Nigerian Universities Lack Sound Management Teams - Onabanjo

UNLESS vice chancellors and other key officials of Nigerian universities update their management skills, university system in the country will continue to be in the woods.

This was the opinion of the Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council of the Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Ago-Iwoye, Chief (Dr.) Alex Onabanjo, at a lecture organised by the Correspondents Chapel of the Oyo State council of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), in Ibadan, Oyo State, on Monday.

Speaking on the topic, Taking Public Universities to the Next Level: The Managerial Challenge, Chief Onabanjo observed that funding, falling standards, admission racketeering, cultism, inadequate staff strength, autonomy, general poor working conditions and mismanagement of resources were problems millitating against the university system.

He identified lack of managerial acumen on the part of those running public universities as a reason things might never work in the system.

Citing the rising profile of private universities in the country as an example, the renowned industrialist said “to a very large extent, the country’s private universities, which are currently more than 50 in number, are not, manifestly, faced with this problem, because they know that if they do not pay their bills, they would simply be forced to close shop.”

He said this made the proprietors to search for people with proven managerial skills who were not only open to constant innovations, but also constantly exposed to current managerial trends via linkages with local and international policy and business institutions.

“In other words, they look for people who can sell on the local and international markets,” he said.

He regretted that public universities appeared to be managed largely by academics and non-teaching staff with little management capacity, and had retained a primordial civil service mentality instead of constantly evolving strategies for survival.

He added that unlike in the United Kingdom and other developed countries, the manner university vice chancellors, especially in the states, emerged in Nigeria was based on politics, rather than on merit.

“Are Nigeria’s public universities facing a managerial challenge? This question should perhaps be seen not in the context of the problems confronting these institutions, especially the state universities, but in how, at management level, they have responded to these problems.

“It is my candid submission here that a whole lot of Nigeria’s public universities lack purposeful, vision-driven, cost-informed leadership and have, thus, neither earned the respect of critical observers of the system nor justified the confidence reposed in them by the discerning public,” he said.






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