The Federal Executive Council during its weekly meeting last week approved the issuance of provisional licences for the establishment of 12 private universities across the country.
Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, disclosed this to State House correspondents at the end of the council meeting, presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari, on Wednesday in Abuja.
He said the affected universities would be located in Kano, Niger, Gombe, Sokoto, Delta, Abia, Anambra States and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
He said, “Council approved the memo for the issuance of provisional licences for the establishment of 12 proposed private universities.
“The proposed private universities are Pen Resource University Gombe, Gombe State, Al-Ansar University, Maiduguri, Borno State, Margaret Lawrence I -University, Delta State and Khalifa Ishaku Rabiu University Kano, Kano State.
“Sports University Idumuje Ugboko, Delta State, Bala Ahmed University Kano, Saisa University of Medical Sciences and Technology, Sokoto State, Nigerian-British University Hasa, Abia State and Peter University Acina-Onene, Anambra State as well as Newgate University, Minna, Niger State, European University of Nigeria in Duboyi, Abuja and the North-West University Sokoto. ”
Mohammed said the Minister of State, Education, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, presented the memo on behalf of the National Universities Commission and it was approved by the cabinet.
According to him, each of the new universities will be mentored by the old universities nearer to them.
He argued that the establishment of additional universities for an over 200 million-populated country was necessary if the policy of educating a larger percentage of youngsters was to succeed.
“The thinking behind the proliferation of universities is flawed. The sensible way is to place a moratorium on the establishment of new institutions and fix the fatal flaws in tertiary education in Nigeria
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There are 170 universities in Nigeria as of 2021. Out of these, 79 were private, and federal universities amounted to 43, while state universities were 48.
As of today, out of the 2,168, 018 students in Nigeria University system, according to the National Universities Commission, 60 percent of them are in federal universities, 26 percent are in the states’ universities, and 5 percent or less are in the private universities.
Nigerians have experienced many educational setbacks due to the Federal Government’s inability to fund the country’s educational sector to the maximum level.
Even though there are many setbacks from the Federal Government, some of the federal universities have done well in imparting knowledge to the students.
Some private universities in Nigeria have also raised the standard of education in the country, and most of them have been ranked as the best universities in Nigeria.
Individuals from different states in Nigeria have helped build these private universities that have helped to increase the Nigerian education system.
They have promoted education to a higher level and helped reduce the high unemployment rate in Nigeria by providing job opportunities for lecturers.
Be that as it may, at the global level, Nigerian universities rank abysmally low. In the latest Webometrics ranking, no Nigerian university made the first 1,000 globally. The best, the University of Ibadan, ranks 1,231; Covenant 1,370; Obafemi Awolowo University 1,477, and University of Nigeria 1,622.
Therefore, the thinking behind the proliferation of universities is flawed. The sensible way is to place a moratorium on the establishment of new institutions and fix the fatal flaws in tertiary education in Nigeria.
For the government, politics plays a major part; for the private investor, the motive is profit. Both motives are primordial.
The ongoing strike by members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, which is the 17th time since 1999, continues to cast a dark cloud on the suitability and sustainability of our higher education.
At the centre of the strike debacle is the funding of higher education and the role of government.
The primary reason for this contradiction is that Nigeria currently spends more than four times on higher education than it spends on basic education. But despite this funding, it has remained insufficient and ineffective, so much that between 90 and 95 percent of budget allocation to tertiary institutions are spent on personnel costs. There is, therefore, hardly anything left for research and innovation, which should be the raison d’etre of tertiary education.
Nigeria is perhaps the only country where it is more expensive to access basic education than it is to get a higher education, whereas in other parts of the world, the emphasis is on free and compulsory basic education, because it is this level of education that provides students with, literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking skills, which are the core objective of learning.
Higher education is not a right and should presumably not be tuition free. The challenge, however, is that the government over the years has decided to subsidize higher education as an attempt to cover up the failure of our basic, post basic and senior secondary education to meet its objectives.
Besides, there is a chronic shortage of teaching staff. A 2017 audit by the Federal Government found that there were 3,756 academic staff in the 12 universities that former President Goodluck Jonathan established. Only 32 per cent of them had PhD degrees.
A 2013 needs assessment commissioned by the Federal Government also discovered that the universities are grossly understaffed; they lack basic infrastructure in lecture rooms and halls of residence. Academic staff just moved around. Between then and now, the situation is worse because there are more universities to contend with. This is a knotty problem that cannot be solved simply by setting up more universities.
There were 164 universities and higher education institutions in the United Kingdom in the 2018/19 academic year, an increase of one university when compared with the previous academic year. There are a total of 90 United Kingdom universities in the QS World University Rankings 2021- six more than the year before. Four of these institutions make it to the global top 10, with a further four in the global top 50.
As a way out for Nigeria, the United States model can give a clue. Although a high percentage of the universities there are private, they are not-for-profit. The US government statistics as of 2019 said there were 1,626 public colleges, 1,687 private non-profit schools, and 985 for-profit universities. Evidence suggests that closure is rife among the profit-oriented schools there because the government does not give grants to for-profit institutions.
Private universities in Nigeria are profit-oriented, but many students do not have a choice since the government has destroyed the public university system almost beyond repair.
