. It is the challenge of thinking global and acting local. However, this is a high-sounding formula that is not easily realized in a third world educational context like Nigeria. One all-round situation is the dissonance between research methodology, global best practices and local realities. I am speaking about a situation where research methodologies are not cutting edge sufficiently to capture what is wrong and proffer creative solutions.
The answer lies in between the perception of what government is capable of doing and what the government should really do. Public universities in Nigeria are oriented on the subvention culture: vice chancellors go every month to Abuja to receive their quota of the oil money as their operational subvention. And most of these universities spent these subventions on overheads, rather than in the development of innovative research.
In critically attending to their research portfolio, the universities, through the public-private relationship with the private sectors, push the boundaries of development innovativeness in ways that draw the conscious attention of the government at all levels.