Presidential candidate of the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria (ACPN) Oby Ezekwesili has said she would put an end to frequent shutdown of tertiary institutions in the country if elected into office.
Mrs Ezekwesili said on Tuesday in a press statement that she would convert budgetary allocations to universities to grants.
This according to her would “reposition Nigeria’s universities to make them rank among their contemporaries in the world.”
Members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) are currently on strike and have since suspended activities on campus.
“Granting autonomy to federal universities will enable institutional differentiations through a competitive race to the top of their performance in how they attract the best students and top faculty.
“The Federal Government’s current budgetary funding for such universities will be converted to annual grants that are indexed to accountability, performance, results. The overriding objective will be for our public universities to deliver qualitative tertiary education at cost-effective tuition for their students,” Ezekwesili said.
She added that her focus for tertiary institutions would be to transform 20 of them into world-class institutions within seven years.
“One of the signature programmes of our administration would be #TwentyTo-eRanking. This initiative will focus on the transformation of 20 Nigerian universities and to raise them up to the league of world-class institutions within a seven-year period.
“Our administration will end the current centralised control of universities by the Federal Government (or state governments over their own funded universities), which over the decades stifled their growth and performance,” she said.
