“Stop Turning Establishment Of Varsities Into Constituency Projects, Fund Existing Ones,” ASUU Tells FG, States

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has once again warned the federal and state governments to stop establishing new public universities in the country, saying that there is no need to do so now.

Professor Emmanuel Osodeke, the chairman of the trade union, made this assertion in an online interview with the Tribune.

He said that neither the federal nor state governments are sincere about the need to establish more public universities.

According to him, almost all existing public universities in the country lack funds, and this situation has led to frequent frictions between trade unions and the government.

Citing an example, he said that all public universities now mainly rely on funds from the Higher Education Trust Fund (TETFund) to fund their activities because the government has abandoned such a role for the agency.

He pointed out that the nine federal universities established in 2013 are still crawling eight years later because, according to him, they are as underfunded as the previous universities, and the federal and state governments are creating more.

The leader of ASUU insists that the country’s political leaders have no real interest in establishing universities, except for using it to gain cheap political points among voters to elect them again.

He said, “Many of them think only about what they will gain personally and for their families without minding what could become of the generality of people by that action let alone the country as a whole.”