Striking university lecturers and other stakeholders in education sector were told a bitter truth yesterday: Federal government does not have the financial ability to plug funding shortfall in Nigerian universities.

President Muhammadu Buhari, who made the revelation at the convocation of the University of Ibadan which coincided with the institution’s 70th anniversary, said the federal government will therefore raise funds from the capital market to fund universities.

Buhari, who was represented by the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, acknowledged that university education was really being under-funded, and that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has a point for their ongoing strike, however, pleaded that the institutions should leverage on alumni and partnership with the private sector to provide the needed succour.

Osinbajo revealed that some of the options that the federal government was working on “are the details of education funding for the public universities, which will involve raising funds from the capital market to give a push to the infrastructure in our universities. The ongoing talks with the ASUU as you know are follow-up of the chequered history of negotiations concluded with the government in 2013.”

He added: “There is no question that ASUU has a point. However, we must seek to resolve amicably and with minimum disruption to the academic calendar. The issue really is that there is no doubt whatsoever that education is under-funded and we must fund it even with the best. But even with the best effort at attending to funding education from the budget, it is completely impossible to do so.

“None of the universities, especially in the free world, is fully or even substantially funded by the government. The task of fund-raising is precisely what the universities are established to do; to solve problems and to create solutions that uplift the society. We can creatively address the issue looking at other solutions around the world. One of the solutions that we must explore is alumni network. There is perhaps no university in Nigeria that has the kind of alumni network today that the University of Ibadan has.”

•Excerpted from Nation report

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