Public universities in Nigeria will face harsh financial times yet again this year. The National Assembly recently approved a paltry 8.7% of the nation’s entire budget for the education sector, and only around 3% of this low allocation will go to tertiary institutions.
Stakeholders, including lecturers, students and non-teaching staff at public universities, have expressed disappointment at poor funding of the sector by a political class that has clearly not come to terms with the urgent need to invest massively in education, as the driving force of the knowledge economy.
Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Education has 22 specialised agencies and hundreds of civil servants in the ministry itself. It is in charge of 37 universities, 21 colleges of education, 48 mono- and polytechnics and 19 technical colleges. The budget also supports 104 unity secondary schools spread across the six geo-political zones of Nigeria.
According to Carol Abiku, an education consultant in Lagos, the low funding of public universities has serious implications.
First, some 80% of the money will have to be used to pay salaries. Second, around 18% will be spent on university administration and running costs, including the supply of power by diesel generators. This will leave a paltry 2% for teaching and research.
“With this dismal budgetary allocation, our public universities cannot be centres of research and scientific innovation. Moreover, federal tertiary institutions may not witness this year positive changes in capital and infrastructural development,” she predicted.
An equally gloomy picture was painted by Professor Sola Akinrinade, former vice-chancellor of Osun State University in south-west Nigeria.
He argued that poor funding of tertiary institutions indicated the government was not serious about development. At this stage of Nigeria’s development, the government needed to allocate enormous resources to education – particularly higher education, research and innovation.
“For a country that desires to transition into a knowledge economy and harbours what is turning out to be a largely illusory aspiration to become one of the top 20 economies in 2020 , it is incumbent upon the government to deploy appropriate resources that would facilitate the development of human capital at all levels of education,” Akinrinade said.
Poor funding of public universities has become the norm in Nigeria.
The Academic Staff Union of Universities has consistently put pressure on the federal and regional governments to implement the compulsory 26% allocation of annual budget to education, as prescribed by UNESCO – a policy to which Nigeria is a signatory. However, various Nigerian governments have refused to honour the country’s obligation in this matter.
Many stakeholders are convinced that Nigeria has sufficient resources to adequately fund tertiary education. But in the continued absence of improved support, a flurry of proposals has been put forward on alternative funding of universities.
One viable funding option would be the establishment of partnerships between universities and the private sector. In almost all advanced nations and the emerging economies of China, Brazil and India, industries have massively funded research in tertiary education. Companies have benefited commercially from the research, and universities from the funding.
But this practice has yet to take off in Nigeria. In the words of Sola Akinrinade: “In over 60 years of university education, how much of the industry-applicable research findings emanating from our universities has been commercialised by industrial investors?
“What is the research and development budget of our industries and how much of this is spent supporting research in universities? We need to support our universities to concentrate on performing their primary functions of manpower development and knowledge production that can advance the economy,” he said.
Another funding alternative for public universities would be to improve their internally generated revenue, known as ‘IGR’. Vice-chancellors are unanimous about this.
Professor Ayodeji Olukoju, vice-chancellor of the private Caleb University in Lagos, has developed strategies aimed at improving the internal revenue of universities. He advised colleagues in public universities to take advantage of their environment to raise IGR.
“For instance, universities in rural areas can embark upon a lucrative economy tree planting project like the one undertaken by the University of Ilorin in central Nigeria. Universities can do what we are doing here by venturing into fishery and agricultural development,” he said.
Bloated bureaucracy is a major source of financial wastage and leakage in Nigeria’s public universities. For three decades, government expanded the bureaucracy of universities, until the numbers of administrators outnumbered the number of lecturers.
But with the computerisation of vital operations, especially in the bursary and registry sections, universities have many support staff who are no longer needed. Olukoju advised public universities to “offload their excess luggage by embarking on staff rationalisation”.
This suggestion has been vehemently opposed in labour circles – as has been a similar proposal by Lamido Sanusi, governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, to reduce the civil service.
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