FRIDAY March 28, 2025 |
By thenewsdesk.ng
The Minister of Education Dr Maruf Alausa say the Federal Government would in 2025 commence total rehabilitation of facilities in public universities to make them meet desired standards.
The Minister spoke Thursday shortly after commissioning a new structure built for the Department of Agricultural Extension and Communication at the Joseph Sarwua Tarka University Makurdi, JoSTUM, by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETfund year 2024 annual intervention as part of activities marking the 26th to 31st Combined Convocation Ceremonies of the institution.
Represented by the Director of University Education in the Ministry, Mrs. Rakiya Gambo Ilyasu, he commended the noticeable transformation at JoSTUM and urged others to emulate what the Vice Chancellor and his management team were doing in the institution.
He said, “I am quite impressed, the projects I am seeing in the university are quite impressive and I have used that to judge the management and that is to say that the management is doing very well because it is not all managements that can bring up these types of structures within a short time.
“I am told this is a 2024 TETFund intervention. Which means that in less than 13 months this was done. I think we should give a big applause to the management led by Prof. Isaac Itodo. They are doing their best and we are happy with what we are seeing. If all goes well like this, in the next 10 to 15 years, our universities would be transformed into what we will all be proud of.
“I recall I was here during the first Needs Assessment, when we came to assess what the institution needs and I cannot say what we saw. With this there is upgrade.
“I want to agree with the Executive Secretary of TETFund, the 2025 intervention would also be deployed to improve and rehabilitate all the school structures especially the hostels and the toilets because sanitation is one of the best things we can give to students. When the environment is clean and neat every other thing is secondary. Hopefully the government has accepted that we are going to rehabilitate all that, and I believe that the management would do the needful to ensure that it is done.”
Earlier, the Executive Secretary of TETFund, Mr. Sonny Echono who commissioned a new structure built for the Department of Agricultural and Biosystem Engineering under TETFund year 2023 annual intervention, disclosed that President Bola Tinubu had issued a directive that Nigerian universities should be prepared to become self reliant.
He said all hands were already on deck to ensure that the directive was fully implemented hence the ongoing commissioning of projects and ongoing construction of others.
He said: “This is a direct and personal initiative of President Bola Tinubu. When he met with us he specifically gave that mandate that we should begin to prepare our universities to become self reliant.
“That they should explore other avenues of generating revenue other than depending solely on government budgets and allocations. And one of the examples he gave us was that many universities have large parcels of land, and JoSTUM is a very good example of such. He said the land can be used for commercial agriculture that will service not only their students but the community and can also help them earn some revenue from it which would be helpful to cushion the huge costs that they incur even in maintaining their facilities.
“So in this year’s intervention, we made approval for about 10 universities and N10billion was provided and we will be picking 10 different universities. So having seen what I saw here and this being a university of Agriculture, I believe that JoSTUM will be one of them.”
Also Vice Chancellor of JoSTUM, Prof. Isaac Itodo who commended the Federal Government and TETFund for the infrastructural development in the university assured that the management of the institution had already keyed into the vision of the President Tinubu-led administration.
He said: “The rate of develolment in the institution lies squarely on the management of the University. So while you are bifurcating and unbundling programmes you need commensurate infrastructure because the standard is that every programme should occupy a commodious building and that is what we have started doing. You see this whole building belongs to just one program, the one that was commissioned in Engineering belongs to one program in engineering and that is the way to go.
“If you have 74 programs, you need 74 such structures. So we will continue to challenge successive managements. If in five years we have five different programs and in 10 years, you have 10 programs, additional to the existing ones, so you calculate that, if you have 74 programs, in 10 to 15 years you would be infrastructurally satisfied.”
The Vice Chancellor who also assured that TETFund intervention in the institution would be judiciously applied disclosed that efforts were on to address the manpower needs of the institution.
