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Tag: Polytechnic Education

  • Retreat on improving polytechnic education

    Retreat on improving polytechnic education

    It was acknowledged at the outset that polytechnic education had been in recession for decades due partly to low investment in the sector and partly to emphasis on university education. That’s why chairpersons of polytechnics, rectors, registrars, bursars, and state commissioners of education throughout the country attended a retreat on ways to improve polytechnic education. For 6 hours a day over two days (January 21-22, 2026), in the tech-resourced TETFund Auditorium, eight papers were presented and discussed, four per day, each for a full hour. The following summary is infused with my own reflections on the presentations and discussions.

    In his opening address, the Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, drew attention to the renewed goals of polytechnic education under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the need to align polytechnic education with the national manpower needs and development goals: “Innovation must be the heartbeat of our polytechnics; therefore, I urge you to foster entrepreneurship centres, research hubs, and industry partnerships that turn ideas into prototypes, inventions into enterprises, which will graduate students into job creators. Polytechnics should lead in areas like renewable energy, agriculture technology, digital manufacturing, and climate-resilient solutions directly contributing to Nigeria’s sustainable development goals.”

    Seven major issues:

    •Leadership and governance

    Typical governance problems in polytechnics were discussed and various approaches to solving them were highlighted. The problems range from funding shortages and poor infrastructure through inadequate lab and teaching facilities to undue external interference in internal affairs. The problems notwithstanding, effective governance and leadership accountability are necessary for sustaining the mission of the polytechnic.

    2 Social cohesion

    Emphasis was placed on (a) the need to foster collaboration and good relationships among governing council, management, and unions; (b) the need to foster effective relationships among management, staff, and students; and (c) the need to maintain harmonious relationships among institutional management, staff, students, and the host community, realising that a good number of staff and students reside within the host community.

    3 Financial management

    Financial prudence is critical to achieving the mission of the polytechnic, more so in the face of funding shortages. One area in which fiscal management could be optimised is procurement. There was an exhaustive presentation on procurement procedures, based on compliance with the Procurement Act. I strongly recommend this presentation to all procurement officers and members of the Tenders Board throughout the federation. Equally important is the presentation by an ICPC official on how to identify pitfalls in financial operations and how to avoid corrupt practices in fund utilization.

    It must be noted, however, that the procurement procedures are too cumbersome for efficiency. No wonder specially trained officers are required to be in charge. Yet the complicated procedures involved often leave gaps for oversight managers to exploit. There are over ten such groups from various ministries and both Houses of the National Assembly looking into various aspects of polytechnic management. In addition to visiting the campuses, oversight managers often invite one or more members of the polytechnic management to Abuja to explain or defend this or that. But even where there are no clear complaints, these managers often have to be settled. The expenses incurred by the polytechnics on accommodation, transport, and settlement fees amount to a drain on the inadequate resources of the polytechnics with little or no impact on quality assurance.

    • ICT and digital transformation

    In keeping with presidential directive on ICT compliance, polytechnics should adopt digitization across the institution to enhance efficiency in governance, teaching, learning, and research. The presentation and discussion of this topic highlighted the need for polytechnics to prepare candidates for the fourth industrial revolution, spurred by the Internet, digitsation, and the adoption of AI tools for enhanced efficiency.

    • Quality assurance

    Quality assurance enhances efficiency, reduces costs, and boosts stakeholders’ confidence. It is necessary to ensure standards in governance, teaching, fiscal management, and ethical practices. Quality assurance in polytechnics is diffuse, if there is any at all. The so-called oversight managers appear to be after collection rather than correction and after quantity rather than quality. It is unclear how the planned establishment of a Polytechnic Commission (after National Universities Commission) will provide desired quality assurance, which the NBTE appears unable to provide.

    •Human capital development and staff welfare

    The renewed focus on polytechnic education requires the upgrade of the lecturers’ skills, slaries, and allowances as well as clear owed allowances. In was, therefore, good news that the federal government was negotiating with polytechnic unions for salary upgrade and unpaid allowances. TETFund has been helpful to the polytechnics for faculty and staff training. However, polytechnic lecturers have not been tapping enough into available funds for research.

    •Polytechnic-industry linkage

    It is important to establish and strengthen linkages with local industries to establish or enhance internships, practical training, and apprenticeships. Where there are no industries in the area, construction companies, reputable roadside mechanics, welders, plumbers, electricians, and other artisans at work can provide practical training for students.

    Major challenges

    • Irregular and grossly inadequate funding for capital projects and recurrent expenses. Moreover, statutory intervention funds are delayed or not disbursed at all. The rigmarole before approved funds could be accessed often causes unnecessary delay. This has ripple effects across the institution, including dampened morale, lowered quality, and, sometimes, loss of funds.

    •Poor and inadequate infrastructure and deficiencies in workshop and laboratory facilities. The minister announced a special TETFund intervention fund for upgrading engineering schools with modern, industry-standard equipment. But what about the other programmes?

    •Teaching and technical staff shortages and limited opportunities for staff development and career progression.

    • Outdated currcula that are out of alignment with needed industry skills and current technologies need urgent upgrade.

    • Despite policy emphasis on ICT compliance, ICT infrastructure is limited or lacking. As a result, there is limited digital teaching capacity and low e-learning readiness. TETFund is one of a few institutions in Africa to have invested heavily in Blackboard, an online learning tool, but it has hardly translated to use beyond Abuja.

    • There are serious security concerns and safety issues on many polytechnics, especially newer ones without perimeter fencing. This requires urgent intervention in view of rampant security breaches in educational institutions.

    • There are serious constraints on institutional autonomy worsened by delayed release of statutory approvals and external interference in management processes. The menace of numerous “oversight managers” from various ministries and the National Assembly is particularly aggravating to the polytechnic management. Unfortunately, polytechnic Governing Councils have been rendered too ceremonial to be of help to the management.

    Key recommendations

    Federal and state governments should increase funding for polytechnic education and ensure regularity in the release of statutory allocations and intervention funds.

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    Federal and state governments should also take measures to enhance the autonomy of polytechnic institutions to encourage effective compliance with their mission.

    Polytechnics should be encouraged to collaborate with security agencies and community stakeholders to develop campus security protocols and emergency response plans.

    New curricula are long overdue to align polytechnic education with national development goals and industry needs.

    Finally, Governing Councils should cease to be a ceremonial haven for political jobbers. Rather, they should be empowered to hire, promote, and discipline management and staff, maintain quality, and raise necessary funds to carry out the polytechnic’s mission.

    Conclusion

    The zeal with which the present Minister of Education is implementing the administration’s Renewed Hope agenda on education is commendable. But a level playing field is assumed for all universities and polytechnics, which makes it difficult to achieve excellence. It is necessary to identify selected universities and polytechnics and develop high performing ones into Centres of Excellence through special funding for which development goals would be set with measurable kpis. Turkey has joined China and India in doing so.

    Today, Turkey has at least 23 institutions in the top 500 in Europe. In the forefront is Turkey’s Middle East Technical University (METU) which “secured its position as the national leader by scoring highest in academic reputation, employer reputation, and international research network indicators.” Excellence does not result from wishful thinking or funding alone, but from careful planning and achieving set targets.

  • Revisiting polytechnic education in Nigeria (1)

    Revisiting polytechnic education in Nigeria (1)

    At the instance of the new Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, and with the sponsorship of TETFund, the Chairpersons of Nigeria’s Federal Polytechnics met recently in Calabar for four days (February 9-14) in a brainstorming retreat. The dual goal of the retreat was to discuss the problems facing polytechnic education in the country and to recommend possible solutions. It also afforded the exchange of ideas and social networking among the Chairpersons.

    Their findings are implicit in their recommendations, which were summarised in a comprehensive communique, reported by various newspapers after the retreat. However, the newspaper reports only regurgitated the contents of the communique, without discussing them. Besides, in the typical tradition of Nigerian newspaper reporting, there has been no followup. This article attempts to fill both gaps.

    As expected, the major recommendations of the communique cover: (1) funding; (2) curriculum; (3) supervision; (4) infrastructure; and (5) security

    Funding

    Perhaps the most significant factor behind the fall in educational standards in Nigeria’s federal educational institutions is inadequate and irregular funding. This is especially true of polytechnic education, where less than half of approved capital budget is often released, thus making it difficult to maintain existing structures or pay contractors for ongoing construction, not to speak of embarking on new projects. The result is the abandonment of numerous projects as elsewhere in the country. As if this were not enough, delays in releasing subventions translates to delays in releasing funds for overhead expenses and the payment of salaries.

    Right from the inception of polytechnic education in this country, the emphasis has been on the development of necessary skills and competencies that would prepare the students for appropriate job placement. This also has been the reason for recent emphasis on entrepreneurial skills that would prepare the students to initiate some business or some trade after graduation. Unfortunately, however, this desire has not been backed up by the necessary funds for the polytechnics. Hence the call by the Chairpersons to the government to set aside special funds for skills development so that a key goal of polytechnic education could be attained.

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    Although not expressed in the communique, it will be very helpful if the federal government could allow the polytechnics to keep and use tuition fees collected from their students as this is the main source of Internally Generated Revenue for these institutions, especially those created within the past five years. Asking under-resourced institutions to remit as much as half of tuition fees collected to the federal government amounts to double jeopardy.

    Nevertheless, credit must be given to the government for TETFund’s release of funds to federal institutions for special projects, staff training, and attendance at conferences. It is also TETFund that provides the seed money for newly established federal institutions. It must be emphasised, however, that the fund does not come directly from the federal budget but from two percent of the taxes collected from the profit of companies registered in Nigeria. True, TETFund was set up by the federal government to arrest the deterioration in educational infrastructure caused by years of poor resource allocation. Nevertheless, TETFund cannot, and should not, replace the government’s responsibility to the institutions it established. This is the essence of the Council Chairs’ call to the federal government for more and regular funding to the polytechnics.

    Curriculum

    A comprehensive review of polytechnic curricular offerings in all disciplines is long overdue in order to align them with current technological realities and ensure that they meet the needs of the Nigerian job market. Another important reason for curricular review is the pending legislation in the National Assembly to equate HND with a university degree, by awarding a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) to successful candidates. If future HND holders are to just the elevation of their degree to a university degree, then some knowledge equivalent is warranted.

    My experience with the polytechnic graduates I have hired has led me to question their knowledge and even that of their teachers. One had an OND in statistics but could hardly do simple computations, not to speak of basic statistical analysis. Another had HND also in statistics but had no idea of the meaning and uses of basic statistical terms, such as mean, variance, and probability. Worse still, she could not even make sense of an opinion poll done by my company after the data were coded and analysed, although she took part in data collection. It was not surprising, therefore, when, in another study along Oke-Aro street in Akure, I discovered that a number of the women petty traders, selling soft drinks, fruits, and roasted plantain or corn, were polytechnic graduates. One of them said she took the decision to start selling foodstuff after looking for a job unsuccessfully for over six years.

    In engaging in any curricular review, it will not be enough for the National Board of Technical Education to do so in Kaduna or Abuja, without involving experienced past and present polytechnic faculty.

    Supervision

    At present, the supervision of the polytechnics is done by the NBTE, which currently supervises 787 institutions throughout the country. The polytechnics are the apex of these institutions. However, because the NBTE is overburdened, the polytechnics have been left to be preyed upon by other arms of government.

    As a result, various ministries, departments and agencies of government and numerous committees of the National Assembly devolve on the polytechnics or summon their Rectors (and sometimes, their entire management team) to Abuja for one reason or the other. It would have been great if these visitations and summons resulted in improvements in the quality of polytechnic education or their funding. On the contrary, their goal has been extortion of the meagre resources of these institutions. I drew attention to this unwholesome practice in an earlier article (see Repositioning TVET in Nigeria, The Nation, February 5, 2025).

    In order to correct this anomaly, the Committee of Chairpersons recommended the establishment of a Polytechnics Commission at par with the National Universities Commission with similar functions. Indeed, the polytechnics have been asking for such a Commission for quite some time.

    However, the current bill before the National Assembly on awarding a B. Tech degree to HND holders should require the National Universities Commission to supervise the HND programme in order to maintain parity with other university degrees, while the NBTE should be left only with the OND programme. Nothing should prevent the NBTE from imitating the NUC practice of employing reputable polytechnic teachers along with the NBTE staff in carrying out the evaluation and quality assurance of the OND programme.

    I am aware that many Polytechnic Rectors support the establishment of a Commission for their institutions. However, their demand seems to come more from frustration with the NBTE than from anything else. Nevertheless, I am not sure that the solution they need is more bureaucracy.

    •To be concluded next week

  • Polytechnic Education: A Recipe for Visionary Leadership and Governance in Nigeria

    Polytechnic Education: A Recipe for Visionary Leadership and Governance in Nigeria

    The 19th Convocation Lecture of the Lagos State Polytechnic, Ikorodu, Tuesday, March 8th, 2010.

    Excerpts.

    But what is a polytechnic?  As the name implies, a polytechnic is not a university. But this ought not to be a crime but a mere emblem of distinctive identity. In its classical state, a polytechnic  is a non-university higher educational institution focusing on vocational education. There are three factors at play here which often account for the erosion of parity and esteem when the polytechnic community is compared to the university community.

       First, is the false notion that because polytechnic education is mainly vocational, it is merely functional and work-driven. This notion ignores the fact that in certain disciplines, a polytechnic education is more rigorous and quality driven than their university-based counterparts. This explains the preference of employers in fields such as banking, Finance, Engineering, Accounting and Technology for polytechnic graduates over their universities counterparts. In these fields of human endeavour, the polytechnic graduates often arrive “perfectly tuned” and programmed for easy and immediate absorption.

         Second is the binary divide traditionally erected between university education and polytechnic education which makes one inaccessible to the other. Although a carryover from our colonial heritage, this divide ignores the reality  of cross-breeding, cross-carpeting, cross-fertilisation and the transfer of talents and human resources between the two types of education that have existed across age and human societies.

      The third factor arises from the fact that entry-level qualifications for polytechnics tend to be lower than those for universities and the staff generally less qualified. While this is true, this stigma ignores the human capacity for self-improvement and continuous exertion. There are sandwich degree programmes and other avenues for self-realisation for those who start the relay race of education at a disadvantage. In certain circumstances, teachers with lesser qualifications, because they have more to prove, are generally more focused and more ferociously determined to impart quality education than their better qualified colleagues. Although there is usually no short cut to pedagogic distinction, it is so that under the right atmosphere, these disadvantaged students and teachers often come into their own, and it is where you end up that matters rather than where you begin from.

      The example of Albert Einstein again readily comes to mind. The German-Jewish genius was a famously lazy, sloppy and inattentive student. But this was not because he was mentally challenged but because the precocious boy had greater issues on his mind. Einstein was bored to death by the banality of his teachers and as he himself was later to put it: “Since I hated authority so much, God made me an authority”. How many potential Einstein would have been destroyed in the grinding gridlock of the Nigerian educational system?

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      In Nigeria, the stigmatization and discrimination against polytechnic education began right after independence when the first Cookie Commission of Enquiry set up a salary differential between university graduates and their polytechnic counterparts. Even worse is the fact that in universities, you cannot join the council in congregation unless you are a degree holder.

    In 2006, the Nigerian federal authorities took what at first appeared as a bold and courageous step to harmonise  and consolidate tertiary education in the country by virtually abolishing polytechnic education. Inaugurating the technical committee, Ufot Ekaette, the then Secretary to the Federal Government, noted that no country could achieve scientific and technological breakthrough when less than fifteen per cent of the populace have access to university education. According to him, the existing facilities were so oversubscribed that the entire educational system faced an apocalyptic meltdown.

    On the face of it, this seems to be a revolutionary and radically innovative development; an admirable example of visionary and proactive governance. But on closer examination, there seemed to be something sinister and radically obtuse going on. There is no evidence that the momentous conclusions were arrived at after a holistic, exhaustive and comprehensive study of the country-specific needs of tertiary education in Nigeria. Had there been a more crucial interrogation of the dynamics of technological and societal under-development in the nation, the conclusions might have been different.

      Several decades later, the country is still jogging in the jungle of misguided modernization. Once there is no organic nationalist elite bent on driving the project and process of modernity, a nation labours in vain.