About 57 per cent of the 36,000 lecturers in
61 public universities in Nigeria which is 20,520 have no PhDs and it is
crippling the quality of manpower in the system, Executive Secretary of
the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Professor Mahmmod Yakubu,
has said.
Yakubu, who spoke in Abuja yesterday at a meeting for heads of
tertiary institutions, said after conducting the needs assessment of
Nigerian universities, indi-cated a disproportionate number of students
registered for undergraduate studies.
He said 85 per cent of students were enrolled for undergraduate
studies, 5 per cent sub-degree, 5 per cent for postgraduate for diploma,
3 per cent for postgraduate masters and only 2 per cent PhD candidates.
The Federal Government had recently appealed to first generation
universities to concentrate more on postgraduate studies to fill the
dearth of quality manpower.
The University of Ilorin which now has a 60:40 per cent ratio in
favour of postgraduate studies and the University of Ibadan are the only
universities in compliance.
In July when the National Universities Commission (NUC) presented the
benchmark minimum academic standards for Postgraduate Programmes,
Education Minister Professor Ruqayyatu Rufai directed the commission to
seek funding from TETfund to conduct a staff and student audit of all
public universities in Nigeria to verify the number of shortfall of
lecturers in the system.
The last verification exercise conducted by NUC was in 2007 where it
was revealed that about 61 per cent of the 25,000 lecturers were
Lecturer 1 and below with little capacity for research.
That survey also revealed that tertiary institutions have a shortfall
of 61,738 academic staff especially in the areas of science and
technology.
