Newsfront Online …Telling the Public as it is
…Says years of poor investments in education sector responsible for present woes
Public universities budget N1 billion annually on energy, Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, said yesterday.
He said the overhead of N11 million-N12 million released for public universities to run their operations monthly was not enough as most universities spend between N60 million and N80 million monthly to buy diesel, service their generators and do other things.
The executive secretary of NUC said this in a Pre-Convocation Lecture he delivered ahead of the 4th Combined Convocation Ceremony of Bingham University in Karu, Nasarawa State.
Speaking on the topic: ‘Issues in the Nigerian Tertiary Education System’, the NUC boss linked Nigeria’s present challenges to poor investments in the education sector. He said that there was a need to invest more in the education sector as the impact of low education budgets tended to lead to high illiteracy rate.
According to him, the country needs to be a little bit more serious with education.
The executive secretary of NUC said: “Public universities have to budget close to N1 billion for energy every year to buy diesel, pay NEPA, service generator, attend to some other things, and what does the government give them?
“But in reality, what universities spend is between N60 million to N80 million monthly to pay for electricity, and that is why there are inadequacies of water, counselling, support for teachers, communication, internet and cleaning services.”
The executive secretary said that in many universities, there was a huge infrastructural deficit with grossly inadequate lecture halls, laboratories, offices, hostels, internet and electrical facilities among others.
Prof. Rasheed commended the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) for its intervention role, saying that without them, most universities would have gone into extinction.
The NUC boss, while also speaking on the impact of educational budget on governance and development in Nigeria, said the impact of low spending on education by past and present administration was evident across the country.
Prof Rasheed said: “The widening gap of out-of-school children which currently stands at 18.5m is the highest in the world.
“The figure has jumped from 10 million as parents withdraw their children from school for fear of abduction, kidnapping and the rest, so the illiteracy rate now stands at 78 million while tertiary enrollment is about 10.1 per cent.”
(thenationonlineng.net)
