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Nigeria: 'Poor Education Funding May Disrupt Vision 2020'
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Daily Trust (Abuja)
23 July 2008
Posted to the web 23 July 2008
Ruby Rabiu
Poor funding of the education system may render the Vision 2020 of the Federal Government of making Nigeria one of world's the leading economies a mirage if drastic steps are not taken to address the issue.
The Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Education, Alhaji Farouk Lawan, who bemoaned the dropping standard in the education sector agreed that the apparent insensitivity and lukewarm attitude demonstrated by governments in the past towards technical education had been responsible for the backwardness of the country in technological advancement.
Lawan was speaking at a workshop titled, "Funding Diversification in Polytechnics", organized by the Kaduna-based National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) in Abuja.
Lawan who said that the workshop was critical for the development of education, said "The slogan of vision 2020 will not make any meaningful impact if we cannot fund the polytechnic sector that has the key to driving us into that stage, and the with the year 2020 just around the corner, the reality on the ground is that we have not done enough to make us be a competitor in that direction with the current low level of funding of the polytechnic sector."
He said for the country to achieve the Vision 2020, there must be systematic and pragmatic funding of the education sector, especially technical education.
The House committee chairman also urged government to urgently address the disparity in funding universities and polytechnics, saying sometimes polytechnics deserved more funding due to their peculiar nature.
"While it is important to look elsewhere to generate revenue, it is also important for the government to fulfill its obligation to the people of the country by taking up its own responsibilities," Lawan said.
Earlier, the Minister of Education, Dr. Igwe Aja-Nwachuku, while declaring the workshop open, pointed out that the government was worried over the lack of information concerning the utilization of resources allocated to the polytechnic sub-sector and the low level of IGR, and charged the nation's tertiary institutions to be in the fore-front of the campaign for transparency and accountability and be more creative in addressing their additional incomes.
Aja revealed that the Federal Government spent over N98 billion to fund federal polytechnics between 2003 and 2007 with the institutions generating only N9.3bn from 2003 to 2007.
Responding, the Executive Secretary of the NBTE, Dr. Nuru Yakubu, in his opening remarks, said the low level of IGR in federal polytechnics was a reflection of the widely held wrong notion in the institutions that government had the resources to cater fully for their financial needs, and all that was required was to exert pressure on the minister of education and his finance counterpart.
According to Yakubu, an analysis of the funding situation in the federal polytechnics in terms of proposed and approved figures from 1999 to date showed that an average of an average of 57.78 per cent; the highest being 80.7 per cent in 2001 and the lowest being 33.4 per cent in 2003.
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"The internally generated revenue of the federal polytechnics between 2003v and 2007 averaged 7.7 per cent of their budget proposals and 11.7 per cent of approved budget, with the actual figures dangling between N1 billion to N2 billion last year," he said.
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