We don’t need new varsities – Reps
By John Ameh, Abuja
Thursday, 24 Feb 2011
 


The House of Representatives Committee on Education on Wednesday that it could not rationalise how the Federal Government arrived at the decision to create nine new universities when it could not fund the existing 27 adequately.

The Committee on Education, which also observed that the government cut the education budget on capital projects for this year from N75bn budgeted in 2010 to N34.8bn, also noted that in spite of the ‘obvious poor funding of the sector’, government had proposed additional universities.

The committee made the observations when the Minister of Education, Prof. Ruqayyatu Rufa’l, appeared before it to defend the ministry’s 2011 budget proposals. The committee’s Chairman, Mr. Farouk Lawan, said that the N75bn budgeted for capital projects in 2010 was ‘grossly inadequate’.

He stated, “It is therefore, a thing of surprise that this year, they cut the money down to N34.8bn. The Executive is taking us back; what we have is a dismal allocation.” Lawan cited the case of the 27 federal universities, which were allocated only N10.4bn for capital projects this year.

He added, “This means that none of the universities will get up to N500m as capital allocation. Look at the colleges of education; they got barely N2.5bn for capital projects. If we are truly committed to producing quality teachers, we must fund the system adequately.

“The situation is not different with the federal polytechnics. All of them were given only N2bn capital allocation to share. This shows that we are not serious.”

However, while the capital allocation was slashed, the overhead cost of the main ministry shot up in 2011. From N736.5m in 2010, the overhead cost rose to N994.5bn in 2011, though it was still lower than the N1.55bn budgeted in 2008.

The minister defended the increase, saying that it was to address the shortfalls in 2009 and 2010. She said the drop in overhead cost between 2009 and 2010, affected the ministhttp://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art20110224362050ry’s capacity to service its capital projects.

I[b] agree with him. How do you cut the budget for Education then claim you are establishing 6 new universities.
How are they going to be built?
How are they going to be maintained?
How are the staff going to be paid seeing that it is a running battle with ASUU to pay the existing lecturers, especially now that the budget has been reduced?
Question question questions?
[/b]

Sensible questions.

We really dont know how to do things in our country

And people still want to vote PDP? This is an opportuinity to send a strong message to corrupt leaders that we dont want them anymore . Lets change things come april 2011.