By FUNMILAYO ADEYEMI

The Executive Secretary, National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), Prof. Idris Bugaje, has disclosed that over 30,000 Nigerian Higher National Diploma (HND) holders have applied for its top-up programme.

Bugaje said this when fielding questions from the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on issues around its newly launched top-up programme for HND holders to acquire a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in their choice course.

He said that the board had no power to award degrees to students but able to help HND holders by facilitating the programmes with foreign universities while introducing credit mapping to aid learning.

“We have a software that does credit mapping, we have already fed our HND graduates with that software so it will now pick the curriculum of the foreign university compare them together to bring out what is the difference between the two.

“We are now in discussion with a number of these foreign universities from Malaysia, Russia, India but with time we hope we can populate about 15-20 universities. Though it’s a gradual process and this will offer more opportunities for students.

“So far we have gotten applicants for over 30,000. About two weeks ago, it was 15,000 and within this two weeks, it has doubled and I am very confident that in the next two weeks we may hit about 50,000 applicants.

“These are Nigerian HND holders yearning to have this dichotomy brought to an end by acquiring BSc and unfortunately there are PhD holders who has HND who are also coming back to do BSc.

“This is like a contradiction after a doctorate coming back to BSc and this is what we are trying to avoid by asking the fresh HND holders to go straight to do the top-up programme and get the BSc and be at par with anybody else in the progression,” he said.

He, therefore, said that HND holders would only be made to pay 10 per cent of the entire tuition fees to run the one-year top-up programme.

The executive secretary also allayed the fears of the university system as against losing their students saying the programme would only bring competition.

When asked about the preference of foreign universities over local universities, Bugaje said the local universities were full of prejudice against HND.

He, however, blamed this on the National Universities Commission (NUC) who had refused to key into the programme in spite of written letters to inform them about the programme.

“The best dialogue is with the NUC and the ministry of education. We have written letters and sent reminders and even crafted a curriculum and we sent it to the ministry but it is like it has not seen the light of the day.

“We realised they are looking down on the academic board of polytechnics, they said the academic board of polytechnics are not equivalent to universities senate.

“We have been in this since two years I came in as executive secretary of NBTE. I have given the new minister brief on this and I am very confident he is going to endorse what we are doing,” he said.

He called on the Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, to take a very strong position against the dichotomy while also hoping that the polytechnic Act would be revisited in no time to put an end to the dichotomy challenge.

He said the Act If reviewed would allow polytechnics to run bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees in technology for their products.

“The polytechnic system is a system parallel to the university, we are not feeders. The Colleges of Education (COE) feed the university system.

“This is because anytime the national policy on education changes and they make BSc education the minimum qualification for teaching in basic schools, the role of the NCE will be over even the commission overseeing the programme will seize to exist.

“The COE all feed into the NUC programmes to produce graduates. In the polytechnics, we are a complimentary system, we produce technology and technicians for industries basically.

“But there are components of our systems also that pursue academic career and those ambition should not be stopped so I hope the roadmap committee the minister has set up will come up with a final solution for this dichotomy against HND,” he added. (NAN)

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