The demanding nature of Academia in Nigeria: What the society doesn’t Know, by Dikko Muhammed, PhD
Many people were lured into academia with promises that “You only teach two courses a week; you can reschedule the lecture time; you can go to the office any time of the day, blah blah!” Ha! Once you enter, you’re trapped.
You’re initiated into a nocturnal life, reading papers and book chapters when normal human beings sleep in the comfort of their beds. There are projects and theses and dissertations of your students. You have to read their draft and do more research to ensure the originality, uniqueness, and newness of these drafts. All this you have to do at any hour of the day and any day of the week.
There’s the torture of marking hundred and thousand of badly-written scripts. Your students will respond to your lecture efforts in their usual “hi, ykk, gud mrng” and other social media usage of language. You will cancel, cross out, hiss, bang the table, curse, and complain alone in your study. You will re-examine your life’s choices while marking every script and blame yourself for not joining the police or some tax organization where you would have simply taken orders and moved on with your life.
There are more frustrating, if not outright embarrassing activities that eat up your time. You’re into committees and some administrative duties. If you’re not careful, you would be thrown into secretarial and administrative work. This happens more when you have busybody superiors who don’t trust their non-teaching colleagues. You end up doing your work and that of others.
And in between all this, you must find quality time to do your research for your progress. You must publish quality articles and books for your promotion. You don’t do that; you perish; thrown into oblivion. You are in constant communication with both encouraging and hostile reviewers and publishers.
Plus the wahala associated with visa applications and travels for conferences. You’re scrutinized by the visa issuing officer whom you have to convince that you’re not running away from your country!
AND society expects you at every wedding, naming ceremony, funeral, family meeting, etc, etc. If you are not seen in one or two of these gatherings, Ha! You’re ɗan Boko! Tried and condemned and executed in absentia. Your children will be told of weekends and breaks and public holidays by the children of normal people. But you’re a researcher. You don’t know if these periods exist. This and many more become the unbreakable cycle of your busy life.
AND WE better not talk of the pay! Good Monday morning, dearest normal people.
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