Kuni Tyessi
A former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof. Peter Okebukola, has commended President Muhammadu Buhari for the reappointment of Prof. Abubakar Rasheed and Prof. Is-haq Oloyede as Executive Secretary of NUC and Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) respectively.
Okebukola, the current chairman of the Governing Board of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), in a statement, said the action would lead to the rapid development of the education sector in the country as it would allow for continuity and sustainability of their innovative programmes.
“The reappointment of Rasheed and Oloyede is indicative of two things: one, that Buhari has a love of education at heart because non-renewal of the appointments would have set the higher education sub-sector back several years with new actors,” said Okebukola. “Second, it shows that Buhari has a listening ear as he hearkened the call of stakeholders in the sector to reappoint the two highly-resourceful chief executive officers.”
He also commended the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, for recommending the duo for reappointment. Okebukola added that while a global assessment agency recently ranked Rasheed as the best executive secretary in NUC history, Oloyede is also globally acclaimed as the most dynamic, innovative, and most prudent registrar JAMB has ever had.
Okebukola affirmed that the activities Rasheed and Oloyede had, in the last five years, elevated the quality of university education in Nigeria.
“The minister of education needs Rasheed and Oloyede for the promise of the president to hold true for the Nigerian university system. While Oloyede ensures improved quality of candidates into the system, Rasheed ensures that when admitted, these candidates benefit from high-quality processing leading to much-improved quality of graduates compared with what we used to have before he came into office,” he further stated.
Okabukola said, “Other programmes and projects which are dependent on the international clout and expertise of Prof. Rasheed, include the Nigerian University System Knowledge Bank, the Virtual Institute for Capacity Building in Higher Education and the Digest of Statistics.”
