Demands University Act Reform as Lokoja varsity courts investors

Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has said that in view of the multi-faceted challenges public universities are faced with, it is imperative for them to embrace new models of governance and funding.

He also called for a fundamental review of the legal framework governing Nigerian universities, particularly the amendment of University Establishment Acts to grant institutions greater operational and academic autonomy.

Olaopa gave this charge in Abuja yesterday during the Federal University of Lokoja & Research Enterprise System’s conference themed “University Governance and the Corporate World: Towards an All-of-People Approach to Financing University Education in Nigeria.”

However, the Vice-Chancellor of the Federal University Lokoja (FUL), Prof. Solomon Ibileye, unveiled a range of investment opportunities in the institution, including student hostels, staff housing, technology, healthcare, among others.

According to Olaopa in his address as chairman of the occasion, university education governance in Nigeria stands at a critical juncture, as it continues to be constrained by systemic and structural bottlenecks, chief of which is the funding challenge.

He said that this lingering challenge has, in turn, distorted and complicated the required reform that traditional universities’ governance structure needs as it struggles to reconcile the conflicting associated reform imperatives of academic and administrative autonomy, operational viability, and industry relevance.

Olaopa noted that budget to education remains well below UNESCO-acclaimed benchmark of 15-20 per cent of public expenditure, even as Nigeria’s NPE itself targets 26 per cent.

“Nigerian universities’ severe funding challenge reflects profoundly in a research funding level accounting for less than 0.3 per cent of the yearly GDP; a level that is substantially lower than the African average (0.45 per cent) and global benchmark (1.7 per cent),” he said.

Olaopa, therefore, called for a collaborative strategy of transforming the institution from a collection of isolated departments competing for resources into an integrated system where budget decisions directly fund strategic goals.

He said that this would then mean that no new academic programme, building, or hiring initiative should be approved unless it directly aligns with a specific KPI in the university’s strategic plan.

Besides, he urged universities in Nigeria to transcend the traditional shared governance system where the Council and Senate carry out oversight on academic standards and institutional fiduciary.

Olaopa explained the “all-of-people partnership model” as what puts governance in the hands of the stakeholders (those beyond internal university community constituents and government-appointed representatives) and those that the university serves; those whom its decisions directly affect, namely, industry partners, community representatives, alumni, trade union leaders, among others.

He, however, proposed a community-backed, equity-rooted endowment fund that would entail restructuring the traditional endowment into a participatory, community-owned asset fund, into which alumni, local enterprise networks, and other CSOs contribute capital, adding that achieving the proposed governance and funding models would require the collaboration of the National Assembly, Federal Ministry of Education, and the National Universities Commission (NUC) to amend the existing university establishment Acts to grant full operational and academic autonomy to universities.