by Deborah Aivihenyo

The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof Is-haq Oloyede, says the autonomy of public universities can be better achieved if the National Universities Commission (NUC) is left alone to manage the budgets of tertiary institutions in addition to its role as the regulator that accredits courses in schools.

The JAMB Registrar said university education is so sensitive and the government should allow experts to administer these tertiary institutions.

He faulted a situation where each public university now approaches the National Assembly to defend their budget and get whatever they want based on the people they know and the influence they wield.

He said, “We can still re-engineer the situation to have the things we need. We need to look at the funding mechanism. The National Universities Commission (NUC), for example, should be left alone to run the universities. Hold the National Universities Commission responsible for the management of the universities.

“I was chairman, Committee of Vice Chancellors and I was involved in re-organising and retooling of the National Universities Commission. When the NUC was in charge, things were done well. I believe very strongly that the autonomy that we are talking about for our universities can be better achieved if we allow the NUC to coordinate the affair.

“Now, every university goes to the National Assembly for their budget, for their defence and the more you can pull the weight, the more will determine.”

He said when the NUC managed the budget of universities, there was the Universities Annual Review System which looked at how many candidates universities have across disciplines and used that to determine the next year’s budget.

“Whether you know anybody or you don’t does not come in. The NUC will determine the parameter number of students and so on. And it is the NUC that will defend at the National Assembly and the Ministry of Education,” he said.

Oloyede said when the NUC was in charge, the money going into capital development was high but now, it has fallen because universities now have too many support staff.

He envisaged a situation where public universities would get funds based on the number of students they admit.

“I believe that the way we are running and the way we are funding, it could get to a level that we will say: University of Abuja, you are producing XY medical doctors, what does it take to train one medical doctor? This is the quota we have given you. So, we now calculate (the amount). Both your capital and your recurrent expenditure won’t be our business. And we would have built research into it to ascertain the amount,” he said.

He also said Nigeria does not need more universities, stressing that the current ones should be expanded and equipped for better performance. He lamented a trend where politicians now compensate marginalised communities with the creation of universities instead of the establishment of factories and industries.