Between the Federal Ministry of Education and some states, we are hearing pronouncements on educational policies that give us citizens some concern especially parents and those who are seized with the question of the education of our children and grandchildren and about the educational trajectory of the country. The Federal Ministry of Education shocked the whole country, by issuing a decree, as if we were in a military regime, that children under 18 should not be allowed to take JAMB university entrance examination and those below certain age should not be allowed to take the Senior School examination. Also Lagos State suddenly announced it was converting the College of Medicine in its university into a University of Medicine. These two developments gave me worry and if some of us don’t speak out, these two authorities will think they are doing the right thing.

The federal minister of education who made one of these announcements is totally wrong. First of all, education is still on the concurrent constitutional list on which both the federal and the state governments have jurisdiction. I am waiting for any state government to challenge this federal announcement because it is wrong. No government should be able to tell parents whether their fast learning children should be arbitrarily restrained from entering a university because a minister says so, or should a minister be able to restrain a child from taking senior school leaving examination which is a prerequisite for sitting for JAMB examination. If this policy holds, parents would be forced to asking their children to take Ordinary and Advanced level examinations of external examination bodies in order to give their children opportunity to enter universities. In this way, the minister would have found a market for external examination bodies to the detriment of the local ones.

In places like Canada and the United States, children enter universities with different state qualifications not a unified homogenized qualification like in Nigeria. There are smart children who get first degrees in Harvard and Oxford universities in their teenage years because they are gifted children and it doesn’t seem as if our own regimes make allowance for such gifted children because everyone is brought down to the lowest pedestal of the average and dullest people in the country.

I pray that this action of the federal minister of education would be challenged in the courts for clarification and also in order to protect the interest of smart and precocious children who have no voice in what amounts to abridgment of their educational progress.

The idea of University of Medicine began in Ondo State where a so-called university of medicine domiciled in a rented section of the Adeyemi College of Education in Ondo State for years before apparently having its own campus. When this unique institution was established, I asked then in this paper what this university of medicine was all about. Can medical students be trained without knowledge of basic sciences like Physics, Biology and Chemistry? Certainly these medical students would  be expected to go through basic sciences in which case the university of medicine would have to have departments of basic sciences and also Biochemistry, Physiology and Anatomy, knowledge of which are critical to the study of medicine. In modern medical schools, students are expected to have knowledge of the sociology of the country within which their knowledge will be practiced. Education nowadays tries to widen the knowledge of students outside the narrow confines of the specialized fields of study. This is why a university of medicine should be part of a developed comprehensive university, not an isolated university of medicine. Even if there are universities of medicine in the developed countries, must we blindly copy them without their level of development and the resources available in such countries? Since the Ondo example, the federal government has in the last few years established such universities of medicine in Oturpo, in Benue State and another one in Ila-Orangun , Osun State presumably to honour Brigadier-Gen. David Mark and Chief  Bisi Akande  who are political bigwigs in the country without counting the cost of such establishment even when other old dilapidating federal institutions are collapsing.

One also wonders where medical teachers are going to be found for these universities of medicine. There is no surplus of such teachers in Nigeria or anywhere as far as I know. In the case of Ondo State, it is not even able to fund its universities of technology in Okitipupa, Owo and its premier university in Akungba. The technical equipment and structure for such a highly specialized university of medicine can only be purchased in forex-denominated currency. Is it with the billions of naira that will fetch a mere million dollars that they would use to fund this so-called university of medicine?

A poorly trained doctor armed with the scalpel to perform surgery will be a licensed murderer. By the way, what happened to Muhammadu Buhari’s University of Transportation in Daura? Recently the Customs Director-General announced his department was about to announce a university of Customs and the Department of Immigration is ready to roll! Not to talk about different arms of the military! The university idea has become a joke in Nigeria.

When Lagos State announced that it was setting up a university of medicine this October, I said to myself here we go again. The reasons adduced for it were shortage of doctors in state hospitals because of resignation of their doctors for foreign appointments. The state did not say people went elsewhere because of poor remuneration but we the people know this is what happened. We all know the reason why doctors are fleeing the country is poor wages and emoluments. The announcement by the Lagos State governor went further to state that the new university of medicine would graduate 1500 doctors per year.

I asked myself whether the institution would just be told to go and graduate 1500 doctors as if it were a factory. What will be the size of 1500 graduating medical university? Where are the teachers that would graduate 1500 doctors? This is simply impossible and if it is possible, these brand new doctors would be poorly trained physicians. None of the old medical schools in the country can graduate a third of such figures annually. This is not a solution to the problem of resignation.

For the sake of argument, would the new doctors be tied down by shackles to the hospitals? I have not heard of universities being set up like this before. Was there any study done about the feasibility of this enterprise? Even with the acclaimed resource endowment of Lagos State, it will not be able to fund adequately its new university of medicine along with recently established universities of technology, of education and the old LASU which is not adequately funded.

State governments should not just jump into the running stream of establishing universities on the whim of the chief executive. States concerned with the health of their people should provide potable clean water and embark on programs of preventive medicine rather than poorly conceived establishments of universities of medicine. Universities that are universities are serious enterprises. The federal and state governments should have deep thoughts about  establishing new universities when it can hardly fund the current ones. It is indeed time for the federal and state governments to roll back some of the mushroom universities that they have established in recent times.