Presenting the Servant Leadership Model as a Panacea to Bad Leadership in Tertiary Education in West Africa

Abstract

Tertiary education in West Africa presently is fading in value compared with the last two or threedecades when graduates of universities in Nigeria and Ghana were highly rated by world rankedinstitutions in Europe and North America. In many West African tertiary institutions there are chronicand critical challenges impeding quality delivery of education to the citizens. Some of these lead toavoidable wastes in time, financial and human resources. In Nigeria for instance, there are many casesof students’ unrest leading to wanton and unwarranted destruction of properties and sometimes humanlives. In addition, lecturers and non-academic employees in tertiary institutions compound the alreadyendangered system by embarking on industrial strikes to press home their demands for better pay,conditions of service, less government interference, etc. Hence, in West Africa presently, huge amountof valuable resources are wasted in educational institutions of higher learning due primarily to humanand systemic problems associated with bad leadership structure. Crippen (2005) argued that the wayforward is a paradigm shifts in how educational leaders see themselves in the leadership process ofhigher institutions of learning (p. 2). Bennis and Goldsmith (1997) also argued that for transformation tooccur, leaders must recognize the paradigm shift through which they view themselves. In this paper, theparadigm shift we propose is leadership in tertiary educational institutions as one meant to first servethe school community rather than leading it. Thus, advocating the servant-leadership model ofleadership as originally propounded by Robert K. Greenleaf (1970/1991).