• Thursday, March 28, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

Lawmakers’ scramble for tertiary institutions

UNILAG-gate

The current demand by national assembly members for the establishment of a federal tertiary institution in each of the 360 constituencies in Nigeria is an indication that they have abdicated their primary responsibility of making laws for the good of the nation to the pursuit of pecuniary matters

In other climes, legislatures use the number of bills they sponsored on the floor of the legislative house as a measurement of success. Regrettably, that is not the case in Nigeria. Here, our lawmakers shamelessly flaunt the number of physical projects they attracted such as the construction of motor parks or purchase of motorcycles as evidence of representation.

As House Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila recently warned “at a time of reduced revenue, with pre-existing and worsening infrastructure deficits requiring significant investments, we cannot continue to keep establishing more institutions that impose a permanent liability on the government,” unfortunately, his colleagues do not agree with his position.

Suffice it to say that the current development is not good for a country that has not been able to properly fund existing educational institutions resulting in incessant industrial strikes by academic and non-academic staff.

It is reprehensible that rather than proffer solutions to myriad challenges facing the nation, federal lawmakers are busy lobbying for the establishment of over 200 new tertiary institutions. This we see as more of a political than nationalistic concern. How can a reasonable Nigerian want a tertiary institution established in all the 360 federal constituencies in the country?

Statistics from the federal ministry of education show that currently, Nigeria has poorly funded 98 government-owned universities and about 120 polytechnics and colleges of education. Of the 120 polytechnics, 32 are federal polytechnics, 51 are state-owned polytechnics, and 64 are private polytechnics. Nigeria also has 99 private universities many of which could be better described as glorified secondary schools.

Read Also: FG okays N292bn for tertiary institutions

In addition, there are 27 federal and 49 states’ owned colleges of education and about 200 accredited monotechnics.

In the present 9th National Assembly, there are 126 bills seeking the establishment of universities (some are concurrence bills seeking to approve what the Senate had passed). There are also 140 bills for the establishment of specialised colleges and 27 for the establishment of polytechnics. In most of the cases, the lawmakers that proposed the establishment of the institutions want them cited in their communities.

 

How can a reasonable Nigerian want a tertiary institution established in all the 360 federal constituencies in the country?

Between 2015 when he came into office and September 2021, President Muhammadu Buhari approved the establishment of 9 federal polytechnics. Of this number, only 2 of the federal polytechnics in Daura, Katsina State and Orogun, Delta State, have enabling laws, the rest were created by executive fiat, with bills to establish them still at various legislative stages in the National Assembly.

For long, the government’s disbursement to the education sector is not commensurate with the growing demand for higher education. Tertiary institutions cannot perform optimally without adequate funding. Shortage of funds affects job performance and the growth of the institution leading to incessant strike actions by the workers.

Inadequate infrastructural facilities such as lecture halls, laboratories, electricity, staff offices, libraries, students’ hostels, administrative blocks, recreation centres, good road network within the school have combined to further put educational institutions in very bad condition.

Over the past years, there has been a mass exodus of brilliant lecturers and professors to other sectors such as politics and foreign universities with its attendant effect on tertiary education in Nigeria.

In view of these and other factors it is not surprising that no Nigerian tertiary institution made it to the top 1,000 in the world ranking of Universities, or the top 10 in the African ranking according to the most recent ranking of universities by Webometrics. The highest-ranked Nigerian university, the University of Ibadan was placed 1,219 globally and 18th in Africa, far behind universities from South Africa, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda.

Rather than insist that universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education be established in each federal constituency, lawmakers should direct their attention to addressing the challenges faced by existing institutions with a view to reducing or eliminating most of them.

Government should allocate more funds to educational institutions so that they can be more effective in their day-to-day operations. On their own part, the institutions should establish and equip a unit in their institutions solely for the purpose of generating funds internally. Various stakeholders should also be encouraged to give more financial support to university education. The personal emoluments of staff should be reviewed upward to prevent brain drain. An enabling teaching-learning environment should be assured and granting them full autonomy would help reduce the extent of political interference in the affairs of these institutions.

It is a truism that no nation can rise above the level of its education. It then follows that if we do not want to be left behind, we must begin to fix the sector, as the future of the country is at stake. In doing this, emphasis should be placed on quality education and not quantity.