March 2, 2015 – The Deputy Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Hon. Musibau Kolawole Taiwo has described establishment of nine new private universities by Federal Executive Council (FEC) as sign of unseriousness.
He said that this was not about politics but that the number of universities in Nigeria and the number of graduates produce do not commensurate with the number of jobs that are available in the country.
“Also, we are not even doing it in such a way that it would help our well-being as a people. For instance, we have electricity problem in Nigeria. There is a particular profession that is needed to come up with the ingenuity that would solve that problem,” he said.
The Deputy Speaker said further that educational curriculum in other countries are used in advanced world to tackle problems.
“There was a time that some Americans came to Nigeria to whisk away our medical professionals. Go to America now, you will see that they are no more having shortfall of medical staff and most of the people that were whisked away are no longer gainfully employed,” he said.
Kolawole said that most of those that went to the United States of America cannot come home again because they are not rich.
He explained that the time Nigerian medical professionals were used as stop gap in the US and that Americans now use their educational arrangement to correct the imbalances in their society, which he said was what education was all about.
“Train your child for that child to be able to solve the problem that is confronting the family, and the national problem that is confronting the nation, not establishing universities for establishment sake.
“We should not just be establishing universities that would not match the standard of secondary schools, we cannot establish universities for establishment sake. We should use them to solve national problems, ” he stated.
He insisted that approvals should only be given to private persons that are ready to establish universities that can solve specific problems, adding that it is foolish to establish universities that would be teaching history or psychology alone.
