The Minister of Education, Prof Tahir Mamman, announced that the Federal Government is in the process of allocating funds for the revitalization of universities.
The release of funds for the rehabilitation of facilities in public universities was one of the demands of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).
The minister also said the government had taken steps to power the universities through gas-powered facilities using the public-private partnership (PPP) window provided by the government.
He said 18 universities have been shortlisted for the first phase of the project.
The minister stated this on Monday during an event to mark the 60th Anniversary of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities (CVCNU) in Abuja.
The minister said the recently approved payment of a salary increase of 35 percent to academics and 25 percent to non-academics was a further commitment to the welfare of the staff of public universities.
He said: “The scheme is intended to start with 18 universities in the first instance and the shortlisted universities will be contacted at the appropriate stage of the project. The centrality of the power to service delivery, research, and cost savings cannot be over-emphasized.”
He noted that due to the recognition of the centrality of the education sector, a committee was set up to provide a roadmap to guide policy, provide implementation plans, deliverables, key performance indicators (KPIs), and a timeline was put in place and that the report of the committee would be submitted this month.
While noting that arrangements had been concluded for a meeting with heads of key security outfits and the Minister of Education to review and enhance the security cover in schools, the minister said the role of government was to continue to support the public sector universities with appropriate resources while encouraging the proper development of the private universities that were now in greater numbers.
He said: “The government is fully aware of the challenges and needs of the institutions and will leave no stone unturned to attend to them: – infrastructure, welfare, safety and security, adequate funding self-governance and overall suitable environment for learning, teaching, and research.”
The minister, however, urged Nigerian universities to produce competent and skilled graduates, saying this was even as they were expected to tap into, explore, and exploit other sources of funding to run the system as was the convention globally to support government funding.
Mamman said: “The government is also keenly interested in having a stable academic calendar for appropriate learning, research, collaboration and student exchange to take place.”
National President of ASUU, Prof Emmanuel Osodeke said the problem of godfatherism had entered the university system, adding that the universities were in a big crisis.
Prof Osodeke said universities should be run the way they were run in the 60s and 70s where there was little or no interference from government officials.
He said universities no longer followed the process of advertising and letting people apply for the position and get interviewed to get into the university, but rather, they came in through godfatherism.
Osodeke stated: “Today, before a vice chancellor can employ any lecturer he has to go and get permission from the Head of Service, and when he employs, he has to go to the Accountant General’s office to beg for people employed to be paid salary.
“How can we run a system like that? We should be sad that there is nothing to celebrate. Our jobs as vice-chancellors are on the line.
“There is a need to unbundle the stranglehold of the bureaucrats in the Nigerian university system. Let them run the way they were run in the 60s and 70s. Now we are in a big crisis, we must take our universities to the uni-versatility of universities not to regional universities,” he said.
Osodeke also decried the state of inadequate lecturers and funding in the system, saying that the least budget for education in Africa was 12 percent but in Nigeria, last year was 3.8 percent.
“How do you expect a good system?” he asked.
The Chairman of CVCNU, Prof Lilian Salami, said the conference provided an opportunity to look at the challenges facing the university system and how to address them.
She said: “We are here to add value to the education system in Nigeria, especially the tertiary education system in Nigeria. The gathering is not only to celebrate the 60-year anniversary or to receive or to be given but to re-engineer the system so that we would have a better future and posterity will then judge us positively.”
Prof Salami said the quality of education in terms of graduates produced has never dropped despite the challenges facing the system.
According to her, Nigerian graduates excel abroad because of the quality of education they receive in Nigeria.
Secretary-General, CVCNU, Yakubu Ochefu said: “The Nigeria university system is 75 years old while globally the university system is over a thousand years old so if you put us in that time frame you will see that we are still taking baby steps, but we have made a lot of improvement in the system but there is room for more.
“We believe that now that we have opened our doors to our stakeholders they will look at us and support the system. It is not the federal government alone, not the state government alone, and not the people that have decided to invest in education alone but for all of us because education is for the entire ecosystem.”
