The management of the University of Ghana, Legon (UG) has disassociated itself from Professor Austin Nwagbara, a Nigerian Professor of English who was captured on video denigrating the university and other Ghanaian tertiary institutions at a meeting.
“Professor Nwagbara is currently not a member of faculty at the University of Ghana,” the university disowned him in a statement.
Professor Nwagbara claimed in the video which has gone viral on social media that he was a lecturer at the English faculty of the university.
The university said beyond the many “provocative statements” Prof Nwagbara made, he also launched into a tirade against universities in Ghana in general, and the University of Ghana, in particular.
He said: “…Our people will come here and pay $10,000 but they will not pay N20,000 in the University of Lagos … What an average student pays in the University of Lagos in one session to get a degree in English is N12,000. Ghanaians are there paying N12,000… if you ask Nigerians to donate N50,000 naira every year to contribute to that university they will riot but the same Nigerians will come here and pay $10,000 for something 80 per cent inferior to Nigeria.”
“I won’t pay 10 per cent of that sum for my child to get a degree in a Ghanaian university, I am in the system, I know the quality of education we receive here is 80 per cent inferior to what is in Nigeria. I can tell you authoritatively,” he added.
“No Ghanaian degree is 20 per cent up to the quality of a Nigerian degree. All our federal universities are better than any universities here. What makes a university? It’s not buildings, it’s not trees, it’s the quality of staff that will recycle and produce others; they don’t have it,” he said.
The UG management in its statement said its records show that Prof Nwagbara was a visiting scholar at the Department of English during the 2011/12 academic year from 8 August 2011 to 30 July 2012.
The UG statement noted that the claims Prof Nwangbara made in the video relating to the University’s sources of income are incorrect and do not in any way represent the true facts and figures of the university’s income and state of affairs.
“The University of Ghana disassociates itself from the claims Professor Austin Nwagbara makes in the video which we find as mischievous and intended to mislead the public and harm the reputation of the university,” the statement said.
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