There is no doubt that education in Nigeria is travestied. As one German visitor to Nigeria put it in 2002, “Nigerian schools remind one of ruined factories, and the teachers and pupils have thrown in the towel”. This sounds exaggerated. But to any critical mind, those words paint a vivid picture of Nigeria’s educational system in the morning of the 21st century. The quality of teachers and students that populate our schools, coupled with government’s rather jaundiced attitude, have turned the Nigerian education industry into a playground of inanities. Not only are course contents stale and questionable in some respects, some of the degrees awarded have become as cheap as Nigerian chieftaincy titles.

Recently, many universities have decreed that faculty must obtain the PhD before they can be promoted to Senior Lecturers or Professors. This directive was issued and has been carried out without consideration for certain disciplines which traditionally do not have the PhD as the terminal degree. In this regard, art and art faculty have suffered astronomically.

Art training in most parts of the world is structured along theory and studio lines. For the theory aspect which incorporates art history, art education, critical theory, visual culture and others, the terminal degree is usually the PhD. For the visual arts proper, otherwise known as studio arts (painting, sculpture, ceramics, design, textiles), the terminal degree is the M.F.A., although some universities in Europe and Japan have recently created the D.F.A. (Doctor of Fine Arts). At present, there is no such degree in Nigeria.

The M.F.A. remains the highest possible qualification for the employment, evaluation and retention of visual arts faculty. The studio teacher does not need a degree in art history or art education to be able to discharge his/her pedagogic responsibilities effectively. But in Nigeria, this fact has been inverted by uninformed and short-sighted education/school administrators. Rather than review the M.F.A. curriculum in the universities or create D.F.A. programmes in the visual arts, university administrators have issued a blanket battle cry against non-PhD holders. This is, in one word, absurd.

Consequently, there has been a scramble for the doctorate among visual arts faculty. While some have pursued courses in art history, art education and philosophy, others have picked up questionable PhDs in mass communication, religion, theatre arts, anthropology, and so on. If a teacher spends four years or more in order to acquire a PhD that he/she does not really need, save for the ephemeral purpose of promotion, of what use is such knowledge to the community?

It is very strange that art training in most Nigerian universities today is designed as if training in art history is the culmination of every scholarship in art. Not only is it curious that M.F.A. faculty are now compelled in some cases to acquire degrees in art history or art education for advancement beyond certain levels in their career, fresh employment involving M.F.A. holders have been handled in ways that question the validity of the M.F.A. as a terminal professional qualification. The insistence of some people that an M.A./PhD in art history is necessary for the teaching of art is quite worrisome and ridiculous, given what obtains internationally and in Nigeria. For an example of the international standards, those who care can access the C.A.A. Guidelines on the Internet as used by most colleges and universities in the USA.

The Nigerian example is both dangerous and corrosive, as far as studies in the studio areas of the visual arts are concerned. If painters, sculptors, textile designers, graphic designers, and ceramists have to acquire degrees in art history and art education only to go back and teach their respective studio specialisations for which they have qualified with the M.F.A., what then is the need of having to study for M.A. and PhD in art history and art education, which they may never teach? Besides dangerously turning all visual arts faculty into art historians and art educators (albeit, redundant ones in most cases), it creates a situation where the studio areas are deserted by their practitioners for several years, as they are immersed in research in other people’s areas (namely, art history, art education and all what not) in the pursuit of the Ph.D to enable them become professors in the new dispensation that obtains in most Nigerian universities today.

When the sole ambition of faculty is to attain the professorship without minding how twisted or questionable parts of the process are, then the university/educational system suffers in the short and long runs. I am aware of Nigerian professors of art whose PhDs are in other areas, including religious studies. They are only a sad testimony to the rot that attends the art education in Nigeria, and the situation is at once alarming and contradictory. It is of course to the ignorance of education administrators and university authorities in Nigeria that we owe the prevailing mess. The education industry of a country which thrives on the bandwagon psychology is bound to be straight-jacketed in several respects, but for how long can the pursuit of ignorance stand for excellence and the dogged glorification of underdevelopment represent the new meaning of development in Nigeria?

The reality which is at once dangerous and ugly is that in the next few years – unless something positive and logical is done – all the visual arts faculty in our universities and polytechnics will become reluctant art historians, yet teaching one aspect of studio or the other. The result, in terms of art scholarship, will indeed be unimaginable.

In July 2004, the Pan-African Circle of Artists convened a conference at Delta State University, Abraka, to look at the crisis inherent in, and generated by, this anomaly. With about 40 participants from across Nigeria, the conference had enough voices to address the centralising theme. But it is still worrisome that such a seminal issue as the problem of art training in Nigeria could not attract much more participants than that. It betrays the visual arts faculty in Nigerian schools as a tribe that is not able to take its destiny in its own hands. But they are not an isolated case.

Academics in Nigeria, with the exception of a few, have lost the central essence of their vocation, namely the pursuit of knowledge and freedom. Crass politics and academic mercantilism have become cheap among them. Otherwise, the visual arts faculty and indeed the artists would find a common forum for demonstrating to the university authorities the futility of acquiring irrelevant degrees for the teaching of studio arts and for the sole purpose of promotion. If the most important issue in the university system in Nigeria today is promotion at all costs, excellence is devalued and jeopardised.

If it has become terribly important for Nigeria to become one of the first countries where the MFA is to be trampled upon, is it not better to encourage universities to create the necessary higher degrees, rather than condone a situation where MFA holders teaching studio art in universities have resorted to obtaining degrees in art history, or even in religion and languages in order to attain senior lecturership or professorship in their original fields? Even in two or three countries where such higher degrees have been created in Europe and Asia, the MFA has not been jettisoned, especially because of the dilemma and irony presented by the weighty credit load associated with it as a practical, professional course of study.

Normally, an MA programme in the university is a 12-month affair, whereas an MFA programme lasts 24 months or more. In terms of credit units, the MA and Doctorate, combined, sum up to roughly 36 credits, whereas the MFA alone stands at a total of 60 credits. If the 60- credit system is the international standard, it becomes problematic to cut it down in an attempt to create a higher degree that would serve no other purpose than promotion in the university system. An MFA degree based on a credit system lower than 60 will certainly not be acceptable outside Nigeria.

To this extent, the pointers are two: either to retain the MFA as it is as the terminal degree for visual arts faculty or to create a lean studio-theoretical course above it as a sop to the ignorance of Nigeria’s education policymakers and in the interest of visual arts faculty and artists who are as endangered as art and intellect in postmodern Nigeria with its materialism, nihilism, and commitment to extremis (a sustained desire to bring history to a forcible end).

But the bottom line, as maintained at the Abraka conference, is not what is terminal or not terminal in terms of qualification, but the course content and curriculum. Art is primarily a doing thing, but not the pastime of fools or a truancy from life. If Nigeria’s artists, especially the institution-based ones, obtain basketfuls of degrees and wear them like soldiers’ epaulettes, but cannot acquit themselves practically and otherwise at home and abroad, then NUC’s PhD battle cry, as it relates to visual arts faculty, is a dangerous policy.