30th September, 2017
Gbenro Adesina/Ibadan
The Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, UI, Prof. Abel Idowu Olayinka has identified inadequate funding as the main problem confronting higher education in Nigeria, stressing that government must properly fund universities to be globally competitive.
Olayinka who stated this on MITV said that quality education comes with sufficient cash, adding, “What stops UI from recruiting a Professor of Mechanical Engineering from Harvard University to come and be teaching our students in Ibadan? But can we pay his salary? Will he be willing to come and be contending with all these money-induced incessant strike?
“What makes a world-class university is the quality of human resources. How many foreign lecturers and foreign students can Nigerian universities attract with our poor infrastructure and conditions? I think we need to invest heavily in education if we must be globally competitive”.
Also identifying access and quality as problems, Olayinka pointed out that public universities were the most heavily subscribed options by the teeming candidates over state and privately owned universities because of cost, but regretted that public universities lacked adequate space to accommodate all the candidates.
According to him, “10,000 candidates applied to study Medicine and Surgery in UI, but we can only admit 150 because of space, we would have loved to admit more than 150 but because we don’t want to compromise the quality that we are producing. If there is money, we can expand the scope, build more hostels and classrooms”.
On the incessant strike rocking the sector, Olayinka linked the problem to the same issue of funding, noting that the staff became restful because the salary was “amputated “, maintaining that this was one of the reasons Nigerian youth run to Ghana and other neighbouring countries to study.
The UI boss argued that most of the foreign universities being attended by Nigerian youth were not relatively better than Nigerian universities, but because “there is a stable academic calendar over there, they attract our youth who want to complete their studies on record time.”
He said that public primary and secondary schools had virtually collapsed in the country because they were not well taken-care of, as many parents now send their children to private primary and secondary schools.
Olayinka insisted that education was not cheap as someone had to pick up the bills, thereby calling on all stakeholders to join hands in order to save education sector.