LAUTECH as Ladoke Akintola University of Technology is affectionately called was established on April 23, 1990 as a technical state university with a motto of “Excellence, Integrity and Service” and located in Ogbomoso. It has a student population of 30,000 and staff strength of 3000 most of whom are administrative, technical and non-academic staff. The university was previously known as Oyo State University of Technology and was owned by the then Oyo State. But when Osun State was hived from Oyo State on August 27, 1991, the university became jointly owned by Oyo and Osun states, two sisterly states that outside politics should have no problem running and adequately funding the university.
The university was renamed Ladoke Akintola University after the second and last premier of the old Western Nigeria, Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, a great and foremost politician and wordsmith who by coincidence was a native of Ogbomoso where the university is located. Ogbomoso is the second largest town in Yoruba land and during British colonial rule when censuses were taken with honesty and integrity, Ogbomoso was the third largest city in Nigeria after Ibadan and Kano in that order. Lagos was fourth before the deluge of population flooded the city after the civil war and the oil economy of the 1970s. A college of medicine of the university was established in Oshogbo a year after the university started operating from Ogbomosho. Today the university is more of a comprehensive university but with social and management sciences existing as service faculty while the humanities and education remain happily in abeyance avoiding the unnecessary duplication characteristic of tertiary education in Nigeria.
In 2003/2004 Ladoke Akintola University was adjudged the best state university in Nigeria and one of the best universities, state or federal in Nigeria. But since then, the fortune of the university has witnessed a downturn. Hardly is there a semester without strike by staff who have not been paid or students agitating against one financial imposition or the other. The cause of the problem is inadequate funding by the two states that jointly own the institution. Since 1999 return of politics, different political parties held sway in Osogbo and Ibadan. The effect has been devastating on the university. It was in these circumstances that Governor Akala built a rival and much more elaborate teaching hospital in Ogbomoso against the puny one in Osogbo, obviously with the idea of concentrating the entire university in Ogbomoso and rendering the so-called College of Medicine in Osogbo redundant and irrelevant. His plan did not pan out and the College of Medicine has remained in Osogbo while Akala’s white elephant has remained unused or underutilized. But who is the loser in all this? Of course, it is the students, the state and the nation.
There is a need to find a lasting solution to the problem of Ladoke Akintola University so that its mission and the vision of the people who conceived it can be realized. Osun State has since established its own university in December 2006. The state is not capable of jointly funding another university. This is the truth. I know Osun State very well and I lived there for two years and as educationally ambitious as the state may be, the financial capacity is just not there. The enormous resources Rauf Aregbesola diverted to the educational sector particularly building of great primary and secondary schools nearly bankrupted the state and almost leading to his being run out of the place when he could not pay workers. As a friend of the state and a longtime resident of Ibadan, I appeal to the governors of Oyo and Osun states to resolve the problem of ownership of Ladoke Akintola University amicably. Let Osun concentrate on funding its own university which should now include the College of Medicine in Osogbo while Ladoke Akintola University with its modern teaching hospital is allowed to prosper as Oyo State-owned Ladoke Akintola University. I understand there is a restraining judgment on this scenario, but the two sisterly states can approach the court to vacate the restraining order.
Governors Seyi Makinde of Oyo and Gboyega Oyetola are mature individuals who should by this singular decision write their names in gold in the history of higher education in Nigeria but particularly in Yoruba land. As the Yoruba would say – charity begins at home.
Then what becomes of Ajimobi’s hastily established Ibadan Technical University? My advice to the governor of Oyo State is to ask if Oyo State really needs two universities of technology? If the answer is yes, then our governor must increase exponentially the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of Oyo State so that he would have money for his two universities of technology. I honestly believe that Oyo with its huge population should not be going bowl in hand begging for the monthly federal allocation. That allocation should be solely used for capital projects and not for recurrent expenditure. What Oyo State should do is have a land use charge like Lagos, of course not on the same degree because we don’t have disposable income like the Lagosians. But a charge on citizens who own the government would still be appropriate. Secondly, if the answer as to if Oyo needs two universities of technology is no, then Ajimobi’s Ibadan Technical University would have to be merged with Ladoke Akintola University if not scraped completely to save cost and to avoid duplication of offices viz vice chancellors, pro-chancellors, governing councils, registrars, librarians, bursars and so on.
Ibadan is blessed with University of Ibadan already and the city remains the intellectual centre of Nigeria. It has as a result of this attracted the major publishing houses in Nigeria, namely University Press, Heinemann Books Nigeria, Macmillan Press, Evans Publishers, Spectrum, Bookcraft and others. The Catholic Mission also has St Augustine University in Ibadan. Ibadan is home to the rapidly growing Lead City University. Chief Kola Daisi has also established a private university in Ibadan and one or two sectarian Christian missions are roaring to go in the establishment of their own universities. In essence, Ibadan city is not crying for an abiku university that will again be a financial burden to a harassed government which needs to be engaged in social welfare for the people, urban renewal and building of modern houses and generally making life better for the harried and harassed people.
The going trend in global higher education is for well-established universities particularly in the western world such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Berkeley, Columbia, Cambridge, Oxford and London to mention a few to establish colleges in developing countries, selling their well-established brand of excellence and graduating students in the countries of residents of their colleges overseas. This is catching on and such colleges already exist in Europe, Asia, particularly in Egypt, Lebanon, Malaysia, Dubai, South Africa and even China. Ghana is already preparing to welcome such institutions. Once these colleges are established, the home universities may have to fight to survive. In other words, instead of establishing universities merely by name, we should concentrate our efforts and resources on those we can adequately fund. While on funding, we should tell ourselves the home truth that university education is not cheap anywhere and it is in most cases, elitist. Even in the USA and Europe, the percentage of those who go to universities is small compared with the national population. If this is so and if we want excellent universities, somebody had better be prepared to pay. Where parents are unable to pay, state and local governments will have to give scholarships. Banks and commercial houses, as was the case in the past, must allocate funds as part of their corporate social responsibility for scholarships to students in universities. Politicians must desist from using “free university education” slogan in their campaigns for elective offices and as much as possible, universities must be allowed to charge their students reasonable fees for services rendered to them. This will free government from concentrating too much resources on university education with little left to create investment friendly environment for self-employment and also for governments to establish job creating industries that will absorb the teeming products of our tertiary institutions.
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