By Juliana Uche-Okobi
The National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi, has said that the Nigerian political class contributed to the seeming incurable disease that has plagued Nigeria’s education sector for decades.
The ASUU boss, who said this in an interview with our correspondent, noted that the long years of neglect of the education sector by successive administrations had dealt a heavy blow on the sector.
Ogunyemi further explained that education was not the only sector feeling the negative impact of the failure of government to take measures to put the country on the right path.
He said every sector of the economy had been gapping for breath as a result of bad policies or none at all, causing havoc to the economy.
The ASUU president stressed that the Nigerian economy had been suffocating for a long time now following the recession that hit it since 2015.
The resultant effects, he said, were hardship and the growing level of poverty that brought in its trail kidnapping, the youth’s unbridled desire to make money quick by all means, illegal migration and increasing number of out-of-school children, as some parents can no longer fund their children’s education.
On the part of government, Ogunyemi noted that funding education was no longer on their mind.
The ASUU president, who said that the adoption of neo-liberalism by the Federal Government had made it to ignore the provision of social services that would benefit the populace, declared that the education sector had been battered by the ruling elite.
Unlike other sectors, Ogunyemi said the damage done to education by the ineptitude of government was more disturbing because of the role education plays in society.
Describing education as a catalyst, a weapon and instrument for addressing some societal vices such as insecurity, corruption, armed robbery and kidnapping, he said that the mishandling of the knowledge sector would adversely affect other sectors of the economy.
According to the ASUU president, Nigerian leaders have been paying only lip service to education.
He added that in the last 10 years, Nigeria’s annual budgetary allocation to education had been on the downward trend.
He noted that education once got about 12 per cent of budgetary allocation in the past, but recently, especially in the past decade, allocation to the sector had been dangling around seven per cent “and there is nothing suggesting that it will be better tomorrow.”
While not endorsing military rule, Ogunyemi, however, said that the military did better in terms of funding education than the democratic governments the country had produced.
According to the university don, government has not shown any commitment towards better education in Nigeria.
He said that decisions on the allocation of funds to education was not made independently by Nigerians, describing the education budget as “envelope” budget, whereby some individuals predetermined the allocation without recourse to the needs of the sector.
He regretted that despite being aware of the challenges of education following the NEEDS assessment conducted in most universities around the country, government had yet to respond to those needs.
Ogunyemi said, “In an effort to solve the problems of education in the country, we, together with a government team in 2012, visited some 73 universities, both federal and state, across the country and conducted NEEDS assessment of those institutions.
After the exercise, both parties agreed that government should contribute the sum of N1.3 trillion to take care of the needs and, in 2013, government signed the MoU to that effect, agreeing to release the agreed sum in six instalments of N200 billion.
“If government was faithful to that agreement, the last batch of that payment would have been made in 2018, but it failed. They only released N200 billion spread across four years and I think another N20 billion has been added and that was all government could pay out of N1.3 trillion. Is that how serious people behave?”
