‘Up-scale in knowledge based intervention essential to driving education growth’

It is indeed appalling that the tertiary education in the country has suffered serious setback in the last decades, a situation that is further heighten by the shortfall in the funding of research and development in our tertiary institutions.
It is against this backdrop that educationists have called for an up-scale in research and development in the nation’s tertiary institutions as it is only through this that Nigeria can hope to attain her growth potential in human capacity.
Adamu Rasheed Abubakar, vice chancellor, Bayero University Kano, in his paper presentation at the 2014 Tax payers forum event organised by TETFUND titled Nigeria transition to knowledge based economy and the treasure role of TETFund pointed out that there a strong relationship between investment in higher education and the creation of knowledge based society specifically stressing that the strong connection between the universities, industries and government in any move towards creating a knowledge based economy is a step in the right direction.
Abubakar observed that developed countries are developed because their economy is knowledge driven while other countries are developing or under developed because they choose to maintain a resource dependent economy rather than knowledge based economy.
He however maintains that Nigeria though bedeviled with numerous socio economic challenges must look beyond this and addressed these challenges if she hopes to grow and be competitive globally.
The university don then called on TETFund to slightly fine tune its intervention areas to focus on research and development, “it is this kind of intervention that will encourage high import research in sensitive area that will in turn generate hi tech innovation to grow the economy.
Earlier in his presentation, Sulaiman Bogoro, executive secretary, Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) while giving account of the agencies stewardship at the 2014 TETFund organised Taxpayers forum disclosed that the mandate of TETfund is to administer and disburse the 2 percent education tax fund for the general improvement of education in Federal and State tertiary education institutions.
According to him, these inventions specifically is for the provision of essential physical infrastructure for teaching and learning, instructional materials for the students, research and publication, academic staff training and development and any other needs which in the opinion of the public or member of trustees which is critical and essential for the improvement of the stan dard in higher education public institutions.
Bogoro observes that Library development is one of those key academic content components of the agency intervention. “You will recall that a number of times that ASUU and other unions in out tertiary institution went on strike, it had to do with what they describe as the dilapidated and decrepitude in our public tertiary institution. That is why for a number of years former ETF and now TETFund did a lot of intervention in physical infrastructure”. He added.
The executive secretary further said that as soon as TETFund came into existence, there was a refocus not only for tertiary institutions but to ensure that the content component enjoys the intervention of TETFund and that is why if you are talking about priority, you tell me that library is not a priority and you will be wrong.