LASU VC, Olanrewaju Fagbohun Calls For Proper Funding of Education

The Vice Chancellor, Lagos State University, Professor Olanrewaju Fagbohun, has called for improved funding for the education sector and e- infrastructure if the country must meet up with the global standard.
Fagbohun made the call while delivering the main Lecture for the celebration of the 55th Birthday of the Chairman, Lagos Stats House of Assembly Committee on Education, Hon. Olanrewaju Ogunyemi in Lagos.
The scholar said that improved funding that would lead to e-infrastructure as well as better training and renumeration for teachers remained imperative to move the nation forward.
Speaking on the the theme “Attaining Global Education Quality Standards: Prospects and Challenges of Achieving United Nations Funding Target in Nigeria”, Fagbohun said that nations of the world had left Nigeria behind.
“When we look at education in Nigeria, we are seriously challenged.
“We don’t see faculty members coming from Ghana, Kenya and other countries into Nigeria. But we see Nigerian faculty members going into other countries.
“We don’t see students from these other countries coming to Nigeria. But we see Nigerian students going into these other countries.
“In Ghana alone we have 13,000 Nigerian students, over 4000 in Malaysia; it means there is something we are not doing right that we need to correct.
“There is a need to fund education in a much deeper way. One of the things I did in the course of my survey was to look at 800 universities globally ranked.
“What is it that they have that we don’t have and I found out that e-infrastructure was common to all of them. It is important to take ICT very seriously.
“We need to expose our children to ICT to give them access to variety of information.
“Inclusive and quality education is a fundamental human rights, it is not a privilege. It is a right in the Sustainable Development Goals,” he said.
According to him, the 21st century knowledge is all about teaching less and learning and that is why e-infrastructure is expected in our universities.
Fagbohun decried the inability of Nigerian Universities to be among the leading 1000 Universities in the world.
He said that the nation’s Universities failed abysmally to attract foreign faculty members and international students due to fallen standard.
Explaining the global standard of education, the Vice-Chancellor reiterated the importance of quality education and important perspectives in quality education worldwide.
The contemporary issues on quality of education, he said, included the expansion of education system, stagnation/declining enrollment, education wastages, quality of educational services, amongst others.
He advocated quality facilities, quality content, quality learners and learning environment and quality education.
The vice chancellor commended the state government for its commitment to education which had led to huge investment in Education Infrastructure.
Fagbohun, who stressed that the state needed continuous realignment of its strategy, called on the government to embark on aggressive e-infrastructure for all its tertiary institutions for them to compete globally.
He urged the wealthy individuals to support education as endowment funds to raise the nation’s education standards.
He revealed that over 40 000 students applied for admission to LASU but that the institution had the space for only 3,500, stressing that inadequate facility prevents institutions from admitting many qualified students.
In his comments, the celebrant, Hon. Ogunyemi, representing Ojo Constituency II in the Assembly, said that the country could not continue to do the same thing the same way and expect different results.
“The world is moving and education is dynamic. World over now, there is so much emphasis on less of theoretical learning and more of self learning.
“There is a paradigm shift now from less of teachers teaching and more of the learner learning and discovering by themselves and e-learning is the key now globally. Our children must be internet savvy.
E-learning is the way and we should deemphasize chalk board teaching and we are trying to introduce Ibile Tablet in Lagos.
“Our government must be ready to invest on this is the gap between us and the developed world. We are not there.
“We need to do more to move our education from pedestrian level to the height of e-learning and the government must do a lot of investment in that direction,” he said.
The programme was witnessed by the Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Rt. Hon. Mudashiru Obasa, as Chairman, while the Governor of the State of Osun, Raufu Aregbesola was the Keynote Speaker.