Edo State Governor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, has called on the Federal Government to review the university education policy with a view to subsidising tuition fees for indigent students to have unfettered access to and encouraged to acquire qualitative university education.
The governor, who spoke at the maiden matriculation ceremony for the pioneer students admitted into the Edo State University, Iyamho, said the rich should be made to pay for quality university education for their children, while the government should subsidise the education of children of the poor.
In his words: “Nigeria has to engage in a serious national conversation on the appropriate educational policy with particular reference to higher education. Now, this conversation is taking place in an informal way. The system seems to have collapsed and the governments at all levels simply do not have the capacity to provide the level of funding which universities required to produce first class graduates.
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“Right now, Nigeria is running a system which is highly deceptive and is not sustainable, a system that I will like to describe as a “generalised system of suffering, a system that subsidises the children of the rich just as it subsidises the children of the poor.”
“For God’s sake, my dear friend who works in an oil sector, why should his son or his daughter go to the university and enjoy subsidy when they can afford to pay $20,000 or $30,000 on his son in Canada or in the United Kingdom or in the United States? But, if they are in Nigerian universities, they pay N40,000 or N50,000, and we know that is not sustainable.”
Oshiomhole wondered why the people are finding individual solutions to a matter that requires a national policy, adding that some university lecturers send their children and wards to foreign universities for quality education, and some Nigerian doctors also go to India for medical treatment.
The 91 pioneer students of the institution that took the matriculation oath at the ceremony promised management of the university to be of good ambassadors of the institution both in learning and character.
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