Abubakar Suleiman, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Sterling Bank Plc, has insisted that the country start concentrating more energies and resources towards getting more non-government sector funding to arrest the decline in tertiary education.
Suleiman stated this during an interview he had on Arise TV on Monday. He agreed that funding has been and will continue to be a problem for tertiary education in the country, given the poor funding it gets from the government budget. He also said that the overconcentration on meeting the demands of the tertiary institutions has created a huge gap in quality between the tertiary institutions and other institutions of learning.
He said, “If we think that government is the one to fund education, or more appropriately, that government is the only one to fund education, then funding is and will remain the issue.
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“We need to be clear about that. The government doesn’t have enough money to fund education for, say, 10 million Nigerians in higher education institutions today.
“My estimation is that we need to have at least 10 million Nigerians, which is about 5 percent of our population, studying in institutions of higher learning across the country for us to start breaking the back of poverty.
The banker insisted on a more collaborative approach to dealing with the problem of funding for tertiary education. “The government cannot do that; they are already struggling with two million. What we need to consider and agree on is how else we can fund tertiary education,” he said.
He argued that a more creative approach that focuses on the individual obtaining the education as a source of funding would not only provide more opportunities for study, but would also make it easier for the government to devote more funding to other levels of education.
“Because if we find a solution that says tertiary education is an investment in the individual and that the individual has the capacity and the will to pay back that investment, then we can start to direct the resources from tertiary institutions and move that into primary and secondary institutions, where we now face a crisis and need to declare that a national emergency, and then allow other funding sources to fill the gaps.
“Not only will they fill the gaps that the government is funding, but they are far more scalable because they are commercial in nature, and therefore, rather than just 1 percent of the Nigerian population enjoying the benefit of education at the tertiary level, we could have 5 percent.
“And I do believe that Nigerians who are well educated would earn enough to pay back the cost of that education,” he emphasized.
