President's Essay: Working in Nations in Transition

Nigeria

In Nigeria, MacArthur maintains the same balance of working with government while also supporting its critics and working for reform.

Our program in higher education, allied to the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa, focuses on four leading universities: Ibadan, Ahmadu Bello, Bayero and Port Harcourt. We aim to help these institutions make the case for increased public investment, but our larger ambition is to demonstrate that Nigeria’s universities can improve to meet international standards.

We have contributed to a new gas and petroleum Institute at Port Harcourt that is preparing Nigerians for highly-skilled jobs in the energy sector, and a new Department of Agriculture at Bayero University training agricultural extension officers and forging partnerships with agribusiness. In all the universities, we have sponsored more bandwidth and new computer centers, improved libraries and science laboratories, and helped more faculty members earn their PhDs. In a conversation with President Yar’ Adua in the summer of 2007, I was pleased to hear him say that he would make strengthening higher education a priority.

Civil Society groups operate freely in Nigeria and their number is growing dramatically. Many are dedicated to strengthening the rule of law. MacArthur has a particular interest in combating police abuse and improving the administration of justice through the two dozen groups it supports.

Onlookers observe a court proceeding in Duste, Nigeria. MacArthur seeks to strengthen Nigeria’s human rights legal architecture.

A sampling: Legal Defense and Assistance Project (LEDAP) is training prosecutors to improve their handling of cases, the CLEEN Foundation seeks to better relations between the police and the community, Access to Justice tracks extrajudicial killings, Civil Liberties Organization and Human Rights Monitor investigate rights violations, Baobab for Women’s Human Rights and WRAPA have saved women accused of adultery from death by stoning and from lashings under Sharia law.

We have also worked with the government. We gave grants to the Federal Minister of Justice to review laws passed by the military dictatorship that conflict with the Constitution, to the National Human Rights Commission to develop an Action Plan, to the Working Group on the Administration of Criminal Justice to reform the treatment of pre-trial inmates, and to the National Police for a community policy training center.

There is much to criticize in Nigeria: flawed elections, violence in the Delta, endemic corruption. But I remain hopeful that incremental political change, a stronger civil society, and a new generation with higher expectations, will bring a more robust and mature democracy. 
 

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1. The Partnership includes MacArthur, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in a program to strengthen African universities. Each organization works in different countries and in different ways: Carnegie in Tanzania with Dar-es-Salaam University, Rockefeller in Uganda with Makerere University, and Ford in South Africa with the university system as a whole and in Mozambique with Eduardo Mondlane University.

Students at Ahmadu Bello University in Kaduna State, Nigeria. MacArthur’s support of Nigerian higher education is based on the belief that robust universities and intellectual freedom are essential to developing and sustaining health, economically vibrant, democratic societies.