Nigeria: Revisiting the Rot in Nigeria's Public Varsities

10 December 2018

Since November 5, 2018 when the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, embarked on a nationwide strike, the experiences for students, parents and business concerns have not been palatable. Reports have it that all the meetings held so far with the Minister of Education are yet to resolve any of the demands of ASUU. ASUU predicated its strike on the need to revitalise the comatose public varsity education, unpaid accumulated earned academic allowances, failure to release NUMPENCO license, and other issues documented in the 2017 Memorandum of Action signed with the President Muhammadu Buhari. ASUU had argued that the Federal Government constituted a team itself to ascertain what it would take to fix the observed problems in the university system. They came up with N1.3 trillion as against the sum of N1.2 trillion contained in the ASUU-FGN agreement of 2009. This can be found in the NEEDs Assessment Report of Nigerian Public Universities of 2012. I will highlight some aspects of the report to bring to the fore the rot in the Nigerian university system as at 2012. I invite you to imagine how precarious public universities will be in 2018, six years after to further nose-diving of funding.

The NEEDS assessment committee was led by the then Executive Secretary, TETFUND and now Chairman of INEC, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, with about ten terms of reference which include the appraisal of physical facilities for teaching and learning; number of staff; give requirements for the upgrade of municipal facilities, among others. At the time, there were 74 public varsities (37 each of federal and state varsities) but 27 federal and 34 state universities were visited by the committee. The committee in their report submitted that irrespective of region or ownership, the universities have common problems. Using their words, "the report is factual, graphic and some cases grim".

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