Posted by By Tom Chiahemen on
President Olusegun Obasanjo has bemoaned the inability of the University of Abuja (UNIABUJA) to rise to its stature as a university in the nation's Federal Capital Territory.
President Olusegun Obasanjo has bemoaned the inability of the University of Abuja (UNIABUJA) to rise to its stature as a university in the nation's Federal Capital Territory.
Speaking at the 8th, 9th and 10th convocation ceremony of the university on Saturday, Obasanjo regretted that the growth of the institution's infrastructural development has been stunted.
Represented at the occasion by the Minister of Education, Mrs. Chinwe Nora Obaji, the president noted that in the area of academic development, University of Abuja had not risen well to the mark, as its recent ranking among the universities in its generation is not impressive.
He, therefore, charged the new council and management of the university to rise to the challenge of reversing the trend.
But a former vice chancellor of the University of Lagos, Professor Jelili Adebisi Omotola (SAN), strongly condemned the rating of the universities by the National Universities Commission (NUC).
Delivering the university's pre-condition lecture earlier on Friday, Omotola said the NUC should stop 'the fruitless exercise of rating universities, according to irrelevant criteria". Rather, he said the commission should concern itself with 'a rating that reflects the production of graduates in the area of manpower needs of the economy".
This way, he believed the NUC would assist in stemming the nation's woes of unemployment.
'The government should also assist by increasing funding based on the number of graduates in the area of needs (while) the NUC should direct its energies at finding succour for the impoverished system," he advocated.
Omotola, who spoke on 'Privatisation and sustainability of the public universities in Nigeria: Prospects and challenges", also welcomed the calls for the scrapping of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) as one of the organs of the Nigerian university system, saying it had overbearing impact in the way it performed its functions of unified and coordinated admission into universities.