To the Vice Chancellor of the Bayero University Kano (BUK), Professor Abubakar Rasheed, the twelve years of democracy in Nigeria have not translated to improved education sector. He explained how in an interview with SAXONE AKHAINE. Excerpts Looking at the country generally and democracy for the past 12 years, how do you rate the efforts of legislators, both at the national and state assemblies, and other agencies in transforming the educationEducation, in many respects, is in a state of crisis. Access to higher education constitutes the biggest problem. At least, over 1.3 million candidates write the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) every year, seeking admission into the universities, but the total capacity for the 117 universities is not more than 300,000.Until recently, it was in the region of 200,000, so, every year, you have to disappoint over one million young men and women seeking to gain admission into universities for lack of space. It is not that they cannot get admission, most of the applicants can cope with university education but the space is not there.In my university in Kano for example, I had 41,000 applicants this year and believe me, if the space were there, up to 25,000 of them can cope with university education. But I can accommodate only 4,000, which is not more than 10 per cent. I would say that yes, efforts are being made, the Education Trust Fund is helping a lot to increase access to education, but I think government is only pay lip service. Investment in the education sector is not enough.UNESCO has estimated that for a country to develop properly, it has to invest not less than 26 per cent of its total budget in education. You know that we are yet to attain that. But many other countries in Africa and Europe invest about 26 per cent of their annual budgets in education. So, a lot needs to be done. Government should register more private universities and with more federal universities coming on board, if government treats the issue right, if government pays attention to the issue of staff development, gives both local and overseas scholarships to enable Nigerians from all walks of life who want to acquire higher degrees, especially PhD to do so, they can come back and help man these universities whether private or federal.This is one area where we need to think a lot. Every time we just think it is the space, nobody thinks of the teachers. You do not find them in the markets or on the roads; they have to come from the existing universities. We do not have enough, yet, we have to feed other universities coming up everyday. So, there is the need to have a kind of marshal plan to train more university teachers so that they can help to man the teeming number of universities. I believe Nigerian can cope with more than 300 universities.Ukraine has a population of about 52 million people but it has over 800 universities. That is why some Nigerians go to Ukraine to study. With a population of over 150 million, we can do with more universities but the only criticism is that we should not set up more universities just for the sake of it. The teachers should be identified and trained and then the equipment and infrastructure, so that we can begin to compete internationally. Universities are international institutions, they are not local. It is not a bad dream if I say that I want my university to compare with the University of London.So, you are in support of the plan by the Federal Government to establish additional nine universitiesI believe it is good. Anybody who has worked in admission units of universities and anybody who is concerned about the issue of access to education will welcome any efforts to increase access to education.But the only debate is whether that increase should be through the creation of new universities or through expanding the existing universities. Some people feel that giving more money to the existing universities to expand and therefore admit more students is better than establishing new universities. But whatever the arguments, what we need is increased access to education. Let us have up to one million Nigerians being absorbed into universities every year. The economy can handle it. Once we get our critical infrastructure right, once the power problem is solved in this country, once we have better security, the economy can absorb 200,000 university graduates every year.Allowing our youths to become frustrated, every year, over one million of them, not because they are not qualified but because we do not provide the access for them in the universities is dangerous. And that is why we have come with so many regulations that so many other clauses, simply because we do not have enough space for them. If you were to take many of those we reject outside the country, they will fit in and many of them will come back with first class degrees. Let us all support any efforts by governments and the private sector to increase access to higher education.You talked of registering more private universities but do you think that there is a way government can intervene in terms of regulating fees these private universities chargeIt is a very difficult thing to say that government should intervene in regulating the school fees. To say that will be undemocratic and we are in a democracy. What government should do is to institute serious scholarship schemes and bursaries, not only at the federal, but at the state and local government levels. Then let wealthy individuals institute foundations to assist indigent students who cannot afford those fees the universities. Banks too can come in here. Nobody should be denied education because he does not have money or because his parents are poor. Banks and other institutions are there with their loans where you borrow money but the problem here is that you go to the bank and borrow N2 million for example and study for a degree in Engineering for five years, then you stay several years without a job and perhaps you end up in a secondary school where they pay you N20,000. How can you pay the loan So, the society needs to re-organize and restructure. So, I do not believe government should intervene except in the form of helping the students to pay part of the school fees.You are the chairman of Senator Ahmed Makarfi Scholarship scheme Committee. What is the scheme trying to achieveThe Senator Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi scholarship scheme was instituted in 2005, initially with the aim of supporting indigent students from Makarfi and the neighbouring local governments. In the first year, about 250 students benefitted from the scheme in universities and polytechnics and for the first four years we kept that number every year. But this year, the scheme has been upgraded and we have processed and approved 391 applications so far and all of them will benefit from the scheme. The scholarship is restricted to students pursuing or about to pursue education in universities for degrees and in the polytechnics for higher national diplomas only. The aim is simply to help those who ordinarily would have found it difficult to acquire higher education without this support. I believe Senator Makarfi is trying to pay back to society that has produced him. He knows the value of education and he knows the danger of leaving people uneducated. So far we have spent about N8 million for this year. But if we have genuine applicants we can always get Senator Makarfi to always assist.
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