Professor of Business and Entrepreneurship at Ojaja University (formerly Crown-Hill University), Eiyenkorin, Kwara State, Muritala Awodun, has said that Public-Private Partnership (PPP) ownership arrangement will solve governance and funding issues of public universities in Nigeria.
According to him, 61 state and 51 federal universities are facing obvious resource constraints, a situation that can be salvaged permanently with the PPP model.
These 112 public universities, he stated, can be matched to the top 112 private enterprises in Nigeria for adoption in a PPP arrangement that will be a win-win situation, and all the problems bedevilling public universities will become a thing of the past.
Awodun, who is Director, Centre for Enterprise and Human Capital Development at Ojaja University, spoke while moderating the fourth breakout session of the third yearly conference of the Forum for Innovation in African Universities (FIAU), with the theme, ‘Strengthening Africa’s Higher Education in a Post-COVID-19 World’ in Abuja, at the weekend.
The fourth breakout session looked at ‘Strengthening Resource-Constrained African Universities Through Partnership’. To drive home his point, he cited the major funding needs of a typical university as infrastructure (capital expenditure), recurrent, teaching, research, capacity development, endowment and community development.
While the education tax has provided succour to the infrastructure problems, through TETFund, which he believes needs some overhaul to reduce wastages, he said the others are not as certain and remain challenging to the government that owns the institutions.
According to him, the enterprise model solution, therefore, is the adoption of each of these 112 universities by the top 112 private institutions, which he identified in his study, through a tax-related ownership/governance arrangement for a minimum of 10 years, to bring about the required turnaround and bring the universities to self-sufficiency.
Rolling out statistics from his study, he stated that he intentionally left out companies operating in the oil industry in his study of the top 120 companies operating in telecommunications, banking, food and beverages, building and construction, manufacturing and agriculture, analysing their income statements before arriving at his conclusion.
He cited MTN, with a Profit After Tax (PAT) of N359 billion in 2022 paying about N10 billion in Education Tax and about N145 billion as Company Income Tax. He opined that if allowed to adopt, for instance, the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) whose 2023 approved budget is N29.3 billion, the highest of the federal universities, the company will conveniently fund UNN with just about 20 per cent of its Income Tax directly used for this arrangement.
Adopting the university under the enterprise model solution, being proposed, should give the company a 51 per cent ownership and stake in the governance structure of the institution that will bring about the required turnaround.
Awodun posited that the successes recorded by the most successful private universities such as Covenant, Babcock, Afe Babalola, Redeemers and Igbinedion were not due to the availability of funds from the owners of these institutions alone, but more importantly of the visionary governance and management that prioritises performance measurement, efficiency, productivity, innovation and commitment, which, he said, are on the downward trail in Nigeria’s public universities.
“Therefore, the government, as owners of these public universities, could save itself from the quagmire of the present challenges by adopting this enterprise model to turn around the public universities and bring them to self-sufficiency under this model in a maximum of 10 years.
“The Federal Government under President Bola Tinubu should take the lead in this regard with the federal universities and watch the enviable results and relief that will come out of it for the universities and the government,” he said.
Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Education, Andrew Adejoh, declared the forum’s meeting open, while the acting Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission (NUC), Mr. Chris Maiyaki, and Director General, Industrial Training Fund (ITF), Joseph Ari, delivered keynotes at the summit that had vice chancellors of Nigerian universities and Directors of Centres for Entrepreneurship, in attendance.
