University Administrators As Endangered Species: The Nigeria’s Situation (Published)
In Nigeria, most organizations like the Nigeria’s Football Federation could boast of abundance of talents but lack managerial skills. There is the consensus that the main problem of Nigeria’s football is administration; the maladministration, the in-fighting, the lack of synergy between the ‘backroom’ experts and the field experts. This invariably led to the inability to entrench proper structures and logistics to ensure that the nation occupies its rightful place on the footballing map. Furthermore, it shows how important administration is in any setup.In the music space, the maverick afro music maestro, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti once expressed the commonplace sentiment in Nigerian polity through his song captioned ‘Suffering and Smiling’, reflecting the difference between appearance and reality. An Igbo adage also states that; “The way the kolanut sounds is not the way it tastes.”The place of the Nigerian Universities’ Administrators could best be described in this mold and with this ominous contradiction where the outside smiles and the inside weeps. The picture of a suave, well-clad university Administrator behind a big and polished table cut a picture of a self-satisfied policy implementer, while in actual fact, this is a professional whom by his action or inaction is fast becoming a relic by ceding qualities and powers he once possessed. It is a story of a system that needs revamping as evidences abound to show that the system has ruptured across all known cleavages.This paper calls into question, the nature of the administrative process and functionaries in Nigerian universities, taking into consideration the actual role performance vis-à-vis the role expectation as it affects the achievement of university’s goals and objectives. In doing this, the place of the administrator in the university is probed and examined in the background of factors militating against his continuing relevance and existence. It concludes by examining the concept of endangerment in Nigerian
Keywords: Administrators, Nigeria’s situation, University, endangered species