For Nigeria to unlock its potentials and take its rightful place in the comity of nations, tertiary education requires strategic rebooting for national development, the Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission, Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, has said.
To achieve this, he added, institutions must evolve robust programmes capable of appropriating the enormous opportunities in the nation’s economy.
“We must reconnect to the fundamental goals and functions of tertiary education and develop a new vision based on curricula that are geared at solving practical socio-economic, political and technical problems,” Rasheed said.
The NUC boss stated this while delivering the Lagos State University’s 22nd Convocation Lecture entitled, “Role of Tertiary Education in Promoting Social Cohesion and Peace: Opportunities and Challenges for Nigeria.”
According to him, considering the number of tertiary educational institutions in Nigeria, their statutory roles, and the ever-increasing student enrollments in these institutions, the country does not need to look elsewhere for solutions to its search for a socially cohesive nation.
“But if truth must be told, our tertiary education system has failed woefully in two out of the three great missions identified in the 1960 report of the Ashby Commission on Higher Education, which include creating a national elite, engendering development and promoting unity and nation building,” he said.
Rasheed added that although remarkable success had been achieved in the area of creating the manpower needed for development, the system had failed to give birth to a national elite or serve as an instrument of unity and peace.
He said recent developments in the country had challenged and continued to challenge peaceful co-existence.
“Erstwhile peaceful communities have become mini-theatre of war. Today, our disunity has become more pronounced and rather than the language of peace and progress, our so-called educated elite is spewing out noises of hate, secession and war,” he said.
The NUC boss, however, said for tertiary educational institutions to promote social cohesion, the challenge for the immediate future was to get the nation’s tertiary institutions to create a national elite that would facilitate the emergence of a truly united nation.
“They must engage in education for social cohesion, promote good citizenry, promote literacy, promote entrepreneurship education and also promote good governance,” he said.
Rasheed further said Nigerian institutions must be models of national complexity and unity, adding, “We will be able to tell the whole nation that we are serious, as an intellectual hub, when a Hausa man or Yoruba man is elected as vice-chancellor in a Federal university in the West or North, respectively, based purely on merit.
“Achieving that will not only be a barometer for us, but how we achieve it will definitely usher in the dawn of our true national development.”
The professor of English also said there was the need for a new strategy for funding tertiary institutions, where government continued to give block grants as usual but with a little extra for investments.
“Secondly, I would like to see a more regulated Internally Generated Revenue regime in our tertiary education institutions. This should entail allowing more flexibility in the areas of IGR that can be exploited, including some cost sharing mechanism,” he said.
