Professor Olu Obafemi arouses further our pleasurable curiosities. (Any) Alternatives to funding public universities?
There is an unending debate on sources of funding for the universities—especially public universities. First is the unyielding entitlement philosophy in which parents, students and the labour unions believe that the government, if it applies its available resources judiciously, could and should fund the university education of Nigerians as smaller nations in the continent do.

Issues of over-government, disproportional commitment of the commonwealth to service governance and the National Assembly (NASS) in a rogue elite cohort, are blamed for the seeming inability of government to fund universities adequately as it should. A situation of undemocratic disbursement from the national coffers where only a tiny percentage of the Nigerian populace cart/cream off more than 80 per cent of the nation’s wealth and leave little for meeting the critical mandates of governance such as education, health, infrastructures and so on, leaves so much to be desired.

However, government, in its own (un-)righteous perception, believes that education is too large a sector for government to fund alone. It is quite easy to debunk this inability to fund-education-alone syndrome when one takes into consideration the ostentatious and opulent lifestyle of the ruling class (in the Executive and the Legislative arms of governance along with their rapacious patronage beneficiaries.

The adjudged ludicrous re-allocation of Appropriation by National Assembly from N175 billion to N350 billion, after buying for themselves special cars costing N160 million each is a case in point. In this year 2024 budget, the National Assembly, after the President had submitted its Appropriation, allegedly padded it with over one extra Trillion naira, assumedly in self-nest-feathering. Oil- raking shares by Federal and State governments is over a trillion naira in the last one year. Under such humongous swindling disbursement by those in governing elite, how is it possible for people to swallow the bait that FG cannot finance public universities?

This is asides the bewildering, blinding volume of corruption and kleptocracy that has seized the nation’s jugular for eight years. Just take a recent yet-to-be-confirmed but not-yet-denied anywhere, explosive revelation by Prof Yemi Osinbajo, former Vice-President of this country:
“A few weeks to elections (2015 election) the sum of $292 million in cash was taken out of the Nigerian treasury. For two weeks after that the Central Bank of Nigeria did not have dollars… Another day, N60 billion is withdrawn, three Nigerians did what was called strategic alliance contract, what was taken and never returned was almost $3billion…The trigger money programme that we are given to petty traders was N20 billion. Our entire external reserves was $40 billion. If somebody takes $billion, how should we not expect that we cannot fund education…I am so irritated that, these individuals, who robbed the nation… can come and tell us that, oh, we are the people who can fix it. I think we are dealing with an outrage! (Prof Yemi Osibajo,” quoted by Tik Tok @jewel9ja, February 20, 2024.)

Even when verified and confirmed or denied, this is just a droplet from the whooping mass and depths of the corruption cesspit that has ravaged our country, including the frightening disappearing billions by ‘mistake,’ ‘snakes’ or sheer dramatised amnesia of sudden kleptocrats with psychotic streaks! All these and more make it unimaginable that government can come and say that they cannot fund education.

I am indeed, tempted here to propose that the corruption-tracking agencies in Nigeria, namely ICPC, EFCC, rep of ASUU, Labour, FIRS, the Attorney General, etc., be included in a Special Commission set up to investigate, identify all Nigerians with over a billion naira in their accounts, in hiding, in property, including recovered loot to support funding of Tertiary Education in Nigeria.

The present attitude of shelving capital and research responsibilities of government to agencies like the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (Tetfund) is incorrect. Nobody should forget that TetFund itself is a product of ASUU struggle. And we must commend the immediate past and current leadership of Tetfund for taking their commitment beyond physical infrastructural repairs to the knowledge content of their mandate as we presently experience under Tetfund’s current leadership. The walls at the back of Federal universities are mostly supplied by Tetfund, new books, indigenously produced and published, are appearing in the universities resulting from the efforts of the leadership of Bogoro and Echono as Executive Secretaries.

Be that as it may, current capital Allocation to Universities by government is cynical and deplorable. The sorry state of infrastructure had been a major item on the negotiations between government and the university unions—the outcome of which are not accepted for implementation by government and for which unions are suffering unearned reprisals. The tendency by government to shelve their capital allocation responsibilities to such agencies like TetFund is unacceptable and must be revisited. Capital expenditures are constitutional responsibilities of government for physical infrastructure in all institutions, universities inclusive.

Greater reluctance of government towards funding education is through the eagerness to shift funding from government to students and their parents, referencing, disingenuously, the possible lesson learnt from the Empire, Britain, which at some point, from the 2015 Budget of Chancellor Osborne to Prime Minister Theresa May (2018) by an act of policy, resolved to make “future students [to] contribute to the cost of their studies, including the level, terms and duration of their contribution; the replacement of grants with loans due to the steady fall of finance support for public university exemplifies this horrible task-shedding” (Robert Anderson ,2016).

First, it is wrong-headed to learn such negative policy lessons, whereas it is possible to look at other European nations where education remains free from time immemorial till date. Higher education is free in Germany. Slovenia does not charge their citizens and students from Europe any tuition. Spanish and European students attend public universities for free in Spain.

Other countries with none or relatively low fees include Norway, Austria, Finland, France and Sweden These are developed countries and they still place prime value on education for their citizens and neighbours. In Cuba, education, including university education, is 100 per cent free, with government investing a disproportionate quantum of the budget in education. Why is it so difficult for Nigeria to borrow a leaf from these nations?

Even if Britain took such a reactionary policy decision, Nigeria, a developing nation, cannot afford to toe such a line, given the low-level entrance into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, knowledge and digital economy by a country that requires education as its inexorable bedrock. Even in England, at the point of entry, higher education remains free for a high minority of students, and in any case, ‘the state pays for the poorest and low income to access universities in their determination to make attendance of university substantially high.

Historically speaking, there were bright initial climes for Higher Education in our country before this rather bleak season set in. These were periods of the rapid growth of Nigerian universities—First, Second and Third Generations public universities).

In this period, government paid tuition fees for students and offered maintenance grants for numerous others. Even though fees were reintroduced into tertiary educational institutions in Britain 1998, loans were given as ‘top up fees’ as supplementation to government direct funding. Note that this was not all over Britain. Free Higher education continued to attract higher electoral appeal in Scotland and they were continued.

As Anderson (2016) further recounted, and this is very instructive, since the 19th century in Great Britain, the state merged university education with the national system in telling awareness that education and national development are inextricably linked.

In Scotland, references were continually made to Germany where higher education was/is free and the ideological principle of recognising the democratic character of universities compelled state support.

The truth to be told from the university education of people of my generation in the seventies to the early eighties was that, at least in the North, education was virtually free — funded through States and Federal scholarships, with adequate allowances which we called ‘Bulgaria.’ The case was less so for our counterparts from the Southern States but where many students still enjoyed fair support from the states and federal government.

The present situation in which only tuition fees are free and government is proposing the introduction of students loans is hardly acceptable and I think government should consider dropping that poor advice from Bretton Woods institutions like International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank – institutions who wish to force hardship strategies down our nation’s throat whereby anti-welfare policies, including the so-called free market, deregulation, removal of subsidies and all kinds of neo-liberal, anti-people devices are fed into our system and which our governments seem to be swallowing.

Already in this year’s Budget, an allocation of N50 billion has been made for students’ loans and its implementation has just been put on top gear.
What many discerned Nigerians are proposing right now, which should receive an attentive ear of government, is the reintroduction of scholarships and grants. It is worth noting that Government is not only dangling the ideology of the impracticability of her funding public tertiary institutions alone, it is being nudged to sell the idea to its institutions and agencies.

The Committee of Pro-Chancellors and Governing Councils of Federal and State universities in Nigeria independently worried about the decay in the universities under their watch, started to organise workshops to find a means of intervening and finding alternatives to government funding of universities. Patently concerned that

“University education in Nigeria has been facing a declining Government budgetary allocation ‘in the past decade, especially since 2016, when the education ‘budget stood at 9.1 per cent of the total budget. A significant drop to 7.14 per cent occurred in 2018, 7.02 per cent in 2019, 6.7 per cent in 2020 and a paltry 5.6 per cent in 2021’ all of this happening as ‘students’ enrolment, ageing and dilapidation of infrastructure facilities and increases in recurrent cost. Reasons adduced for this horrid situation had been advanced, for this declining allocation, including especially ‘declining revenues accruing to the nation from its main source: oil upon which nation depends for sustenance.”

The Committee felt persuaded that since education, ‘Higher Education in particular is the bedrock on which nations’ fortunes rest’, a sustained funding model has to be developed to feed this sector in the present fast changing world VUCA(Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world’.

The Pro-Chancellors then charged themselves with the task of getting tooled with a ‘Strategic Thinking Mindset for Managing Challenging times and the knowledge of Creative Funding options for Higher Education. (Pro-Chancellors Executive Leadership Programme, October 2021). This was followed by another workshop in Cambridge in 2022. Products and outcomes of these strategic decision-making engagements were yet to become manifest when the body was unilaterally dissolved by the present civilian government.

While it is possible that, had the Pro-Chancellors succeeded in their effort to provide alternative funding structure and models of financing tertiary institutions, it might have greatly supplemented the efforts to restore quality and standards in the university but it will certainly not free government of its duties to fund universities under its watch.
To be continued.
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.