Why Niger established university of education – Commissioner

Over the years several fake certificates have been issued by a syndicate of certificate racketeers among the staff of College of Education, Minna, Niger State. What do you have to say on this?Screening has been conducted in all schools in Niger State and beyond and the certificates in question had been retrieved. If you interface […]

Over the years several fake certificates have been issued by a syndicate of certificate racketeers among the staff of College of Education, Minna, Niger State. What do you have to say on this?
Screening has been conducted in all schools in Niger State and beyond and the certificates in question had been retrieved. If you interface with the management of the college they will tell you the statistics because so many certificates that were not issued through the proper way had been retrieved. Now, sanity has been restored, recognition is being restored better than many Colleges of Education in the country, that I can assure you that.
What are the measures put in place to forestall the re-emergence of such syndicate in the college?
We suspended some staff; some were dismissed for their involvement in the racketeering. Also the students that were involved in the scandal were expelled. There were punishments and there were rewards that strengthened the process. Everyone is now on his toes; if you do things that are illegal definately you will not go unpunished. At same time the system has been built by the use of ICT, even admission and result processes are now scientifically done and checked at different angles.
How can you assure the employers of labour that academic quality has been restored in the college?
It can be recalled, when I came on board the first thing I did was to take admission racketeering headlong, where from different angles unqualified students were being admitted and this has been adequately addressed. Also in collaboration with the college, we addressed the issue of quality because the search light has been there. We are constantly cross-checking the happenings in the college. We have established quality assurance department in the ministry to check on daily basis of what is coming out from our tertiary institutions. That is why if you can look around, virtually all the tertiary institutions in Niger State have been transformed in term of structure, quality and deliverance. This is how the College of Education has been repositioned today. We must commend the leadership now, because they are very responsive to addressing these anomalies that were hitherto in the system. The system has been strengthened and is better now. The system is focused now; once you cannot control the intake then you cannot have quality assurance. The intake has been controlled and most of these cash and carry programmes have been flushed out which added to the issue of the quality. We now have teachers, more than 15 of them on PhD programmes; they are almost rounding up their programmes. Virtually all the staff went for training. That is why today we are comfortable with the way the college is addressing the issue of quality of education.
The plan to establish University of Education is viewed as misplacement of priority for the fact that the state has owned university in Lapai. What is your take on that?
Well, a lot of feasibility studies had been carried out. It is a popular decision, justifiable and long overdue. When you have looked at how we placed teachers training, starting even by scrapping the teachers’ colleges, it is the most unfair thing ever been done to education sector in this country because without the rudiments of education, without the foundation of teaching methodology there is no way impacting knowledge can rightfully take place. We need to go back to the basis and that is why in Niger State we have taken a step further to say that college of education is not enough because most of the products of such colleges in this country are not qualitative; if tested on one on one you will be disappointed. You could see the capability is not there so we need a specialized university of education to really further bake them to make them more qualified, more relevant to the need of today, more matured so that they can go back and impact knowledge with quality. That is what we are doing. We are expecting the NUC resource inspection team. We have gone further in making preparation to even take off in September this year. If you looked at the College of Education is already being running over seven degree courses in education in affiliation with Ahamdu Bello University (ABU), Zaria and Usman Danfodio University Sokoto (UDUS). So considering high demand, it tells you that there is need for establishing a university of education in Niger State. It will be good if we can create a university of education to fill this gap.
Funding has been a major impediment to all state owned universities. How can the two universities be taken care of by the Niger State government considering the meagre resource of the state?
As I have said earlier, we have already carried out a feasibility study, a Faculty of Education in Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University (IBBU), Lapai will move to the University of Education and in its place we are establishing a Faculty of Health Sciences. Field base in Suleja has already been given to IBBU, we will use that as a campus to establish Faculty of Health Sciences. We have made provision for over N300m for the take of the university which is coming up in September this year.
You have been accused by students’ union of siphoning their scholarship funds. What do you have to say on that?
What I did was to use the internal auditing mechanism where 8,300 ghost students have been discovered in the payroll of the board, therefore the list of the scholarship awardees was pruned from 23,000 to 14,700. We arrived at that through the use of Bio-Metrics Data which enabled us to delete some ghost beneficiaries that are reading same data including local government, course of study and university. This indicated that these are duplicated names. We were able to recover N125m after the verification exercise. That is where we are now and even the remittance of 10percent meant for the students’ union bodies has been very consistent now. At every payment 10 percent is taken and shared between the local branches and the national body. This is the era of e-banking, the records are available, and it is there for everybody to see. Most of these students are mischievous, particularly, the leadership, they wouldn’t want their followers to know that they are collecting this money. There is nothing hidden, we are running a transparent system but they (leaders of the union) want us to do it in the usual way but we said no because we made it very open, transparent and everybody can have a field. That is why it is hard for them to accept the reality and we cannot be deterred. We know people are instigating them because of politics to do what is not right. If I have connived with them, if I have accepted what they wanted I wouldn’t have make the saving of over N 125 million. Sincerely, we cannot allowe ourselves to be distracted and that is why I presented the whole report to the state executive council, everybody was amazed and we were commended for doing a wonderful job and there is no way for other people that are perpetrating evil to be happy about this development.