The N3 trillion bill for tertiary education

THE fundamental problems facing tertiary education in the country were recently highlighted by the Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council, University of Lagos (UNILAG), Dr Wale Babalakin, when he said the Federal Government would need between N2.5 trillion and N3 trillion yearly to provide quality education for Nigerians. Speaking during a fundraising dinner organised by the alumni of the UNILAG College of Medicine, Babalakin averred that the government alone could not raise such a huge amount of money which he said represented close to 60 per cent of total receipts in the system, hence the need for individuals, corporate bodies and alumni associations to support the government in the quest to deliver quality education. “Since we cannot continue to give poor quality education to our people because of funding, we must look for alternative funding to deliver quality and quantitative education to Nigerians,” he stressed. While commending the alumni for giving back to their alma mater years after graduation, Babalakin said he was looking forward to a time when Nigerian public universities would be so financially buoyant that government funding would only be an addition. In his own address on the occasion, chairman of the organising committee of the event, Professor Oladapo Ashiru, pointed out that universities in developed countries have a day set aside to celebrate their legacies and use the money raised on such occasions to address their needs.

There is, indeed, no doubt that the country’s universities are in a precarious condition. In most of the universities, issues of manpower, space and infrastructure continue to pose serious challenges. Hostel facilities are inadequate, decrepit and ramshackle, causing students to live in horrendous conditions. Indeed, a distraught student union president in one of the universities, ruing the overcrowding in the hostels, was once reported to have told his vice chancellor: “You packed us into the rooms like animals and we behave like animals. Why are you surprised?” Many of the universities fail to attract the best brains among their own products for teaching and research and suffer the additional indignity of overstretching the available facilities by admitting an impossible number of students. Although the Federal Government has, since the return to civil rule in 1999, invested in the turnaround of the universities, the effort remains negligible, with the government preferring to establish more institutions and bureaucracies rather than expanding the capacities of the extant schools. Given this scenario, the country would indeed be deluding itself to believe that what is currently on offer in the institutions amounts to quality education.

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In our view, one major problem is the country’s lack of a viable manufacturing or industrial base. Beyond rolling out barrels of crude oil, what really does the country produce or manufacture, except perhaps a retinue of intellectually impoverished and corrupt politicians? To say the least, a society that does not produce anything is bound to face the kind of challenges facing the country. Even in the agricultural sector which provides the basis for sloganeering in government circles, there have been as yet not enough viable policies rolled out to take advantage of some of the options available to the country. In the last four years in particular, the sector has stagnated, with the government celebrating the export of yams and failing to key into the policy options it inherited in the area of fertiliser distribution and the production of cassava bread. Admittedly, though, the government’s studied opposition to the restructuring imperative for the country could not have facilitated anything other than continuing rot almost in every facet of the national life.

No doubt, the country needs to generate more funds to run tertiary education. It must factor endowments into the system and encourage research and development. Serious countries commit about 25 per cent or more of their budgets to education because of its critical role in national development. In this regard, even if N3 trillion appears to be humongous, much more than that figure might, in fact, be required to fix the sector. If tertiary education is not to stagnate further, all the stakeholders will have to go back to the drawing board to work out how to raise the fund. With a thinking government in place, the funding challenge in tertiary education can be solved.