One startling revelation from the House of Representatives’ ongoing engagement with tertiary institutions ahead of the debate on the 2025 appropriation bill is that Federal Polytechnic Ugep in Cross River State plans to spend over N600 million on salaries and overhead costs but has only 142 students.
The Polytechnic’s Rector, Edward Okey, told the House Committee on Polytechnics and other higher technical education that the institution spent its N2 billion take-off grant to renovate the abandoned, dilapidated structures of Ugep Community Secondary School, which it used as its temporary campus.
It is amazing that four years after its establishment in 2021, the Polytechnic, which has 154 academic and non-academic staff, could only boast 142 students. In one year, the polytechnic spent N38 million on local travel.
Specifically, the Rector said the school spent more than one year struggling to get a take-off site as it was to start at a temporary site in the state Polytechnic- the Institute of Technology and Management (ITM)- but could not get the state Polytechnic’s consent.
“After going around the village, we ended up with dilapidated buildings of a secondary school called Ugep Community Secondary School. The principal of that school told us that those buildings had been abandoned for 25 years.
“So, we have to renovate those buildings. It took us over a year to renovate those buildings before we could start. With our 2022 take-up, we identified a permanent site. We started different projects, about ten projects on the permanent site,” the Rector noted.
He also claimed that getting students was challenging because of some stigma that Ugep community carries.
We are disturbed that everything about the Polytechnic in Ugep, beginning with its challenges of securing a take-off site, shows a lack of proper planning.
The Federal Polytechnic Ugep wastes such a large amount of funds when the government struggles with dwindling revenue, further buttressing the widely held view that the nation has a spending, not revenue, problem.
Fundamentally, the alarmingly poor enrolment makes it incumbent to ask about the necessity of the institution. To a large extent, this suggests that there was no need for the Ugep Polytechnic in the first place.
Whether private or public, institutions are established and sited in areas where they will contribute to advancing education through sound teaching and research. Unfortunately, politics seems to be the central consideration for establishing publicly funded institutions in Nigeria.
Nigeria has about 179 polytechnics, of which 54, including the one in Ugep, are owned by the federal government, while states own 41 and private individuals own 84. Despite this vast number, polytechnics have witnessed a dramatic drop in enrolment due to students’ and parents’ preference for university education.
Well aware of this fact, instead of channelling the limited resources to strengthen infrastructures in the already existing tertiary institutions, especially universities, which have continued to witness a massive rise in enrolment, the government is busy dissipating thin resources in establishing more polytechnics, as it did in Ugep.
Curiously, in our opinion, this waste of funds on Ugep comes when Nigerians are inundated with government borrowings, and public polytechnics across the country shut down because of industrial action by the academic staff union.
We have repeatedly argued that the government should strengthen the infrastructure of existing institutions instead of establishing new ones. Perhaps if the government had listened to such words of caution, the current strike by the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP), which has grounded academic activities in state and federal polytechnics, would have been averted.
The union is on strike over the government’s failure to address the violation of the Federal Polytechnics Act, non-review of the contentious and suspended document entitled Schemes of Service for Polytechnics and Conditions of Service, non-release of the NEEDS Assessment intervention funds for 2023, usurpation of Academic Board function by NBTE on the admission of HND candidates, and non-capturing of the Peculiar Academic Allowance of members for sustained payment in the planned post-IPPIS era, among others.
The government must revisit the state of Federal Polytechnic Ugep and, indeed, other unviable institutions and be bold enough to either scrap them or convert them into campuses of more viable ones.
The embarrassing situation in Ugep also calls to question the quality of administrators saddled with the responsibility of managing tertiary institutions in the country. The challenge is that their appointments are often politically influenced with the understanding that funds disbursed by the authorities are largesse to be shared based on patronage for the redemption of political I owe you. Otherwise, the entire management team of that institution should be answering questions at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
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