By Dickson Omolola
Former Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Chief Osita Chidoka,
in this interview, laments the situation of tertiary institutions in Nigeria, saying
they lack transparency.
The Chancellor of the Athena Centre for Policy and Leadership also said members of the National Assembly are denying their constituents quality representation. Excerpts:
Recently, the Athena Centre produced a report which exposed Nigerian universities as not only badly run, but also as some of the least transparent educational institutions in the world. Can you tell us more about it?
Nigerian institutions are a very big embarrassment to the country. These are institutions that are going to breed the future leaders of Nigeria. Today, they are the bastion of opacity and lack of transparency. All over the world, we did a survey and just said, how much does the universities get? I am one of those who feel that our universities are poorly funded. And I was asking how much they really get and spend. To our chagrin, that information was not available, not on their website, not on surveys we sent out to the universities to find out.
Then we decided to check out other African countries. From Kenya to Egypt to South Africa, all the universities had the information on their website. We knew how much they internally generated. We knew how much they got from grants. We knew how much they got from research funding. And we knew how much they got from government funding. All the universities got the majority of their recurrent funding from school fees. And then, of course, grants and research grants and other forms of income from alumni and co. But what we find interesting in Nigeria is that we are not able to attract funding to our universities. We are able to attract donations from people who come for doctorate degrees. And even that, there is no accounting for it. How much does it cost to train a graduate in Nigeria? How much do the universities get from the Federal Government or state governments? And how much do they get from internally generated revenue? That information is a black hole. Nobody knows. We do not know with clarity what is costing us. If you look at the whole amount of money the federal government budgets for education and for higher education, you would then be shocked at that level of public appropriation, some universities get as much as N35 billion, N40 billion from federal allocation yearly. Yet, there is no record of how that money is spent.
For the visitation panel that visits the universities, we can only see the reports from the Ministry of Education. We do not see it on the websites of the university. Compared to foreign universities, we see the strategic vision. We see the plan. We see their hostel accommodation, how much they want to bring in private operators and how much students pay for it. All that information creates the transparency that brings in more funding to the university. In Nigeria, the reverse is the case. I told former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Professor Attahiru Jega,
yesterday, that when you brought in professors to become returning officers, we all shouted hurray. If I knew what I know today, that the universities themselves are not transparent, I would have known that the professors were going to be worse. Because our electoral system, like I said many times before, is messed up. And partly because the university professors who go as returning officers have no history of transparency. So when we bring them to public office, they come to public office the same way they run the universities. We are in a back cycle.
In your assessment, is this part of a systemic breakdown across Nigeria, which affects virtually every part of this country?
Absolutely. These are the areas that call for a national state of emergency. There are areas in Nigeria crying for national emergency. One of them is education. One of them is transparency. Government should let us know how many government agencies are still withdrawing cash from the banks. We should be able to have that information because the GIFMIS, the system put in place for financial expenditure, the TSA and co, should allow us to see how many federal institutions are still withdrawing cash and not paying third parties using government platforms. We need to see that. We need to declare an emergency, urgent emergency, on what I call the lack of transparency, the opaque nature of our government transactions. I do not see how we can have renewed hope in an atmosphere of deepening systemic breakdown of basic transparency. We are going to have more renewed hopelessness if we continue like this.
Do you think the National Assembly is, as part of that systemic breakdown, failing in its institutional responsibility to represent the Nigerian people?
I am totally disappointed in the National Assembly. I am disappointed because the president of the Senate is a former governor like the president of Nigeria. He has been a minister. He has been a senator, a minority leader at some point. And the simple adherence to the rules of the National Assembly, the Speaker of the House of Reps said he would do voice votes. He would use the register of attendance. No, that is not the purpose of representative democracy.
The purpose is that I, Osita Chidoka, from Idemili North and South, want to know where my House of Rep member voted on important national issues. I want to know where my senator from Anambra Central voted on important national issues. So you deprive me of quality information or representation when you ask a mass of heads to shout yay and nay. That in itself devalues the National Assembly. If any institution has devalued itself in this democracy, it is actually the National Assembly, because they have refused to see that in respecting their rules.
If we have a Senate that has told the president we must take our votes one by one. So even if you need $1 million to buy each senator, better go find it. If you need to promise them projects for their communities, if you need to offer them pork and barrel for them to vote, do it, because we are going to count them one by one.
That is our rule. It is a mark of self-respect. It is a mark of self-dignity. So when I see the senators behave like small boys, shouting yay and nay on an important issue of whether the president can suspend democratic rule in any part of Nigeria, I feel that the National Assembly has devalued itself, not the Nigerian people. I don’t think he has done anything to the Nigerian people, who don’t have much trust in them, but their respect could have been renewed. And the president’s power would have been ascertained if they had voted, and they voted in support of the president. The president would have reasserted himself as a leader in a very legitimate way. Nigerians would have come to say, this president knows how to get things done.
So to do it in contravention of their own rules takes away the legitimacy…
It delegitimizes the process, delegitimizes the president, because he is now seen as a wheeler-dealer who just does anything to get to an end. But if he had said I took this decision in careful consideration of what I believe to be the way out of this lockdown, and the National Assembly counted their votes and to test, voted for him, he would have asserted himself as an authentic Nigerian leader.
The post How universities, National Assembly are embarrassing Nigeria – Osita Chidoka appeared first on Vanguard News.
