Annals of the Social Science Academy of Nigeria 12(1) 2000 DOI: 10.36108/ssan/0002.21.0170
The Nature and Management of Students’ Conflicts in Nigerian Tertiary Institutions
Ifeanyi Onyeonoru
Department of Sociology, University of lbadan, Ibadan, Nigeria
Abstract
This paper examines the nature of students’ conflicts in tertiary institutions in Nigeria and observes that the prevalence of such conflicts has been due to their mismanagement which is traceable to a conventional, but faulty and often monolithic diagnostic of the problem. The paper, therefore, takes a sociological approach to the analysis of the crisis. The major argument is that overt students’ conflicts are rather social manifestations of more deep rooted conflicts underscored by structural discontinuities and social distortions arising from five related factors associated with the wider Nigerian crisis: authoritarian governance arising from the erosion of institutional autonomy, infrastructural collapse and social distortions due to poor funding, poor motivation of staff who a major obligation for the moral character and wellbeing of the students, the impact of the wider moral crisis on the university staff and students and the precarious sociopsychological mental states of the students as youths in social change and their consequent disposition to simmediacy. Against this backdrop, students are perpetually at the receiving end, which disposes them to aggression. Individual students are more or less left to various forms of adaptation, including deviant behaviour involving conflicts. Hence, administrative strategies that aim at finding lasting solutions to the crisis must be holistic and historical. They must structurally deal with the underlying sources of conflicts rather than concern themselves merely to the symptoms that manifest themselves as students’ conflicts.