ANALYSIS: Why northern Nigerians prefer to study in Sudan

By Gimba Kakanda

1. Sudan isn’t the collapsible banana republic you assumed it is. It’s not just what you see on CNN. It’s had over a century of health professions education, long before Nigeria had its first medical school, and they have an evolved medical education system that attracts undergraduate and postgraduate medical students from across the world. They had had a university for more than half a century before Nigeria had one.
2. Northern Nigeria and Sudan haven’t only had historical interactions and cultural similarities, but Sudanese tertiary institutions also offer superior specialised training in various fields of Islamic studies. For instance, Nigeria’s former CBN Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, obtained a master’s degree in Islamic Jurisprudence at a Sudanese university in the 90s—and he’s one of the smartest public servants Nigeria has ever had. This Sudanese education you’ve portrayed with contempt guided him in reforming Islamic banking in Nigeria during his stewardship at the apex bank.
3. If your aim was to treat Sudan as a hub of substandard education in a country that rushes to French-speaking Cotonou for months-long bachelor’s degrees, that argument won’t hold water. Your stereotypical point about Sudan being a breeding ground of religious extremism is also your consumption of the wrong news channels. The last time I checked, some of the most notorious international terrorists we’ve seen were radicalised in the West, including Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who’s studying at UCL when he fell apart.
4. A few months ago, Nigerian students were rescued from Ukraine, a European country, and we didn’t see these epistles about the whys of their choices of unstable and war-prone countries to study. FYI, Ukraine is a third-world country of blue-eyed, blonde-haired people. Or is your outrage because Sudan is an African or Muslim country?
5. Even as I wrote this, there were still Nigerians from all parts of the country studying in the war-torn Ukraine and Russia, two countries locked in the deadliest war in the world right now. Why aren’t you alarmed by the presence of Nigerians in Ukraine, a country that has been at war for decades? I know this because I have friends still studying there. So, let me ask you exactly what you asked northerners: “What kind of people are these people?”
6. You know quite well the reason Nigerians rush to study abroad—this fear of studying a 5-year programme for about a decade. Ironically, Sudan, for the Nigerians there, isn’t just for the affordability of the schools—a lot of our students in Sudan are from comfortable middle-class families that pay huge sums in tuition and other fees to give their children decent education at private institutions in a culturally familiar foreign country close to their home.
7. And, yes, this environment matters to some. The alienation of adapting to a new environment isn’t an easy cultural dislocation for some, and Sudan offers these northern Muslim students that avenue to study without the culture shocks or civilisational crisis, which even cosmopolitan black students experience in the West.
8. I think some of you should take your time and read up on Sudan. If you can’t write Ukraine off as just a place of war, that ancient African country too deserves the benefit of the doubt. It’s more than its war. There are people elsewhere who also wonder why there are still people in Nigeria, believing the entire country is at war. This isn’t even the time to point fingers.