Exploitation

By Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu

The phrase can be read in two ways: the dangers within mentorship, and the danger that mentorship itself may be disappearing.

As one grows older and accumulates experience, visibility, and a measure of goodwill, public culture often expects a form of “payback.” One of the most valued ways to do this is by mentoring younger colleagues—especially those approaching exit points in their careers. Nowhere is this expectation more pronounced than in academic circles. Yet over the years, I have watched the mentorship process deteriorate from both mentors’ and mentees’ perspectives.

When I began my career, mentees were frequently exploited. They carried out the basic research for their mentors—data gathering, analysis, and preliminary drafting—while the senior scholar ultimately received the credit in subsequent publications. When some mentees later attempted to assert ownership of their intellectual labour by publishing from the same datasets, mentors simply stopped working with them. By then, however, the senior academics had already crossed the Rubicon: they had secured their place in the system and had little incentive to look back.

Being exploited intellectually is not a small matter. In academia, one’s ideas, labour, and reputation are the core of one’s identity. When these are appropriated or manipulated, it feels like a violation — not just of professional ethics, but of dignity. Watching others suffer the same fate, and then seeing the perpetrators continue to flourish without consequence, naturally intensifies the sense of injustice.

A later generation of mentors adopted a more tactical strategy. Mentees were still required to do most of the “dirty work,” often writing up results for papers or book chapters, after which mentors insisted on being listed as joint authors. I objected to this practice on several occasions, arguing that a mentor is institutionally remunerated to support the mentee’s development, not to appropriate the mentee’s intellectual rewards. Yet some mentees willingly entered into such parasitic arrangements, convinced that the mentor’s visibility would enhance their own prospects. Meanwhile, mentors leveraged the mentees’ labour to boost citation counts and online academic metrics—the modern equivalent of academic swagger.

Mentees themselves have not been entirely blameless. Whether within formal institutional settings or in the more fluid spaces of public culture, mentorship ideally enables individuals to reach their potential. Increasingly, however, the relationship is being instrumentalised for economic gain or opportunistic advantage. Recent distressing experiences involving well-known academics [on Facebook and a young man named Ismail Sani] illustrate how goodwill and a willingness to assist can be exploited by outright scams. Such incidents inevitably make potential mentors more cautious, and sometimes less willing, to extend help in the future.

What we are witnessing, therefore, is a shift in expectations from intellectual mentorship to personal patronage. In many of our social environments, the two easily get conflated. Respect for elders, the culture of assistance, and the visibility that comes with academic success can combine to create the assumption that a mentor is also a benefactor. When repeated often enough, the requests begin to feel less like genuine emergencies and more like a pattern of dependence. That can make even a generous person start to withdraw.

Another troubling dimension is the subtle guilt-tripping employed by some would-be mentees. I have received numerous requests to serve as a referee for individuals I scarcely know. We may have met briefly at an event, or they may simply have encountered something I wrote. To them, I appear as a convenient “low-hanging fruit.” Basic courtesy would require prior contact—at the very least, a reminder of the context in which we met. I usually decline such requests. After all, referees are expected to have genuine knowledge of a candidate’s work and character. How can one write an honest assessment based on nothing more than fleeting acquaintance or social-media followership?

Social media has radically transformed access to public figures, rendering them perpetually available. Once a mentoring relationship is established, some mentees interpret access as entitlement. The boundary between guidance and material obligation becomes blurred. Social media makes this worse because it creates intimacy without context — people feel they “know” you, and therefore feel justified in making personal demands. Over time, the mentor begins to anticipate the next request, and the original intellectual purpose of the relationship is quietly eroded.

In the physical, offline world, proximity often enables one to gauge the sincerity of requests for guidance or assistance. The anonymity and immediacy of online interaction, however, have produced what might be called a form of “closed distance”: a space stripped of emotional grammar and contextual obligation. In such a space, panhandling can easily be reframed as a moral claim upon those perceived as accessible or influential.

The cumulative effect is worrying. Mentorship, as a meaningful intellectual and moral relationship, may itself be in danger.

What have your own experiences been?

By Salim Yunusa

Salim Yunusa As the summer break draws to an end and schools are set to resume in the coming weeks, parents are already grumbling over the increased school fees across many private primary and secondary schools across the nation, despite their salaries not increasing even by an inch. Due to the not-so-great condition of the public schools, parents have no other options than to send their wards to these private schools.

Although private schooling is a money spinning venture for many school owners, the least these schools should provide is excellent service delivery in teaching and imparting discipline on students. Unfortunately, this is not the case in many instances.

The learning facilities are substandard, to say the least and the teachers are below par in quality. Their sights are set on the profit the schools will return, not the excellence they’ll deliver and the students they will be proud of at the end of the day. Most of the buildings rented by these low budget schools are originally residential houses or uncompleted buildings that are converted to classrooms with little or or no ventilation; with tiny classrooms containing high number of students in each space.

Many of these schools are not fit for learning, with some of these classes demarcated with cardboards or plywood to create more space. There is absolutely no regard for safety standards and building regulations of any sort. I know of a “school” facility that serves as a school during the day and a football viewing centre at night.

Another school that upsets me anytime I pass it by is a school for young kindergartens and primary students that is directly beside a huge fueling station and inches away from a major highway.

I wonder what the development control authority was thinking; approving such a chaotic land use violation. Yet, it is these schools that charge parents outrageous amount of money every time. It is high time the government wades into these fraudulent waters; making sure that every private school that operates is duly registered, has a license and has ticked off every box of standards and regulations. It also has a responsibility of regulating the uncontrolled and unreasonable school fees and levies set by these schools themselves.

One would think that as these schools are extorting parents in broad daylight, their staff would be well paid. That is far from the reality. Teachers employed in private schools suffer the worst form of dehumanisation and extortion by their employers, unfortunately. They’re overworked and underpaid, with some teachers in some schools taking home less than N10,000 in a month…in 2023!

Their employers take advantage of the saturated labour market that is filled to the brim with young, unemployed teachers – qualified or not – and are desperate for employment. Some of these teachers are unqualified and burdened with many subjects in order to cut the cost of hiring more teachers. They learn on the job for long hours and meagre pay, with threats and deductions for the smallest of mistakes. They’re constantly in fear of speaking up or speaking out against their employers because they can be sacked without any reason whatsoever.

It is the height of wickedness to make parents pay through their nose for their children’s’ education without actually getting the value for their money in a tight, cramped up environment that is not conducive for learning while at the same time underpaying and overworking their staff.

Schools should not only be an avenue to generate more money for their rich owners. They should uphold a standard of excellence and quality delivery of education that’ll produce educationally sound students who can compete nationally and globally.

The government, as a matter of urgency, should continue to upgrade its schools so that they become more attractive to parents than private schools. That way, it will be a healthy competition; judged based on excellence and quality education but before then, they have the responsibility of registering, regulating and standardising private schools for the development of education in the nation.

Salim Yunusa writes from Zaria and can be reached at syunusa@gmail.com