Reason and logic prevailed at last, penultimate week, when the federal government admitted the fact of the systemic dysfunction and proliferation of tertiary institutions in the country. As a result, it imposed a seven-year moratorium on the establishment of new universities, polytechnics and colleges of education at the federal level, so that the inadequacies in existing ones can be fixed.
This crucial policy decision was taken at a Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting presided over by President Bola Tinubu. The underpinnings of this resolve were damning: the apparent lack of rigour in planning and evaluating the tertiary institutions landscape to determine the number Nigeria really needs. And, how sustainable they are.
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Details of the policy shift, as unfolded by the Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, revealed that 34 universities never had a single student applicant to them in last year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) conducted by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB). Also, a total of 199 universities had fewer than 100 applicants through JAMB.
Similarly, polytechnics and colleges of education had a shortage of applicants, to the extent that 64 colleges of education had zero applicants. One university in the north, the minister added, ironically has 1,200 members of staff, as against its enrolment of less than 800 students. As it is obvious, the jaded argument of the lack of access to university education has officially been laid to rest in the country. Duplications of institutions and waste of resources are sticking points, as is capacity under-utilisation in some, while others are operating above their carrying capacities.
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“The moratorium will allow the government to refocus resources on improving existing institutions by upgrading facilities, recruiting qualified staff and expanding their carrying capacity,” Mr Alausa said.
Nigeria has 72 universities, 42 polytechnics and 28 colleges of education that belong to the federal government. The states have 67 universities, while the privately-owned ones are 147. Yet, the approval of nine new private universities on the very day the moratorium was imposed on federal institutions was inconsistent with the policy intent. There are 339 universities in the country, out of which 159 are privately-owned, according to ASUU President Christopher Piwuna.
A national interest education policy of this nature, in our view, carries little or no weight without an outline of the detailed measures to be taken and timelines for reversing the rot. The situation calls for emergency action.
Underfunding is critical to the decline of Nigerian universities. And, this has placed ASUU in the trenches for decades, resulting in the total loss of academic calendars, or distortions, and the award of degrees that have lost their values both at home and abroad.
Just last Thursday, ASUU announced its preparedness to resume its suspended strike over the federal government’s failure to honour agreements it reached with it, such as that of 2009 on the revitalisation of the system and payment of staff allowances. This involved the anticipated injection of ₦1.3 trillion into the system in tranches of ₦200 billion for the first year and ₦220 billion annually over the next five years. This was only done in 2013.
Unfortunately, the government’s foot-dragging on its implementation of the agreement and the unwarranted establishment of newer tertiary institutions have complicated the inadequacies of university education in the country. This is evident in the lack of basic facilities like water, electricity, sufficient lecture halls, students’ halls of residence, outdated libraries, ill-equipped laboratories, low research funding, and manpower shortages.
University lecturers are so poorly paid that senior professors receive about ₦500,000 per month, while a senator allegedly collects a monthly emolument of ₦21 million. It is an unjust reward system that should be revised. Academics are so indigent that many cannot subscribe to foreign journals in their respective disciplines. They deserve to be well paid, otherwise our ivory towers will keep losing their essence as centres of excellence for teaching, learning, research and innovation.
Nigerians periodically weigh in with advisories, including the media. For instance, PREMIUM TIMES, in two scathing editorials on 10 and 31 March, had counselled against the 50 – 66 per cent dissipation of TETFund’s resources, as entrenched in the Tax Reform Bill, from 2025. It was programmed to receive zero funding in 2030 and thereafter. To us, this is “at odds with the progress of tertiary education in Nigeria.” Funding from it has been the only lifeline to universities and allied institutions on infrastructural renewal since its existence.
In the first quarter of this year, the government created nine new universities, when existing ones were in dire need of funds and facilities. The Minister of Education also decried the political pressure on the president to set up new universities and made the shocking revelation that over 200 bills for new ones were in the National Assembly. The drivel of turning universities into “constituency projects” which lawmakers attract should stop.
Sadly, President Tinubu had before now imbibed the recklessness of former Presidents Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari in setting up universities. Some principal officers of the National Assembly now have universities in their villages, which triggered our fiery editorial of 31 March entitled, “Tinubu, stop this gratuitous proliferation of universities.”
Therein, we had pointed out that: “We recommend to Tinubu the minutes of the 2013 FEC meeting of 1 November on the reports of the needs of Universities. The Council found out that students cannot get accommodation; where they get, they are packed like sardines in a tiny room and there is no light and water in their hostels, classrooms and laboratories.”
If there is a desire to reinvent or re-imagine the system now, it has to be meticulously done to achieve the desired result. The ₦1.3 trillion, which ought to have been injected into the universities between 2013 and 2017, based on the 2009 ASUU/FG pact, is about 10 times in value now, given the devaluation of the naira. We need a funding Marshal Plan towards the revitalisation of the system.
The moratorium on the creation of federal tertiary institutions that equally affected private polytechnics and colleges of education should have been extended to privately-owned universities too. All of them draw from the same academic manpower pool, which should justify their inclusion. Proliferation has thinned the human resources in the first and second generations of universities, such that they regularly lose the accreditation of their courses.
The 2012 Needs Assessment of Universities had identified 34,000 PhD gaps, which is a basic qualification for teaching at this level. What the gap in 2025 might be, with the massive increase in universities, is better imagined. There are four federal universities in many states, including Imo, which is indicative of the rule of thumb at play, rather than planning.
At a time when the quality of our degrees is suspect, the federal government announced the plan for more degree mills, with polytechnics and colleges of education being turned into degree-awarding institutions. This irrational policy should stop. If the universities are structurally deficient in their academic programmes, the situation in these lower tertiary layers would even be worse.
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Since 2018, the information in the public space, as revealed by JAMB Registrar Ishaq Oloyede, is that some 600,000 existing spaces in the country’s 150 universities take care of the concern of Nigerians about access. However, the authorities never listened. Data and national interest took flight. A total of 1.6 million candidates sat the 2018 UTME, out of which only 700,000 had the minimum O-level credits in five subjects, including English language and Mathematics, which is the requirement for admission. And not all made the cut-off marks of their respective universities for admission. This has been a yearly trend.
The National Universities Commission (NUC) should be more rigorous in giving its approval for the establishment of new private universities. Those without applicants and others operating below capacity purportedly met all the criteria for their existence when approved. And, with what is now known of these institutions and the racketeering in the accreditation of courses, whereby academics are hired from other universities for the exercise, these raise integrity questions about the Commission’s regulatory oversight.
Nigeria can’t reinvent the wheel in ivory tower education. As global entities, there are universal values or standards, whether in teacher-to-students ratio, criteria for professorial appointments, vice-chancellorships or membership/leadership of their governing councils, that cannot fall below those subscribed to in other parts of the world, from Europe to America and even Asia.
Failing on these metrics has been exposing the Nigerian system to corruption of sorts. In 2017, for instance, a panel set up to review the promotion of professors in a federal university in the South-east, recommended that 27 out of 31 promoted should be demoted. In 2018, seven other professors were demoted in another federal university in the South-south.
But our universities could rediscover their groove, if academics and administrators in the ilk of Kenneth Dike, JF Ade Ajayi and Adamu Baike could be discovered, and appointed to lead these institutions, according to the foremost of standards. Importantly, the chairpersons of their governing councils should, more so, not be products of political patronage and aliens to the academic environment. It would take round pegs in round holes to do all it takes to restore the Nigerian academy to its requisite glory.
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