The bulk of budgetary allocation for education sector will be spent on payment of salaries and other entitlements to 10,500 professors in the country, the Minister of State for Education, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba has said.
Nwajiuba who said this in an interview with The Punch, slammed the Academic Staff Union of Universities and further told them that no sector in the country was getting enough money. He accused the union of using strikes to drive public school students abroad and to private universities.
Nwajiuba said “Actually, there have been a lot of people asking me as minister what I think is the real intention of ASUU. If you look at it critically, what ASUU is achieving by this (strike) is driving students to private universities and out of the country.
“There is nothing that is now an issue. Even if you say universities are not well run, it is ASUU members that run them. If you say there is no enough money given to education, there is no enough money given to anything in Nigeria.
“The bulk of the money that is in education is paid to these professors. There are 71,000 lecturers in Nigeria alone, with 10,500 of them as professors. There are some countries that don’t have up to 2,000 (professors).”
“So, it is not enough to simply say we should bring more money; from where? The 2020 budget, under-performed as low as 62 per cent. We didn’t even collect revenue, there were no companies functioning to pay taxes,” he posited.
