Osun State Governor Rauf Aregbesola has said living on unearned income from rent instead of earning it from productivity is a major challenge facing Nigeria’s economic development.
The governor spoke yesterday in Ibadan, Oyo State capital, at Lead City University’s 10th convocation lecture, titled: Evolution of Private University Education and Issues Miscellany in Governance of the Federation.
He urged the Federal Government to create 50 million jobs to make Nigeria an economic power in the next two decades.
Aregbesola said: “I will like to posit that we should get 50 million of our compatriots to be working, that is, engaged in productive activities that will bring them at least N25,000 a month. From this, N1.25 trillion will be generated every month from real productive engagement into the economy.
“These jobs can be created and paid for by ways and means in diverse areas of the economy, such as agriculture and food production, clothing and footwear, housing, environment, roads, bridges, airports, railways, water resources development, among others, that will provide basic needs for the people and cut imports by 90 per cent, reducing foreign goods to critical machinery and raw materials we do not have at home. This will catapult Nigeria into a superpower within two decades.”
The governor traced the history of private university to the establishment of Igbinedion University at Okada in Edo State, Babcock University at Ilisan-Remo in Ogun State and Madonna University at Okija in Anambra State in 1999.
He recalled that at that time, applications to the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) for the University Matriculation Examination (UME) peaked at over 750,000, with maximum admission at just 50,000 students.
Aregbesola noted that the admission of few students into universities disoriented over 700,000 qualified secondary school leavers.
The governor decried a situation where only few children could afford the fees of private universities.
He said: “No civil servant can, from his or her legitimate earnings, afford these schools and their fees for their children. This has created a problem on its own. Recently, some students could not pay their fees in a university because they invested in Ponzi schemes that went flat and they lost their money.
“One of the challenges of the society which the universities must solve is how to see university education as a compulsory social service, which must be provided to the largest number of people at little cost.
“The next question, of course, is what happens to the students after they leave school. It has become fashionable to proudly claim to have attended a private university, for those who could not travel abroad. Whereas the job market presently is saturated.
“The challenges of the time are different now. During the colonial period, high-level manpower was needed to fill vacancies in the public service and the trading outposts of the metropolitan multinationals.