With just a few weeks to Nigeria’s most critical election, the major contenders who began their campaigns for the coveted number one political job in Nigeria – the office of the President – have so far not adequately addressed the critical issue of right to education.

Going through the various ramifications and segments of the nation’s highest law, the Constitution, it is unambiguous that the right to qualitative education opens the door to the enjoyment of all other fundamental right provisions espoused in chapter four of The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria of 1999 (as amended).

For instance, in section 17 subsection (3), the constitution stipulates that the state shall direct its policy towards ensuring that (a) all citizens, without discrimination on any group whatsoever, have the opportunity for securing adequate means of livelihoods as well as adequate opportunity to secure suitable employment.

There is no doubt that the clearest way of obtaining suitable employment is through capacity-building and or manpower educational empowerment of the citizenry. Section 18 (3) of the grund-norm emphasises: “Government shall strive to eradicate illiteracy and, to this end government shall as and when practicable provide (a) free compulsory and universal primary education; (b) free university education; and (c) free adult literacy programme.”

The foregoing objectives of state policy are never implemented because, as I write, the educational sector is among the most marginalised, even as the provision of the constitution which absolutely prohibits discrimination is not respected by top government functionaries, who have continuously underdeveloped the public educational sector while diverting public funds towards providing the most competitive educational training for their own children in some of the best universities in the advanced Western economies.

The neglect of the public educational sector deteriorated to an extent that most parents have decided to cough out huge sums to be able to send their children to foreign countries for educational training. The public school system in Nigeria suffers from the twin evil of corruption by the management staff, and criminal neglect in terms of funding by all levels of government in Nigeria. Most public schools are at the different stages of collapse.

The focus of this piece today is not on the perennial neglect of the public educational sector but rather on one of the most critical offshoots of marginalisation and corruption that are weighing down the public educational institutions. The problem is the fact that most girls from disadvantaged homes in Nigeria who are in public tertiary institutions are forced to become sex workers so as to train themselves in those schools that have kept hiking tuition fees, but without commensurate upgrade of standards.

This issue is a debilitating factor all around the globe, but the Nigerian dimension is uniquely satanic. This is because unlike in some Western societies where there are facilities from which students can borrow to pay for their very expensive university education, and gradually pays off these debts when they begin to work; in Nigeria, the poor students have no form of scholarship offering nor any educational funding banks from which to borrow. They, then, resort to engaging in all forms of social crimes so that they can pay their way through university.

Last week when I visited most states in the South-East whereby tertiary education is an attractive sector for most young persons, I came face-to-face with the existence of what can be called “capitalism on campus”: which is another way of describing commercial sex activities by female students of these universities. Capitalism on campus is a menace all around educational faculties around the country. Public and private universities are very busy commercialising honorary doctorate awards to the highest bidders, and are engaged in different fields of businesses to boost their revenue generation. But nothing is done to ameliorate the untold and despicable hardships that most students go through. Moreover, nearly 60 per cent of female students in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions are their own educational sponsors. This is why in such places like University of Lagos, among several others, there is the problem associated with what we call Aristos. The word is coined from the capitalist term Aristocrats, which means rich patrons who deploy their wealth to obtain sexual gratification from female or even male students. There are also those that are pejoratively termed as Runs Girls.

The sad thing about it is that the school management has never really appreciated this issue as a fundamental stumbling block to the holistic training and the educational formation of young persons.

As I write, the academic communities are on shut-down due to needless industrial action occasioned by the consistent willful neglect of the funding of public university system by both federal and state administrations. The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has been on strike for nearly a month now. Of course, the academic and non-academic staffs are worried about how to make their salaries and allowances big, but the welfare of their students is never in their calculations. Sadly, the student union bodies have for over two decades become a cash-and-carry contraption for never-do-wells, who impose themselves as students’ union leaders only so they can use their positions to fleece and extort politicians and play the role of praise-singers.

There is really no concerted effort to address this issue of students’ prostitution on campus. This is compounded by the fact that some of the lecturers are even guilty of demanding sexual gratifications from their students in exchange for marks.

However, the search for the underlying reason behind the expanding spectre of commercial sex activities or mercantilism on Nigerian campuses led one to a scholarly work on this issue by Dr Ron Roberts, identified as Jamaica-based university professor. The Kingston University don is known to have researched into the menace and to have published a book called Capitalism on Campus: Sex work, academic freedom and the market.

A recent review of the book, by Russell Whitehouse, shows that virtually all the factors observed in that book are significantly present in most tertiary institutions in Nigeria: both public and private. He noted that sex and student-debt are viewed as “two inevitable facets of university-student-life.” Roberts discussed the disturbing connections between these two and the state of academia as a whole in Capitalism on Campus.

According to the review, Roberts wrote about the growing phenomenon of university students partaking in sex work (mainly stripping, camming and prostitution); citing multiple UK surveys conducted between 2012 and 2017, which found that between 5-6 per cent of university students engaged in sex work. Furthermore, many of the admitted sex workers came from middle-class backgrounds. And that another survey found that 30 per cent of students personally knew of other student(s) engaged in sex work, while another found that 16 per cent of students were considering entering the adult world.

These figures, the reviewer affirmed, have reliably been rising in tandem with UK tuition hikes that started under the New Labour in the late 90s. Such a trend hasn’t been isolated to the UK, of course. American rappers like Jay-Z and Juicy J and the Canadian Drake have been rapping about women stripping to pay their tuition for decades. Across much of the West, college has become exponentially more expensive. Young people in both the US and UK are shouldering cumulative student loan debts in excess of $1 trillion.

This debt explosion, according to the reviewer, combined with poor job prospects for “inexperienced workers,” soaring urban housing costs and the remnants of the recession have compelled many young women (and surprisingly high numbers of men) to take up sex work. Rather than addressing this crisis, schools, by and large, have chosen to ignore it. Worse, many universities and academic associations actively try to whitewash research and reporting about student sex work. But, Roberts cited personal experiences, as well as the experiences of other academics, of being stonewalled and threatened by administrators for daring to try to study the issue.

Universities, he observed, are obsessed with maintaining a façade. Ever since universities went from being a public utility to a privatised cash-cow, schools have felt the need to sell themselves as a product. Roberts observed: “The largely uncritical domestic support offered by university vice-chancellors to tuition fee increases and marketisation suggests not merely a lack of vision and subservience, but a propensity to keep one eye on the huge salary and another on possible rewards from the honours system.”

This prioritisation of bringing in money over student-welfare means an obsession with public imaging and maintaining a high rating in places like the US News and World Report Best Colleges Rankings and The Princeton Review.

The author also noted that much of the weight for these rankings comes from student surveys. Several university teachers and administrators have been caught telling students to give disingenuous good reviews on such surveys. The exponentially rising tuition rates at these school means that front offices are largely beholden to prospective parents of students and donors. As a result, the administrator line of thinking goes thus: What parent or affluent donor is going to want donate to or to send their precious child to a school that’s been exposed for having loads of students who sell their bodies just to get by? University students who have to resort to such means are consequently not just deprived of help by administrators, but often threatened with disciplinary action.

The reviewer affirmed, and rightly so, that society foists upon its future workers not just serf-like levels of debt, but substantial psychological baggage, as well. He asserted that the soaring rates of depression, anxiety and suicide among Western youth is, according to Roberts, better understood not as an index of personal failure, “but as a consequence of the brutal circumstances which have seen cuts in investment, training and job opportunities for young people, low wages, exorbitant student loans and tuition fees, cuts in mental health and welfare services, as well as a savage primary and secondary school system where endemic testing has become the norm.”

Worried about the lacuna in any form of legal frameworks to check the menace, as highlighted above, I then checked nuc.edu.ng and found out that the National Universities Commission (NUC) was established in 1962 as an advisory agency in the Cabinet Office. However, in 1974, it became a statutory body. And Prof. Jibril Aminu was appointed the first Executive Secretary. The NUC is a parastatal under the Federal Ministry of Education (FME). The commission has a governing council, its executive secretary is Prof Abubakar Adamu Rasheed mni, MFR. He assumed office on August 3, 2016.

Over the years, the commission has transformed from a small office in the Cabinet Office to an important arm of the Ministry of Education, in the area of development and management of university education in Nigeria.

The main functions of the NUC are as follows: Granting approval for all academic programmes run in Nigerian universities; granting approval for the establishment of all higher educational institutions offering degree programmes in Nigeria; ensure quality assurance of all academic programmes offered in Nigerian universities; and channel for all external supports to Nigerian universities.

The Commission has 12 directorates, namely: Directorate of Academic Planning, Directorate of Inspection and Monitoring, Directorate of Management Support Services, Directorate of the Establishment of Private Universities, Directorate of Students Support Services, Directorate of Research, Innovations and Information Technology, Directorate of Finance and Accounts, Directorate of Accreditation, Directorate of Open and Distance Education, Directorate of Liaison Services and International Cooperation, Directorate of Corporate Communications, and Directorate of the Executive Secretary’s Office. Each of the directorates is headed by a director.

As a coordinating body, the NUC ensures it discharges its responsibilities by recruiting adequate and relevant manpower and appeals to the universities for their sustained support and understanding. The commission also relies on support from the Federal Government, state governments, and other stakeholders in its bid to improve the quality of tertiary education and graduates of the nation’s university system.

From the foregoing functions and duties of the main regulatory body that coordinates standardisation of the educational sector at the tertiary level, it would seem that the welfare of the students is not adequately captured. NUC has failed substantially to bridge this gap between high tuition fees and social demands and pressures on students to meet up with the different aspects of funding requirements in higher institutions.

The only faint approach towards the eradication of the social malaise of sexual abuses of students is the infinitesimal cases that the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Offences Commission (ICPC) has instituted against randy lecturers.

It is important, therefore, to charge candidates of main political parties seeking the office of the President to tell Nigerians how each of them intends to tackle the menace of prostitution on campus. The next president must seek ways to adopt strategies to assist students to be able to study without tears. The next president must work collectively with the National Assembly and state legislatures to operationalise modalities for stopping the rising cases of prostitution on campuses of Nigeria’s educational institutions.

The need to sanitise the educational sector and check continued proliferation of all kinds of commercial sex work by students is anchored on the provision of chapter four of the Constitution in; specifically section 34 (1) which states:

“Every individual is entitled to respect for the dignity of his person and, accordingly, no person shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment; no person shall be held in slavery or servitude; and no person shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour.”

•RIGHTSVIEW appears on Wednesdays and Saturdays, in addition to special appearances. The Columnist, a popular activist (www.huriwanigeria.com, www.emmanuelonwubiko.com), is a former Federal Commissioner of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission and presently National Coordinator of Human Rights Writers’ Association of Nigeria (HURIWA).

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