The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa has appealed to lawmakers to stop proposing the establishment of more institutions in the country.
Speaking at the Ministerial Press Briefing in Abuja, Alausa said the President had about 200 bills for establishment of institutions which he deemed overwhelming as existing institutions are still battling with poor funding.
He said, “We must focus on our capacities. We need to stop this from happening. There’s so much pressure on the president. We have to at least be sensitive to it as well.
“They (lawmakers) are passing a lot of bills. Today I can tell you that there are almost 200 bills in the National Assembly. We can’t continue this. Even though we have a lot of them, the capacity for a university to admit is not there. What we need to do now is to rebuild the capacities so that we can offer more viable courses to our citizens.’’
Revealing how several institutions in the country still have less than 1000 undergraduates, the Minister said the current administration’s focus is on strengthening existing institutions.
“If you look at overall enrolment figures, private universities—despite making up just 1% of the system—account for only 7.5% of total undergraduate enrolment.
“The total number of undergraduates today is about 875,000, which is relatively low.
Recall the Ministry also recently banned the registration of new Polytechnics and monotechnics for the next one year.
