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There are over 200 outstanding private-member bills at the National Assembly seeking for the establishment of new federal tertiary institutions across the country. Nearly all the federal lawmakers with no federal government’s presence in their areas are lobbying for the ‘constituency’ project. The pressure became so distracting that President Tinubu, who according to the Education Minister, Dr. Tunji Alausa, inherited 551 requests had to reduce them to 79 based on what he termed, ‘active application’. But the more worrisome challenge is that with technical glitches becoming commonplace in Nigeria, which started from the stoppage of real-time transmission of presidential election results in March 2023, and then to the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) results of Lagos and five States in the Southeast, as well as the glitched grades in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) May/June 2025 results, the crisis in our education sector is getting more hydra-headed. And like Caesar’s wife, who is supposed to be above suspicion, the ‘glitches’ even after tearful apologies, would continue to haunt the credibility and incorruptibility of the examination bodies.
The ruination in the education sector did not start today. While the recent 7-year moratorium on establishment of new tertiary schools is laudable, it merely scratched the metastasizing wound on the surface. It only paused the aberration for a while and would scarcely correct the perennial decay occasioned by a systemic neglect of education from basic to tertiary levels. The worsening crisis is manifest in the following key respects: policy flipflops, inadequate number of qualified and motivated teachers, lack of facilities and instructional materials, poor remuneration and learning environment, obsolete curriculum, and negligible funding. Insecurity and poverty in some parts of the country also account for the embarrassing number of out-of-school children in the country. According to UNICEF, Nigeria has about 18.3 million out-of-school children, the highest in the world, and 60% of them are girls.
Going back to memory lane, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) had protested the proliferation of under-funded, under-equipped and glorified secondary school as universities, especially at the state level. It was one of the terms of the famous 2009 FG-ASUU agreement. But it fell on deaf ears, and today, the nation suddenly realized that there is more to approving institutions of higher learning than the stroke of pen of executive fiat. Currently, the nation has about 64 federal universities, 68 state universities, and 138 private universities, yet the applications for more are unending. The growing population and determination of enlightened parents to take their children and wards through tertiary education have heightened the pressure for more admissions amidst the recently revised cut-off marks, which do not speak well of the nation’s standard of education.
But as one of the greatest gifts of modern civilization, quality education does not come cheaply. Good education requires huge funding, well-trained manpower and expertise. Unfortunately, the crop of leaders that emerged after the downfall of the First Republic and their successors lacked the foresight and political will to do commensurate investment in education, and that is at the root of the nation’s crisis of arrested development. Years after independence, the country had highly-sought-after expatriates as lecturers in the first-generation universities but shortly, they left in droves because of pauperization of academia and academics by government. Except one or two top-tier private universities, the country can hardly attract and or retain high-flying academics and professors from educationally-advanced countries. Nigerian professors arguably receive the lowest paychecks in the world, but conversely our federal legislators, according to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, are the highest patronized in the world. It is not surprising that 239 lecturers who earned first-class degrees had to quit teaching at the University of Lagos. In fact, brain drain in the academia remains a national emergency. Contrast it with Singapore under Lew Kuan Yew that attracted best brains in the academia and public service!
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Globally, Nigeria is at the bottom rung of ladder in research and development (R&D) funding. There are no incentives for scientific and technological research and inventions. Therefore, the politically-correct chief executive officers of these institutions resort to needless employment of bottom-heavy personnel that normally jerks up their overhead costs. Is this not a glaring example of consumption without production? Fair enough, it strengthens the logic that the frequent requests and bills for more tertiary schools is mainly to bolster economic activities around the location and attract political leverage to the facilitator, and not necessarily to advance access to good education.
The education sector in Nigeria is in dire straits. Respective reports from the Punch and BusinessDay indicate that the federal government underfunds teachers’ salaries by N290 billion in 2025, just as heads of tertiary institutions decry funding constraints and staffing gaps. Thus, the age-long fight for appropriate budgetary provisions and targeted funding to universities by ASUU and other stakeholders usually drew adrenaline of political leaders at both the national and subnational levels. The universities contribute to the crisis, too. Feelers of public procurements by Vice Chancellors and Governing Councils are largely sleazy. It therefore becomes imperative that Visitation Panels be set up to unearth how received funds were managed.
Undoubtedly, most of these new schools are opened without factoring in the availability of core competent staff and facilities. The grim harvest is the mass production of half-baked scholars to fill the gaps with compromised doctoral degrees and those in professorial rank with nothing to ‘profess’. Even the National Universities Commission with the responsibility of ensuring that facilities and right staffing are in place has been entangled by the Nigerian factor.
Instructively, little did many know that the privately-owned Harvard University in United States had been getting heavy funding from the US government until the recent threat of cut back by President Donald Trump. So, beyond the embargo which political considerations would lead to its relaxation in no distant time, the nation must rise with patriotism and deploy global best practices in terms of facilities, infrastructure, and funding, to rescue our education sector from mockery and churning out educated illiterates.
