Mohammed Shosanya
Immediate past Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC) Prof. Abubakar Rasheed,has said universities in Nigeria should be shored up above 4000 to create greater access to undergraduates seeking tertiary education.
Rasheed,who said this on Friday in Abuja, while handing over the baton of leadership of the commission to his deputy, Chris Maiyaki, expressed discontent over Nigerians criticizing the creation of more universities, saying only myopic minds would make such insinuations.
He said countries like America, Brazil, India had thousands of universities catering for their tertiary needs and they have never complained.
He bemoaned that Nigerians had a penchant for criticizing what belongs to them at their own detriment, stressing that he had instances where Nigerians who after graduating with lesser degrees go outside the country for higher studies and come out exceedingly better.
He said Nigerians going outside to study and doing much better was a means of benchmarking the quality of Nigerian graduates.
He allayed fears held by many about where majority of the graduates would work upon graduation, saying such sentiments were unnecessary as education was the best way to fight poverty.
Prof. Rasheed had up to three more years to the expiration of his tenure but retired on Tuesday, to continue his teaching career at Bayero University, Kano.
He faulted insinuations that he was retiring to evade probe, he said he wanted to fulfil his ambition to become a Professor Emeritus before he attained the age of 70 and the best means of achieving that was to return to the classroom to teach.
