Agora Policy: Why FG Should Grant Varsities Full Autonomy, Amend NUC Law

•Calls for establishment of education bank

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

Agora Policy, an Abuja think-tank, has recommended that the federal government should grant full autonomy to public universities in the country and amend the National Universities Commission Act (1974) Act to release tertiary institutions from the stranglehold of the commission.

In a policy brief released yesterday, the Waziri Adio-led organisation, which is supported by the MacArthur Foundation, urged the government to step back and allow universities develop at their pace, rather than the current overregulation.

“Federal government needs to step back. Less government is best for universities. Government should grant full autonomy to its public universities, and allow each university to develop its own identity and grow at its own pace.

“The National Universities Commission Act (1974) should be amended to release its stranglehold of NUC on the universities and assign it a coordinating and monitoring role rather than a directive or prescriptive role,” the think-tank said.

The brief was written by Bolaji Abdullahi, an education enthusiast, former Commissioner for Education in Kwara State and ex-Federal Minister for Youth Development and Sports.

In keeping with the principle of autonomy, the report stated that government should cede its role as employers of university lecturers to each university.

This, it maintained, would empower the universities to negotiate terms and conditions of service with their respective employees in line with their local reality and the value expected of each lecturer.

It further argued that a realistic annual cost for each student should be determined and the universities should be funded by government based on the number of students rather than personnel or administrative needs of the university.

“Universities should be allowed to charge tuition fees within the parameters set by government, but the Education Bank needs to be established to offer federal government-backed loans to students who may require them.

“Government and institutional scholarship awards are another opportunity for talented but indigent students to pay tuition. Most government scholarships now are targeted at students studying abroad. This should be reversed,” the group argued.

According to Agora Policy, work-study also presents another option for indigent students which can carry out most of the work currently being done by non-academic staff and even contract staff in the universities.

Besides , it contended that endowment funds could be a major way for universities to expand their pool of funds, opining that currently, the universities are not tapping into it as much as they should do.

“ They need to bring their alumni closer and give them incentives to contribute to their university endowment programmes and to establish scholarship schemes and give back in other ways.

“A new framework for tertiary education funding needs to be developed that will set objective parameters for allocation of funds from the TETFUND based on verified outputs in teaching, research and community service,” the organisation advised.

Furthermore, it argued that a semi-autonomous National Higher Education Quality Assurance Agency (NHEQAA) needs to be established to monitor the quality of teaching and research in the universities, and evaluate them in terms of their responsiveness to the nation’s manpower requirement and economic development plan.

Titled: “Repositioning Nigeria’s Public Universities for National Growth and Competitiveness,” the paper noted that in seeking to realign Nigeria’s public university system with its national development objectives, it must ask four critical questions.

The key posers, Agora Policy argued, should be : “What are our development goals over the next 15 years? What human resources would we need to achieve these goals? How many of our citizens of university-going age would we require to have degree-level qualifications in the identified areas of need within the same period and what research priorities do we need to pursue and promote in order to meet these goals?”

The paper argued that the endemic corruption, inefficiency, ineffectiveness, inequity and lack of accountability that characterise the system merely thrive on a fundamental failure that cannot be addressed by interventions that merely target any of the symptoms in isolation.

What Nigeria requires, it said, is a system-wide reform that addresses the three critical elements of governance, funding, and quality assurance based on a rethinking of the entire public university education as a driver of national development objectives.

“In Nigeria, universities are governed by the National Universities Commission (NUC), whose establishment Act of 1974 gives it controlling power over the university education system, including what departments or academic units they run and what they teach.

“They also include what funding they receive and how; what personnel they hire and the conditions of service attached to such personnel; what their research needs are; and “carry (ing) out such other activities as are conducive to the discharge of its functions,” it added.

From its point of view, Agora noted that many university administrators and lecturers regard the NUC as a major impediment to innovation and creativity in the universities.

“Global trends also suggest that less government is better for universities and that universities function best when they are self-governing,” it explained.