By Adesaina Wahab

The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, recently delivered the convocation lecture at the Lagos State University, LASU, and in this chat, speaks on a number of issues relating to the Nigerian University System, the operations of unity colleges among others. Excerpts:

You are in the Lagos State University. What is your impression of the institution?

I can see an improvement in the infrastruacture. The campus is comparable to any other first generation university. I commend the Vice-Chancellor, the Pro-Chancellor, the Chancellor and management and staff and students of the university. There is love radiating among them all and the Governing Council has been supportive. 

Your convocation lecture was directed mainly at youths. What is your message for them?

My message is about the need for them to own Nigeria. It is theirs. The lecture was to address what the country is facing now. The youths are the heartbeat of the country. From youth to adulthood, it is a great leap. President Bola Tinubu believes so much in the youths and has been evolving processes and policies to address their cause.

He believes in their capacity, their ingenuity and their innate ability to do things. 

Our society is not perfect and there is no perfect society anywhere. Agree that we have leadership issue, but we have a good and great country with limitless opportunities and capacity to do things. We want our youths to take ownership of the country and use the opportunity to the best of their abilities. If they do that, they will excel. The abundance of opportunities in this great country is amazing; more than what you can see in many parts of the world.

It is not worth it that after personal investment and the investment of parents, guardians and others, our youths now have to go to London or New York to be cleaners. It is denigrating. If you sit back and be creative in Nigeria, you will live and lead a good life. You will be contributing positively to your community and the country. Some people go abroad with the hope of living a better life, but they end up living as sub-humans. It is shame that is preventing some of them from coming back home.

For our country, I can tell you that God has answered our prayers about leadership challenge. Now, we have a President in the person of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu who has the passion and commitment to leading this country right. We have a President who is prepared for the job and is ready to take difficult decisions. He has taken tough decisions that no leader has taken in this country. For the first time in the country, we are not subsidizing a fictitiously low Naira rate. Nigerians must do away with negativity about the country, we have many positive things happening here. Price parity ratio for the Naira is one dollar to N1,046. The Naira has moved from being overvalued to being undervalued and prices of goods will continue to go down as a result of that. 

Now, we have more Chinese, Europeans and Lebanese coming to Nigeria, do you think they have come to look at our faces? No, they see the opportunities that our youths are not seeing. Don’t run away, opportunities abound here. Youths should look inward. We have a government that is creating opportunities for all, making capital available to do things.

At the Federal Ministry of Education, we are going to launch an Entrepreneurship Value Capital Grant for University Graduates. You can access N10 million to move your creativity to higher level. Even if that N10 million is not enough, we will engage the Bank of Industry to give top up credit in single digit to beneficiaries. The government is creating opportunities for youths in this country. They are the target, the focus.

The administration has created 21 universities in less than two years. What about funding, staffing and others? Is the government not biting more than it can chew?

You have asked a great question. Yes, we have created 21 universities since we came on board. Do we have enough funding to equip these universities? I will tell you absolutely no! The President has mandated me as Education Minister to come up with a memo to address this. I cannot tell you the details of this. You will be seeing a much more directed government policy on that. We are also looking at increasing funding of the education sector. You would have noticed that in this year’s budget, education has the third highest budgetary allocation.

Moreover, the President believes so much in human capital development and when we talk about that, we are talking about education, health and social protection. No government has committed so much into that sector in the country and we are also not neglecting other sectors. 

We have created 21 new universities largely due to our legislators. And I have had to meet with our National Assembly members, we cannot have a situation whereby a Senator or House of Representatives member would want a university in their backyard. It is not possible. We have got into deeper conversation about that and you cannot just because of political gesticulation want a university in your backyard. We must maintain the sanctity of our education system and we have all agreed to this.

The government said medical and nursing schools should increase their admission quotas, do we have the manpower and facilities to cope?

Regarding the shortage of medical and nursing personnel, if you look back to two years ago, it was like we were dying in the midst of plenty – everybody wanted to japa. But we have been able to stabilise the situation. What did we do with the help of the President? We have a population of over 220 million and we moved to double enrollment in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy among others. For nursing, we increased admission by about five folds.

Before we came in, we were enrolling about 28,000 annually, but now, we are doing over 100,000. What I hope you would be talking about is the need to align our tertiary education to the needs of the country. I am challenging our university vice-chancellors, let us stop deceiving the youths of this country, we cannot be giving them education that does not give them any life skills. I apologise if my comment will offend some people, it is better you have a first degree in some courses rather than have a PhD in some. It is better you have a BSc in Nursing rather than a PhD in History. With my BSc Nursing certificate, I will get a job here in Nigeria or anywhere else and probably make more money.

I am happy that the youths of today have seen the need to read some courses. We are working with our tertiary institutions to ensure that they align the education they provide youths with the needs of the country. I would tell you now that we have mandated the National Board for Technical Education, NBTE, to stop issuing licences to monotechnics. Those we will allow now are those that can offer Nursing and related courses. 

You asked me about infrastructure to cope with more medical and nursing students, we are building more infrastructure because we have enough manpower to double admissions into those schools. Even, doubling the admissions is only a drop of water in the ocean. I will give you some figures. Now, we have a shortage of 330,000 doctors that exists in a population of about 220 million. Fast forward to 2050, about 25 years from now, when our population is projected to hit 400 million. If we have a shortage of 330,000 today, you can guess what the figure will be by 2050. Doubling would not be enough. If we double from 5,000 to 10,000.

We are improving infrastructure in our medical schools. We are building simulation laboratories so that we can geometrically train more medical doctors. With TETFund’s intervention fund of N70 billion in 2025, we have decided to spend the money on eight medical schools to improve facilities there. We are also building six simulator laboratories at the cost of N40 billion, collectively, we are intervening with about N110 billion in our medical schools.

You were quoted as proposing two years for the National Youth Service Corps Scheme, can you explain more on this?

People only misquoted me and even abused me on social media. Whatever decisions we take, be rest assured that they would be in the interest of Nigerians. There was never a time I said the NYSC scheme should be extended to two years. But in life, if you don’t innovate or use data, you will fail. Some of the things we did 50 years ago are no longer okay. Innovation is thinking outside the box. These are the things I told the DG of NYSC when he came to my office on a courtesy visit. I said it is like Nigeria is suffering in the midst of plenty. In a situation where we have demand and supply sides, we must be innovative and proactive.

For teachers, we churn out graduates from colleges of education yearly, for you to get the best value from anything, you must balance supply with demand. Now, we have many NCE teachers, well trained but no job. But in our rural areas, we have no teachers to teach our children Mathematics, English Language, Sciences etc. Government in any country should be an enabler. So, I proposed to the NYSC DG that we could have a Teachers Corps, it has been done in many countries and it is successful. Form a Teachers Corps that the NYSC would anchor and the corps would engage teachers to serve voluntarily in rural communities for two years. Even if they are paid the NYSC allowance, though it is not enough, it isn’t also too bad.  Let me tell you, the volunteers or PTA teachers in some of our unity colleges have been working for many years and are paid N30,000 to N40,000 monthly. If the NYSC engages somebody in a controlled two-year setting, and the person is paid N70,000 or N80,000 monthly, is it not better than the PTA teachers in some places?. The state governors, council chairmen will also be part of it and there is a high possibility of the teachers being employed when they are found to be competent. If we do that well, we can move it to the Medical Corps.

We have a lot of teachers who are unemployed. It is about creativity. 

The other thing I said is that with the high number of graduates we churn out yearly without life skills, can we do an optional two- year NYSC scheme where the second year will be optional for members who want to be trained and equipped with vocational skills before going into the world. Those are the things I said, I did not say they should extend the service year to two.

Has the government approved an increase in the PTA Levy in unity colleges?

No, it isn’t true. PTA used to be just an oversight body, to put teachers in check and ensure that everything runs well. Now, PTA has turned to another administrative structure in our schools. It is not acceptable. They now run a parallel organisation in schools. It is a failure of the past governments. If they had recruited more teachers, things would have been better and we would not have this monster. I appreciate PTA for what they are doing but they have gone beyond their bounds and calling. They are just meant to be voluntary oversight body. Government has not given any PTA the mandate to increase levy. We will frontally address this problem. 

Let me tell you what we are doing now. We have taken the NEEDS Assessment of our unity colleges to see the number of PTA teachers that are there, their skill sets and see if we can move them to the federal civil service. We have put a stop to hiring those PTA teacher in our schools. PTA cannot hire teachers that are unable to meet the requirements of being employed into the federal civil service. It pains me that when we go to our unity colleges, you see PTA teachers that have been there for donkey years.

The one I saw at Queens College the other day has been there for 27 years and the woman is paid N50,000 monthly.  She is even considered lucky as they said in some places, they are paid N30,000. As a government, we are working to fix that. We are doing an audit of the situation. We are going to move those who are qualified to the federal civil service and I believe the President will approve that.

We are also investing heavily on infrastructure in our unity colleges. This year, the President has approved N40 billion to rehabilitate our unity colleges, N20 billion for fencing and security in the schools and another N20 billion for the provision of solar energy. That has never been done.

What is the focus of the government regarding the education sector?

We have what we call Education Sector Renewal Initiative. Through it, we want to improve access to education, improve the quality of education we give our children and youths and also improve governance and management of our education system. Our universities are being rated with their peers globally, so, we need to improve standard and governance. I have directed the vice chancellors to put on their websites on or before the end of May, this year, their budgets, overhead cost, capital expenditures. They should also put TETFund capital allocated to them for the year, that should be done yearly. 

They must also go in the direction of endowments. 

There is no where in the world that the government alone funds tertiary education. Universities in advanced nations make more money from research and endowments. They should go and look for that. Many years ago, universities have their endowment funds in commercial banks, but the previous government said they should put it in TSA. The current administration noticed that international funders were running away from here to a place like Ghana, I went to meet the President when I heard about the severity of the situation. I told him our universities would die if it continued. I was not even the Education Minister then, I was Health Minister of State, and the President directed that a presidential memo be done regarding the issue and research and endowment funds were taken out of the TSA.

Our tertiary institutions must also publish their research grants too. We have bright minds there. Let them go and source for research grants. We are going to create a National Research Development Fund to get dedicated funds for research. Students population too must be made public. Some federal universities have 200 students and 1,200 workers. When I saw the data, I was shocked. There are some polytechnics that have existed for more than five years with less than 500 students and 800 staff. And they are the first to access TETFund intervention projects. 

A lot of change has been brought to the sector because President Tinubu is leading a disciplined, focused and directional government. The information we want our tertiary institutions to make public is not strange, it is what is done globally and internationally. 

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