Varsity managers urged to source fund from alumni, research

FORMER registrar, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Mr Ayodele Ogunruku, has advised Nigerian university managers to explore the alumni association’s financial opportunities to form an integral part of their strategic fund generation portfolio.

He gave the advice recently at the inaugural I. O. Ogunsola annual Registry Public Lecture’ entitled the ‘Reality of Funding Tertiary Education in Modern Times: The Global Reality’, organised by the Registry Department, Federal College of Education (Special), Oyo.

According to him, it has become expedient for every tertiary institution in Nigeria to learn and adopt the principle of alumni-driven fund raising being used by the various universities in advanced countries in their fund generation portfolio.

ALSO READ: IGP warns against detaining suspects beyond 48hrs

Ogunruku noted that government established some universities in the country merely to satisfy peculiar political exigencies without adequate budgetary provision that could facilitate the carriage of their objectives.

He added adding that in spite of the increasing financial efforts of the Nigerian government to reduce the level of decadency in the infrastructural state of the federal institutions, funds remain inadequate to satisfy the 150 federal institutions in the country.

He said: “The average cost of tuition for various disciplines in Nigerian universities as at 2005 was N305,909 per student. At the current rate of dollar to naira, it amounts to an average of N750,448 per student. When this is compared to the amount released by government in respect of federally funded institutions, it is far from the financial needs of those tertiary institutions.

“This itself justifies the ASUU request for minimum allocation of a sum of N220 billion to federal universities this year. While it is of essence for the government to fund basic education fully, higher education partly funded, there is no country in the world that fully pays for the funding of their tertiary educational education.”

Ogunruku, therefore appealed to tertiary institutions’ managers to go in the way of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard universities and their contemporaries in the developed countries in their external and internal strategic fund generation policies.

H said that Nigerian tertiary institutions should explore the alumni fund generation opportunities as strategies for fund mobilization, stressing that parents and non-governmental organisations should not be left out in the fund raising process for tertiary institutions, through payment of tuition fee and donations.

Speaking in the same vein, the registrar of the college, Mr Joseph Araoye, asserted that government alone could shoulder the financial responsibility of tertiary education, admitting that each institution should source for alumni financial assistance to supplement other sources of fund in the institution.