Lift employment embargo on tertiary institutions

Apprehension has continued to heighten among lecturers, students as well as heads of institutions about the critical challenge of manpower that has long been confronting the country’s federal tertiary institutions; a problem at which government has consistently turned a blind eye and deaf ears. As a result, more academic programmes continue to fail accreditation at every round of the exercise mainly for reasons of gross inadequacy in the staff-student ratio.

It would be recalled that in January 2022, the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) raised an alarm over the shortage of academic staff that was gradually grounding the country’s federal polytechnics. The situation, if not worse, in most federal universities in Nigeria, is not different from what still obtains today in the federal polytechnics.

Adequate staffing, which substantially determines an academic programme’s success or failure in an accreditation exercise is a fundamental requirement of the National Universities Commission (NUC) and the NBTE for a programme to respectively earn full accreditation in universities and polytechnics.

When an academic programme fulfills most of the basic requirements but remains deficient in limited areas, it is granted interim accreditation with a validity period of two years only. Where the same programme, after two years, fails to make up for all the inadequacies that earned it an interim status, it would be denied accreditation. When a programme is denied accreditation, it loses the right to admit students into the academic programme, which is one of the primary purposes for which a programme functions in an institution.

For more than a decade, many academic programmes in Nigeria’s federal universities and polytechnics have either lost accreditation (de-accredited) or have interim status.

The human resource challenges facing federal universities and polytechnics is occasioned chiefly by the government’s embargo on the employment of staff. This is even as some lecturers and non-academic staff members have retired from service, died, or transferred their service to private and state universities or other sectors that offer better wages.

The last time any recruitment of academic staff on tenure appointment was done in most federal universities, for instance, was more than 15 years ago. These long years of embargo placed on employment in these tertiary institutions have several negative implications for higher education.

The vacuum created by the death, retirement or transfer of service by academic staff to other sectors has put the few lecturers left in most programmes under intense pressure. The situation is so bad that some programmes are left with only three lecturers to teach the entire courses across all levels. Also, this has its attendant consequences on the quality of teaching, and by extension, the products of these under-staffed institutions. The few lecturers left in various programmes have also earned promotions to higher ranks; making such programmes to become top-heavy and bottom-light in terms of staff strength. Under this circumstance, academic mentoring would no longer be a factor to reckon with.

Due to a shortage of non-academic personnel, secretaries are posted to serve more than one department in a faculty or college. The efforts by some institutions at recruiting staff on a part-time basis to temporarily fill the manpower vacuum eventually become a burden on their finances due to a lack of adequate budgetary provisions. Even where institutions have the capacity to cope with such, lecturers on part-time appointments are not the most reliable especially in examination duties.

Beyond the under-development of existing academic programmes is a more prejudicial crisis. The employment embargo placed on tertiary institutions has continued to hamper the takeoff of many new academic programmes in various federal universities and polytechnics, including Railway Engineering, Gas Engineering and Mechatronics Engineering, all of which were conceived to fast track the country’s path to development in addition to helping it catch up with the 21st century global trends in knowledge acquisition, application and dissemination.

One irony in this institutional manpower crisis is government’s discriminatory response of granting approval (sometimes on annual basis) to some select MDAs including the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, the Federal Inland Revenue Service, the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation, and other ‘juicy’ agencies while the staff needs of universities and polytechnics are left to suffer the consequences of employment embargo.

It’s a further mockery of the system that a country in dire need of strategic manpower would place long years of employment embargo on polytechnics and universities that produce trained and skilled human resource for the critical sectors of its national economy, yet continues to grant licenses for more tertiary institutions. 

Whenever tertiary institutions are granted waivers to recruit 40 or 50 staff, the directives for employment slots from agencies that granted the approval, including the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation, the Budget Office and the Federal Character Commission, further frustrate efforts of the vice-chancellors and rectors at tackling the human resource gap in their institutions. Where heads of these institutions refuse to oblige the requests, the oversight agencies would initiate needless strings to ensure that the recruitment process suffers setbacks.

The solution to the manpower crisis in universities and polytechnics is beyond the granting of inconsequential waivers. Daily Trust calls on the federal government to immediately lift the embargo on the employment of staff in its tertiary institutions so that the huge vacuum created by the employment embargo would be filled and the future of Nigeria’s higher education saved from further deterioration.